Ask the Slot Expert: Another slot machine malfunction with a happy ending

Question: I just read your article about slot machines malfunctioning. I have a story to tell you. I don’t know every detail but I still think you’ll find it interesting.

My friend was in a bonus round on an Aristocrat machine. I don’t know which one. This was at a Seminole casino in Florida. He was well into a major jackpot spin, over $100,000 and counting. By this time he had taken out his phone and was recording the bonus spin. The machine malfunctioned during the spin. I don’t remember exactly what the machine did but just as in your case, the slot techs had never seen anything like it.

Apparently they could not get the machine to recover the data. The following day my friend had a meeting with a casino executive. He brought his lawyer friend along. He was sharing the experience with me through texts and one of his comments was that he had about a 5% chance of getting his money. As you and I know, most slot machines have a disclosure on them stating malfunctions void all wins, or something of that nature.

So after the meeting he tells me they are going to send the hard drive to Aristocrat headquarters, which is in Australia, as you know. I was somewhat shocked that they even took this route with such a large dollar amount on line. Casinos get a bad rap sometimes.

Cut to a couple of weeks forward and Aristocrat verifies the activity on the slot machine. Since he never got to finish his bonus round the exact amount in question was up for debate. The casino comes to an agreement on a figure and my friend gets paid a little over $100k. Now THAT’S getting lucky!

Answer: Well, there are malfunctions and then there are malfunctions.

In the ancient and medieval times of the mechanical and electro-mechanical slot machines, where the reels landed determined the outcome of the spin.

When a computer took over, the numbers chosen by the random number generator determined the outcome of the spin, not what was displayed on the reels. The stepper motors were supposed to stop the reels on the proper symbols. I think the possibility that the reels might stop in the wrong positions (though the machine is supposed to detect that) and that there might be (almost definitely are) bugs in the this new software running the machines led to the placement of the malfunction warning, though I can't find any citations specifically saying that that was the reason.

In my malfunction, the machine stopped rendering more and more symbols on the reels during a bonus round. The floorpeople who helped me never said anything about voiding the bonus round. The machine appeared to be properly determining the outcomes of the bonus spins. It just wasn't displaying those outcomes properly. There was a malfunction, but it wasn't affecting the outcomes.

Many (I'm talking 20+) years ago, electrical interference caused a Quartermania machine to enter its test mode. The lady "playing" it knew something was wrong when every time she pressed the Spin button, the machine spit out a coin. The machine was in Hopper Test Mode.

After getting a few coins out of the machine, she inadvertently hit a button that moved the machine into Paytable Test Mode. Now each time she hit the Spin button, the machine would spin the reels to the next winning combination in the paytable, starting with the jackpot combo.

Everyone celebrated until the casino investigated and said that the machine had malfunctioned.

The machine didn't really malfunction. It did what it was supposed to do in Paytable Test Mode.

The combination that landed on the reels, however, was not the result of the lady's making a bet and pressing the Spin button. It was not the result of a wager.

In another incident, a lady is playing a video slot machine. At the end of a spin, the machine displayed a message saying that she had won $100,000 or some other number -- a jackpot that was not possible to win on the machine. The manufacturer determined that some memory in the machine got corrupted and caused the erroneous message.

I think the chances of your friend getting a good amount of money was more like 105%, to misuse percentages like many in Washington do these days.

There was no question that he made a bet and that the outcome of that spin triggered the bonus round. There was no question that the spins in the bonus round legitimately awarded him what he had won so far. I don't see how the casino could have argued that all of these outcomes were the result of one or more malfunctions. The malfunction appeared to just make the machine unable to complete the bonus round.

Here's another example of a malfunction that didn't void a play. A man was playing a multi-site progressive at Treasure Island. Nothing remarkable happened during his session, but unbeknownst to him, the RNG in the machine selected the progressive during the spinning of a wheel in the bonus round, but the wheel never stopped.

Regulators knew the machine had selected the progressive because the machine sent a message saying so to the central computer controlling the progressive. My guess is that the machine never received an acknowledgement so it never stopped the wheel. In any case, Nevada regulators were able to track down the man and pay him his winnings.

I think your friend was lucky to trigger the bonus and win so much in it. Getting paid what he was owed, though, was not a matter of luck.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

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