Slot Machines Trivia
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46 free Slot Machines trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Slot machines bring in about 70% of the average American casino's income, and almost everything about them, from the cherries on the reels to the near-miss on the payline, has a story. This quiz starts in 1890s San Francisco and Brooklyn: the poker-drum machines that paid out in beer and cigars, Charles Fey's three-reel Liberty Bell, the copycats, and the fruit-gum vending attachment that put lemons and BARs on the reels for good. It then follows the technology: Bally's Money Honey and its bottomless hopper, the first video slot built around a Sony television, second-screen bonuses, virtual reels, random number generators and the ticket that replaced the coin. It also covers the maths and the world: return-to-player and PAR sheets, why the mid-size win is tuned to keep you seated, minimum payouts in Nevada and New Jersey, fruit machines and nudges in Britain, pokies in New South Wales, pachislots in Japan, the No Pokies senator, the $55 million jackpot a Vietnamese casino refused to pay, and the record Megabucks hit. Easy questions ask what a one-armed bandit is; the expert tier asks for patents, percentages and dates. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on slot machines, Charles Fey, Bally, IGT and related pages, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Las Vegas, casinos and gambling.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the classic nickname for a slot machine?
One-armed bandit
One-armed bandit refers to the side lever, yet most modern machines are started with a button or touchscreen, and some keep a lever mainly for show.
Q 02What are slot machines called in Australia and New Zealand?
Pokies
Pokies are officially called gaming machines, and in much of Australia they stand in ordinary pubs and clubs, not only in casinos.
Q 03On a modern slot machine, what decides where the reels stop?
A random number chip
A random number chip picks the result first, and the reels are then stopped to match it, so they only look as if they land by chance.
Q 04On which card game was Sittman and Pitt's five-drum, 50-card machine based?
Poker
Poker hands were the aim, and the 50 cards usually left out the ten of spades and jack of hearts, which ruled out a royal flush in two of the four suits.
Q 05In early Las Vegas, casinos mostly saw slot machines as a way to keep whom busy?
Gamblers' wives and girlfriends
Gamblers' wives and girlfriends were the target, yet by 2010 slots and other gaming machines earned about 70 percent of US casino revenue.
Q 06Why couldn't Charles Fey patent his three-reel slot machine in California?
Gambling was illegal there
Gambling was illegal there, so rivals copied his designs freely, and Fey kept control by running his machines in saloons himself rather than selling them.
Q 07Which famous early slot machine was named after its top-paying symbol?
Liberty Bell
Liberty Bell copies spread so widely that 'bell' became the everyday name for almost all three-reel slot machines for half a century.
Q 08What destroyed Charles Fey's San Francisco slot machine factory in 1906?
An earthquake and fire
An earthquake and fire flattened it, and by 1909 San Francisco had banned slot machines outright, silencing more than 3,000 of them across the city.
Q 09What had happened when a Colorado slot machine told a woman in 2010 she had won $42.9 million?
It had malfunctioned
It had malfunctioned, and regulators found she had really won $20.18, since slot machines carry warnings that a malfunction voids all pays.
Q 10Why can a 'penny slot' cost far more than a penny a spin?
Players bet many credits
Players bet many credits per spin across several lines, so a penny machine taking 500 credits at once is really a $5 machine in disguise.
Q 11Why did lemons, cherries, oranges and plums appear on early slot reels?
The machines dispensed fruit-flavoured gum
The machines dispensed fruit-flavoured gum, or at least claimed to, so makers could pass them off as gum sellers where gambling was banned; the bar symbol is said to have begun as a gum-pack logo.
Q 12Which number, shown on every reel, forms the classic jackpot line on slot machines?
Seven
Seven is the number dice players watch: it is the most likely total of two dice, since six of the 36 possible rolls make it, and the opposite faces of a die always add up to it.
Q 13Which New York mayor smashed seized slot machines with a sledgehammer for the cameras in 1934?
Q 21Mississippi and New Jersey law each set which requirement for slot machines?
A minimum payout rate
A minimum payout rate: over time Mississippi's machines must hand back at least 80 percent of the money bet and New Jersey's 83, which still leaves the house up to a fifth of every stake.
