Ask the Slot Expert: When good slot machines go bad

I settled in for what I hoped to be an enjoyable -- and profitable -- session playing my favorite Quick Hit Blitz machine. Blitzy was a little glitchy that day. She just wasn't herself.

Every once in a while, the reels would take a fraction of a second pause after I hit the Spin button. The reels would start spinning and then there'd be a hiccup, like the machine had something else it had to do before getting back to spinning the reels.

I know that this machine has had display problems in the past. The machine did not render many of the symbols on the reels during the bonus round. There were plenty of blank spaces on reels that had no blank spaces.

I don't know what the reels in the bonus round looked like because Blitzy didn't give me any bonuses that day.

I considered calling over one of the slot attendants, but the glitch was intermittent and I didn't know how much weight they would put on my feeling that the machine was not behaving the way it normally did.

(They should investigate if I say something doesn't seem right. I once found a faulty card reader that was reporting that I was constantly removing and inserting my card, even though I wasn't touching it. I also found a machine that wasn't configured properly for a promotion when I didn't get something that I had earned.)

I chalked up the glitch to Blitzy having an off day and hoped she might be rebooted -- or reboot on her own -- and the problem would be gone the next time I played her.

I don't recall whether she still had the spin glitch the next time. She was much more generous with the bonus rounds, though, so I was able to see that the phantom bonus reel symbols problem was back with a vengeance.

More and more symbols disappeared as the bonus round continued. On a few spins, the reels were completely blank. There was a lady sitting at the machine across a very narrow aisle from me. She was watching her friend play, but she watched me when I hit my first bonus round. On one of the completely blank reel spins, I looked over at her and shrugged my shoulders.

I could tell when I had winning combinations because I could see the "line x pays y" message at the bottom of the screen. I could also tell when I had landed Blitz symbols by the sound made when they landed on a reel and by watching the "symbols needed" count go down after the winning combinations were paid.

As the problem worsened, I thought I should call over a slot attendant. But then my bonus round ended. I've learned that it's much better to show an attendant a problem when it is happening than to describe it after it has occurred. They think I'm just another crazy player. If I get another bonus round, I thought, maybe I'll hit the Service button then.

I did get another bonus (Thank you, Blitzy.) Symbols were blank again, so I hit the Service button after a few spins. When you get a Jackpot Upgrade on Quick Bit Blitz, you have to hit the Spin button to start the spins on the next jackpot level. I tried to wait each time I got to a new level to give the attendant time to come, but it's tough to sit at a machine and do nothing when the machine is still operating. I was able to wait a little at each level and, fortunately, the attendant came quickly.

She saw the problem right away. I said that having mostly blank reels added an extra level of excitement and mystery to the bonus. When the machine counted the number of invisible Blitz symbols (not) displayed on the screen, we'd guess how many were actually there.

She radioed for one of the supervisors to come to determine what should be done.

I was lucky enough to get another Jackpot Upgrade after she came. I asked her if she wanted to me wait to start the next level so we could ensure that the supervisor would see the problem. She said that wasn't necessary because she witnessed it.

(If I never hit the Spin button to start the next level, the machine would eventually time out and start it for me. Machines have a sort-of dead man switch to do something that it is waiting for the player to do when the player doesn't do it. If the player is supposed to choose items on the screen, the machine will choose them randomly.)

The bonus ended when I was one Blitz short of an upgrade. The machine makes a lot of noise and displays coins falling down the screen when you win anything more than toll money on the bonus. I had gotten a few upgrades and had won about $150, so the machine should have gone into Big Win mode.

Instead nothing happened. Just then two supervisors arrived. The attendant said that she thought the machine had locked up. I had been keeping track of my credits to see when I had enough credits to make it to 500 spins. I had enough credits to finish the session. I said that I thought the machine had credited me for the bonus round.

One of the supervisors said, "Let's try to cash out." He hit the Cash Out button and nothing happened. None of the buttons did anything. Reboot. His partner fumbled around under the deck trying to get his key into the reset lock. Right after he turned the key, the first supervisor said, "Wait."

Too late. The machine was already rebooting.

My machine was in a pod of four games, each of which participated in the progressive Quick Hit jackpots. My machine acted as the progressive controller for the four machines. When it started rebooting, the progressive amount displays on the other machines changed from showing a dollar amount to showing "Good Luck".

The second supervisor checked to see if anyone was playing the other two machines in the pod, which were back to back with my machine and the one next to mine. He said that no one was playing them, so we were okay. In any case, it took only a minute or so for the progressive amounts to display again.

The slot game took a lot longer to come back. About five minutes. One of the supervisors said that it keeps taking longer and longer for machines to reboot. While we were watching the machine reboot, they got a call that a player was looking for a particular game with a panda. One of the supervisors said to me, "We must have 30 games with a panda."

