Ask the Slot Expert: A gaffed Big 6 Wheel?

Question: The Horseshoe casino in central Indiana has a big 6 wheel. It Will consistently land on in bed or low pay numbers. After over 2oo landing on multiplier, it always resulted in the lowest 20 x. Always.

The craps bonus of 6numbers will roll 40 or more and never hits.

Answer: "Landing in bed" reminds me of a near miss I had with ladies plying their companionship services on a street on the east side of the Strip many years ago.

A friend owned a penny stock that represented ownership of a building on this street. I was going to take a picture of the building for him.

I was driving down the street checking the addresses, looking for the building. This was long before navigation systems in cars. As I got closer to the address, the number of ladies trying to make a living increased. Driving slowly and staring out the window gave some the wrong impression of what I was looking for, so I sped up a bit.

Suddenly, there it was. The building was across the street. I hit the brakes and turned into the first cross street. I pulled over to the side and got out to go back to the corner and take some pictures.

As I walked the 10 feet back to the corner, I noticed a number of ladies rushing towards me to be the first arrive. I guess they saw me suddenly stop and figured I wanted to hold auditions. I took some pictures as quickly as I could. I waved and said, "No, thank you. Just taking some pictures." I hurried back to my rental car and drove off.

Not surprisingly, the Horsheshoe Casino in Indianapolis doesn't promote its Big 6 Wheel on its website. If the wheel is like those found in other casinos in the U.S., it has 54 stops. Fifty-two of the stops are filled with bills ranging from $1 to $20. The lower the bill, the more times it appears on the wheel. The other two stops have the casino logo or a Joker. These are the two jackpot stops.

We expect the spin to land on one of the jackpot stops 3.7% of the time (2/54), or once every 27 spins. That's more frequently than I would have thought, but it makes sense. If the wheel isn't rigged and each stop is equally likely to land under the pointer, we would expect the wheel to land on any individual stop once every 54 spins. We have two jackpot stops, so we expect to land on one of them once every 27 spins.

Now, if you're saying that you tracked the results of 200 spins -- which I'm skeptical that you did because if you had you would have given the exact number of spins you observed -- and the wheel didn't land on one of the two jackpot stops once, then that's not as rare an event as it seems.

Two hundred spins is about 6 cycles. The probability of an event not happening once in 6 cycles is 0.3%, or 3 out of 1000. Not an impossible situation to occur.

In contrast, we don't think it's impossible to hit a royal flush and we get them only once in about 40,000 hands.

I can see how you would get suspicious if you watched this reel for a long time and it never hit the big payouts. Gambling regulations in newer jurisdictions can trace their lineage back to those in Nevada and Nevada prohibits gaffed wheels, Roulette or Big.

A casino, furthermore, doesn't have to cheat on a Big 6 Wheel. Ranging from 11% to 25%, the bets on the game have some of the highest house edges on the casino floor. Cha-ching.

(I don't know what craps bonus you're referring to. If you or someone could give me more info, I'll address it in a future column.)

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