Q 22Some slot machines in US tribal casinos are, by law, electronic versions of which game?
Bingo
Bingo: on these 'Class II' machines the spinning reels are only for show while a linked bingo game between players decides the result, a design that escapes the limits states place on ordinary slots.
Q 23In the 2010s a Russian crew beat casino slot machines around the world by secretly filming them with what?
Their smartphones
Fiorello La Guardia
Fiorello La Guardia had told New Yorkers 'Let's drive the bums out of town', and that autumn more than a thousand seized machines were heaved off a barge into Long Island Sound.
Q 14What could Bally's Money Honey slot machine of the 1960s do that earlier machines could not?
Pay out big wins by itself
Pay out big wins by itself: its motor-driven hopper could drop up to 500 coins, so winners no longer had to wait for an attendant to arrive with the cash.
Q 15What does the 'slot' in 'slot machine' originally refer to?
The opening for coins
The opening for coins: the name is short for 'nickel-in-the-slot machine', a label that once covered ordinary vending machines too before it narrowed to gambling devices.
Q 16Around 2010, the United States had about twice as many slot machines as which other machines?
ATMs
ATMs: CBS counted close to 850,000 slot machines in 2011, double the number of cash machines, so devices that take money outnumbered the ones that hand it out.
Q 17In B. F. Skinner's experiments, often compared to slot machines, which birds pecked for unpredictable rewards?
Pigeons
Pigeons worked hardest when food arrived at random rather than on a fixed count, and Skinner himself likened the box to a slot machine: the uncertainty keeps the lever moving.
Q 18Which TV game show became the biggest licensed brand in slot machines, starting in 1996?
Wheel of Fortune
Wheel of Fortune slots were built with a partner firm whose earlier hit, Wheel of Gold, already had a bonus wheel on top, and the slot maker bought that partner outright in 2001.
Q 19What is the chart on a slot machine that lists winning symbol combinations and their prizes called?
The pay table
The pay table is printed on the glass of older machines, above and below the reels, but on video slots it hides behind a 'help' or 'i' button on the touch screen.
Q 20What does RTP stand for on a slot machine?
Return to player
Return to player is the share of all money bet that a machine is built to pay back over the long run, so a 95 percent machine still keeps five cents of every dollar played.
Their smartphones sent footage of the spins to a server that decoded each machine's number pattern, then alerted the player when to press spin; members were later jailed in the United States and Singapore.
Q 24On a casino floor, what does the flashing 'candle' on top of a slot machine signal?
An attendant is needed
An attendant is needed: the candle lights when a player wants change or help or the machine has a problem, and a coloured band on it often shows the coin size the machine takes.
Q 25Which word for a slot machine fault comes from the switches that caught players rocking old machines?
Tilt
Tilt outlived the switches: they are long gone, yet technicians still call any fault on a machine a tilt, even a door left open.
Q 26What is a payout made by an attendant, rather than the machine, called?
A hand pay
A hand pay happens when a win is too big for the machine to pay out; in the coin era staff had to verify the win and fetch the cash, which could take half an hour.
Q 27What does TITO stand for on modern slot machines?
Ticket-in, ticket-out
Ticket-in, ticket-out machines print a barcoded voucher instead of dropping coins, and makers added a recording of clinking coins so that cashing out still sounds like a win.
Q 28What is a prize pool that grows with every play until it is won called?
A progressive jackpot
A progressive jackpot grows with a slice of every wager until someone wins it; machines are often linked across casinos so it grows faster.
Q 29Ronald Harris was convicted in the 1990s of rigging slot machines while holding which job?
State gaming regulator
State gaming regulator: his job at the Gaming Control Board was to keep slot machine software honest, yet he rigged some machines to pay out and ended up in the Black Book, barred from the casinos he once policed.
Q 30Which US state allows slot machines in its convenience stores and at its biggest airport?
Nevada
Nevada treats a few machines as a normal sideline for shops, and visitors flying into Las Vegas can start playing in the airport terminal before they have even collected their bags.