Games That Have Lasted

21 November 2023

By Frank Scoblete

The casinos offer many (many, many) games and over my almost 40-year gaming career I have seen a seemingly countless array of games come into the casinos and slowly (or “fastly”) leave those same casinos.

Why do some games last – some are almost staples – and why do other games come and go?

The answer to that question ultimately escapes me but here are the games that have stood the test of time – at least my time.

SLOTS:

Slots are the king and queen of the casino world and the force that allowed casinos to essentially take over the gaming world. Any country that allows casino gambling has a boatload of slots throughout their gaming properties. If such machines were part of a country’s army that country would have taken over the world ever since the slots appeared at the end of the 1800s.

Slot machines are pure luck. You don’t need to know any strategy of play. Just put in your credit slips or (in the dim and distant past) your coins and hope and pray the symbols come up showing that you just won something. Slots might elicit prayers in some or many of its players but those prayers have nothing to do with what happens on those machines.

Easily 60 to 90 percent of a given casino’s revenue will come from what used to be called “the one-armed bandits.” Most of today’s slots don’t really have those “one arms” any more but they are just computerized random devices that spit out symbols that players hang on in anticipation.

Today’s slots have hundreds of variations and price per playing. You have machines that can give you literally hundreds of decisions in a very short period of time. Except for the mega-million-winning players who have captured multi-million-dollar wins, slot players are the food for the casinos.

Slot machines can be found in sundry stores that only cater to slot players, slot casinos that only cater to slot players, and the best casinos in the world and, yes, the worst ones too. The Internet is filled with slot machines as well.

People love to play the slots. The slots seem to mesmerize them. You will find players who actually lose days to play them.

My wife the Beautiful AP and I once met a woman in Las Vegas who played through April 1st without any memory of such play. Correct. She started playing on March 31, skipped all memory of April 1st and “woke up” on April 2 at the machines! Yikes!

There are probably few casino players who have never put any money into a slot machine. Just a casual quarter is play enough to continue the slot machine’s conquest of the gambling world.

I guess you could say that there aren’t many (or any) luddites in the casinos. Those machines court and marry just about everyone who enters Lady Luck’s domicile.

“Man, Woman, and Machine” might be the book that sums up the casino experience for future generations. Will slots last until the end of it all? Perhaps!

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Next week: More games that have lasted!