The power of slots

18 June 2019

By Frank Scoblete

Casino gambling or racinos are in over 80% of the United States. They are in Canada and throughout Europe and the Middle East. Casino gambling is almost as popular with the human race as warfare.

Casinos would never have spread like wildfire had it not been for the slot machines. There just aren’t enough table-game players to make casino gambling popular enough throughout the country to warrant such an amazing industry growth. With slot machines it is a totally different story. In some venues 90% of the revenue the casinos make comes from the slots, without which there would be no casinos in those venues.

Go into any casino and you will note seemingly endless aisles of slot machines with a small area reserved for table-game play. Slots are the No. 1 attraction in the home of Dame Fortune, and slot players are the true kings and queens of the casino world.

When I was young and foolish I once joked that the world would end when I saw slot machine advertisements on television or if I saw a movie where the dashing hero played the machines. I mean, picture James Bond strolling haughtily into a casino and saying in that suave way of his, “I just love Blazing Sevens!”

And now advertisements on television are almost strictly for the slot machines and the movies and television shows are following suit. The grand days of table games have long since ended. In 1984, for the first time in history of modern casino gambling, slot machines made more money than the table games in Atlantic City and Las Vegas and now casinos are associated with slots more than with any other form of gambling.

Today’s casino industry is the slot machine.

Check out the billboards as you go into casino towns. It is doubtful there are many extolling table games or the winning of a few hundred dollars (“Look at me everyone, I just won fifty-seven dollars at blackjack!”) but there will be countless ones singing the praises of their slot machines and slot winners. (“Jaime March won $2,000,000 on our super hot machines.”)

At Tropworld (which is now Tropicana) in Atlantic City, over the urinals were pictures of happy people, most of them women, holding those outsized checks and letting you know they had experienced a really big one in the casino. I never saw a picture of a craps player, a roulette player or a blackjack player hanging above a man’s urinal.

Today’s slot machines
In the old days of saloon slots that paid off in gum and cigars which then would be bought back by the bartender (that’s how these clever entrepreneurs got around the gambling laws), the slot machines were just gears and pulleys and their payouts were marginal. Then the technology morphed the slots into electro-mechanical devices. This was after World War II and this electronic morphing allowed for big jackpot payouts and caused the beginning of the “dream big” fantasy of today’s slot players.

Today the slot machine is a computer-driven marvel of modern technology. Everything is decided by the pesky computer, just like the computers that are ruling other aspects of our lives.
Players might still think that the spinning of the reels is an independent event and that the reels are the devices that decide whether you win or not. Sorry, that is no longer the case. The reels have nothing to do with whether you win or lose. They merely tell you whether you won or lost.

Here’s how it all works.

Inside the slot machine is a computer program known as the random number generator (RNG), which selects a series of numbers at random that will relate to the symbols on the slot reels. When you play your credits the RNG is working. Once you press the play button, the RNG will tell you what symbols it has selected at that moment. It tells you that by showing you the symbols on the reels.

Here’s the kicker; even when the machine is not being played, the RNG is in a continual process of selecting number sequences. When you play your credits, it has nothing to do with what sequences are being chosen which then means it has nothing to do with what the reels will be doing. That RNG figuratively spits out a decision, tells the reels where to land, the reels land there and you either clap or moan.

Since the RNG is creating its number sequences in less than a second, there is no way to know what will come up or when it will come up. There is no way to jiggle the handle, if the machine even has a handle, or press the play button with this or that strength to turn the game in your favor as clever slot cheats were able to do over a hundred years ago. That was then; this is now. The computer age is the age all slot players now live in.

Inside that cold, hard exterior of those slots is a computer-brain that only does one thing – it picks what will or will not appear on the reels. The reels are not the deciding factor – they are no factor, since many slot machines don’t even use reels anymore but have animated figures of animals, people and things.

There are slot machines that have over a 100 lines of possible wins going in every direction at once. Such a machine could never have existed without the computer revolution that gave the world the RNG. With the RNG came the computer revolution payoffs that could never have been made in the past, but are now being made daily in casinos all over the world.

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Visit Frank's website at www.frankscoblete.com.