Ask the Slot Expert: "I truly believe slot machines are manipulated"

One thing I forgot to mention in the discussion about "not gambling" when you play free play and "gambling" when you bet your winnings from the free play: Once you've won something, it's yours. You can bet it or you can take it and run. There's no such thing as "the house's money."

Question: I truly believe slot machines are manipulated. I’m an average gambler and whenever I go to the casino I find that, as a black person, no matter what slot or denomination I play, when I receive the bonus, my payout is always the lowest amount. Yet when Caucasians play, they are instantly getting bonuses no matter what denomination and the payout it greater.

I’ve been surveying this situation for over two years now and the results are still the same.

Every time I go to the casinos since the pandemic, I lose between $800 to $1200. It’s becoming something that most blacks talk about at each casino I go to. It’s so obvious. At the last casino I went to, there were four machines. The one at the end was occupied by a Caucasian woman, the next one was a black one, and next to her was a Caucasian woman, then me. The two Caucasian women's machines continually paid out while the black woman and myself kept feeding the machines.

It was sickening to watch, so I finally got up. And instantly after leaving, a Caucasian woman sat in my place and won $700 dollars after 3 spins.

Answer: DirecTV has a helpful set of info screens for almost all programs. One screen I use frequently is the Cast & Crew screen. The system displays biographical data (birthdate, place of birth, date of death) when you highlight someone listed in the Cast & Crew pane.

I don't know where DirecTV gets the data. It's not regularly maintained and it's sometimes wrong.

Sean Connery is still alive according to the data in the system. He died in 2020. Maybe three years isn't long enough to update his data. But the system correctly notes that Chadwick Boseman died in 2020.

Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher have no date of death listed. They both died in 2016.

It's a good idea to check some of the information displayed. For example, the system says that Sydney Greenstreet was born on December 27, 1979 in Kenosha, Wisconsin and died on January 18, 1954.

Kenosha? He sure sounds English to me. Maybe this is a situation like Andrew Garfield's, born in the U.S. but raised in England.

Nope. His Wikipedia page says he was born in Eastry, Kent (a county in South East England). Eastry was voted Kent Village of the Year 2005. They must be very proud. But apparently not proud enough of Sydney to ensure that he is listed in the Notable People section of its Wikipedia page.

So, Kenosha? How did that get in Sydney's bio? Is there an actor who was born in Kenosha?

Yes, there is. Orson Welles was born in Kenosha about 40 years after Greenstreet wasn't born there. Orson's bio data is correct.

At least Sydney's picture is right. At one time, I thought the system was displaying a picture of Paul Dano for Royal Dano. On closer examination, the picture doesn't look much like Paul Dano, but the resemblance is stronger when you think Royal Dano is a woman.

I was trying to remember who plays Detective Thursday's son Sam on Endeavour, so I scrolled through the Cast & Crew list. Oh, that's right. Jack Bannon. But he could not have been born in 1940, like the system says. That Jack Bannon was on Lou Grant and was the son of the voice of Betty Rubble and died in 2017.

Sometimes who they choose to list for the cast can be a mystery. For old films that have a Cast title card in the end credits, that card seems to be the source. For newer films, you'd think it would be the cast list in the end credits (unless they're listed in order of appearance -- I hate that); or the cast listed in the opening credits; or the cast list in what-I-call the vanity credits, the credits that appear over some sort of artsy background and before the background goes black and the full cast list crawls by along with the caterers, the HODs, the folks in the legal department, the personal assistants, and the production babies.

Omissions are puzzling. Take Amsterdam, for example. Find a showing on one of the HBOs in the DirecTV guide and go to the Cast & Crew screen. Scroll through the listing to see who is and isn't listed.

It's not really surprising that Chris Rock doesn't appear in DirecTV's cast list screen for the movie. He doesn't really have a big or crucial role in the film.

Surely, the top three billed stars are in the cast list. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington have the top three spots, in that order, in the vanity credits and the end credits. Christian and Margot appear in the cast list. John does not. Why is he the only one of the top three billed actors not included in the cast list?

He does appear at the top of the cast list for Tenet. I guess you can't ignore him when he's the star of the film.

You have more legitimate grievances than I can possibly imagine. The two times I was pulled over by a cop, I knew exactly why. I'll never have someone decide to wait for the next elevator because I already happen to be on it. I'll probably never have someone shoot me through a closed door because I rang the doorbell at the wrong house or jogged through a neighborhood.

One time when I was playing my favorite Quick Hit Blitz machine, I couldn't hit a bonus to save my life. The lady next to me, however, was hitting them right and left. She had six or seven bonuses in the time I had only two. Everyone experiences bad luck in the vicinity of someone with good luck.

I'm in a run of bad luck at video poker. I've had spectacularly good and bad sessions, but I would usually finish up or down by a few hundred dollars. Not so the past few months. I'd start with a goal to earn a certain number of points and a plan to quit after earning those points or losing my session bankroll. I've almost always lost my session bankroll long before reaching my point goal. And the only times I had a profit were when I hit four deuces.

Everyone has runs of bad luck. I hope yours (and mine!) end soon.

I've seen the reverse situation to ones you described. The bank of NSU machines I play at one casino was across from a bank of Everi machines at the casino wall. I had good luck on High Voltage Jackpot Jolt until it started eating my money and not giving me a bonus. I decided to give it a rest.

The machine makes loud noises when it hits a jackpot, so there's no missing a jackpot hit. Two times when I was playing video poker, I heard the jackpot racket over and over again. One time a Black couple was playing the machine. The other, a Black woman.

The machines don't care who's playing them. It's all random.

I can't speak for the casino employees, but that's okay. There's no way for them to manipulate a machine -- not so much to prevent them from disadvantaging a player, but to keep them from setting the machine to favor their confederate.

Everyone is the same color as far as the casino is concerned. Green.

Preliminary data from the CDC's National Health Interview Survey estimates that only 11.1% of adults report being current cigarette smokers.

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