I asked if my Game of Thrones machine was gone for good, even though I knew that it was. The other movie- and TV show-based Aristocrat machines that they've had in the past weren't moved, they were removed, after two months or so. They said that the manufacturer had replaced them with the Crazy Rich Asian machines.

When the machine was back up, it spun the reels to where they stopped to trigger my bonus. I asked if I was going to have to hit the Spin button to start the bonus. Before anyone could answer, the machine displayed the reels for the first jackpot level and automatically spun the reels. "I guess not," said one of the supervisors.

The four of us watched as the machine replayed all of the spins in my bonus round, automatically starting each level without player interaction. When the supervisors got a bit antsy, I said that I thought this was the last level. The attendant said that I made up one more level.

She was right. I collected enough Blitz symbols on that level for an upgrade. When I was on my third spin at new level, she said that I was going to be one short of an upgrade. I remembered then that when we watched this spin in ghost-symbol mode, we knew that I had landed some Blitz symbols, but we didn't know how many. We watched as the Symbols Needed count went down to 1 and stayed there.End of bonus.

This time the machine did a nice fanfare to award what I had won in the bonus. The supervisors and attendant wished me luck and moved on to their next problem.

Slot regulations require that machines go back to where they left off when they lose power or reboot. If you were in the middle of a bonus round, they will replay the bonus up to the point of interruption and then complete it. My machine hadn't completed my bonus round -- I was out of spins, but the machine hadn't awarded me the credits I had won yet -- so it replayed the sequence from bonus trigger to not getting enough symbols for an upgrade. Then it picked up where it crashed, paying me.

I cashed out 15 minutes later with a $50 profit and some bonus entertainment.

Last week I wondered whether the Omicron surge and subsequent strained hospitals had caused Bill Maher to moderate his "time to get back to normal" message that he espoused at the end of last year.

On his first show back this year, instead of being humbled, Bill doubled down. And one of his panelists, Bari Weiss, said, "I'm done with Covid."

On his second show this year, Bill tripled down. He quoted Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, who said, "I think everybody's angry. It's been two years now. We're fatigued and ready to move on. I think a lot of political vectors are reflecting that."

When Bill didn't discuss the virus during the panel on his February 4 show, I thought he wasn't going to discuss it at all. I was wrong. It was the subject of his editorial at the end of the show.

As I wrote last week, Real Time has at times become a source of misinformation. Bill and his writers are not doing the research.

Bill cited a paper from Johns Hopkins that said that lockdowns had little to no benefit on public health. The paper did not come from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. No, the paper came from the esteemed doctors from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. Some of the authors may be doctors, but they're PhD not MD. The title of the paper is "A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality".

Criticisms available at the time of his show said that the paper had not been peer reviewed yet. Also, it's a study of studies, some of which are also not peer reviewed. Critics also had an issue with what the authors considered a "lockdown".

The authors of the Johns Hopkins study are economists, not epidemiologists, and their ultimate conclusion is related to that expertise. They wrote that the lockdowns during the first wave of the pandemic "have had devastating effects."

...

All 3 authors are also from Sweden and Denmark. Sweden famously decided not to implement any lockdowns and never mandated, only recommended, masks in public. The country recorded more cases per capita and deaths than neighboring countries: Reported deaths were 3 times more than Denmark, 8 times more than Finland, and 10 times more than Norway. A December 2021 article in BMJ said public health experts and scientists believed "Sweden's situation remains precarious."

Controversial Paper Claims COVID-19 "Lockdowns" Had Little Public Health Effect

The findings, which have not been peer reviewed, conflict with previous studies that found lockdowns worked.

...

"Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission," Seth Flaxman, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. "None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed."

Did Pandemic Lockdowns Do Little to Prevent COVID Deaths?

Bill said, "A study this week from a professor at Johns Hopkins concluded that the lockdowns we all suffered through had little impact in reducing Covid deaths. Okay, that's kind of a big one to get wrong."

Bill, concluding that the lockdowns didn't work on the basis of just this one paper is kind of a big one to get wrong.

Bill also took issue with Biden's saying, "You're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations" in a town hall on July 21, 2021.

Bill said, "I already knew that was wrong then and now we all do."

I remember when this occurred. One of the analysts in the post-game show I saw said that Biden's statement wasn't true. There are always breakthrough infections.

Another analyst said that his job here was to encourage people to get vaccinated, not give a detailed statistical analysis of your chances of getting a breakthrough infection, being hospitalized or dying with and without the vaccine.

Bill's losing touch with the larger theme he once had. What is the long game? How are we going to live with the virus?

He seems to be advocating a total lifting of mandatory mitigation efforts, never to be reimposed, and letting the vulnerable fend for themselves. But what if hospitals are stressed again? Shouldn't we be monitoring some metric to know if we need to increase mitigation efforts to prevent hospitals from getting overloaded again?

We may be fatigued and ready to move on, but the real question is whether the virus is fatigued and ready to move on. The virus will tell us when we can shift to endemic mode.

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