Ask the Slot Expert: Why did I win $10,000 on this slot machine?

Last week I posted a puzzle from the New York Times. Here is that puzzle again. The answers are at that bottom of this column.

A few months ago, The New York Times started running a new word game called Connections. The game consists of a grid of 16 words and you have to break them into groups of four words that are related in some way.

The game can be tricky. Frequently five words will have the same connection and you have to figure out which word belongs in another group. The connection between the words, in addition, is sometimes a bit obscure. The puzzle creators even rank the groups by trickiness level.

Sometimes I get a connection that they considered tricky just because I was familiar with what connected them (e.g., Asia, Journey, KISS, Yes are all rock bands with one-word names).

Following are the words from about a month ago. See if you can find the four groups of four words that share a common thread. It's easier to play using the app because the app will tell you once you've correctly identified a set of words, but the Times does not have a way to play a puzzle from the archive. I'll give you answers next week.

Question: I was recently playing a Thunder Arrow slot machine by Konami. I was playing pennies and betting $2.50, the max bet. I got the free spin feature where you get 5 free spins. At the conclusion of the 5 free spins, where I won $8, all of a sudden a giant arrow hit the entire screen and in large letters it said MAXI JACKPOT WINNER. Under it was $10,000.00.

I was in shock and have no clue how I won it. I thought it was a mistake. The casino paid me out.

Is this correct? Can this machine do this?

Answer: This is a kind of letter I don't get every day. A player questioning why they won!

Thunder Arrow is a game theme from Konami Gaming. Games with this theme are: God of the East, Jurassic Queen, North Queen, and Drag Queen. (Just kidding about the last one.) North Queen has slightly different rules than the other two, which are clones. The Konami site says so.

The game has two bonus features.

The Thunder Arrow feature is triggered when six or more arrow symbols land on the screen. The screen changes from the game reels to a 3x5 grid filled with bonus amounts or jackpot names (Mini, Minor, Mega, and Maxi). You start with three spins. When a circle lands in a grid position, an arrow shoots across the screen to the position, which turns gold and locks, and you get another spin. The bonus amounts in the positions change on each spin.

The bonus ends when you run out of spins. You get paid for the amounts locked. If you are lucky enough to turn all 15 positions gold, you get paid the amounts on the screen and you get to do it all again, that is, the Thunder Arrow bonus is re-triggered.

The other feature is the Free Games bonus. You were playing God of the East or Jurassic Queen because those two variations award five free games. The program places more arrow and wild symbols on the reels and then the free spins begin.

I watched more Thunder Arrow videos on YouTube than anyone should be forced to watch before I found what I was hoping to see.

The game page on the Konami site has this interesting text: "Maxi and Mega jackpots can randomly be won on any bought game". One way to win the Maxi is to have it appear during the Thunder Arrow bonus and have it lock in place. You can also win the Maxi randomly during the base game.

It happens about 12 minutes in on this video. Well, it's the Mega for $800 not the Maxi for $10,000, but it's the same mechanism -- randomly awarding one of the jackpots. In the video, an arrow symbol lands on the screen and then a big arrow shoots across the screen, which displays "MEGA JACKPOT $810.67".

I don't know whether landing the arrow symbol is a requirement. The game could be programmed to do another RNG poll after a spin with fewer than six arrow symbols to determine whether to award the Mega or Maxi jackpot anyway. It may also be programmed to do that after any non-winning spin or any spin. One way to reward players betting more per spin is to randomly award these two jackpots more frequently to them. The program isn't altering any of the symbols chosen by the RNG, so it's not a "secondary decision" and it's legal.

A free game isn't a bought game. I think what happened to you is you won $8 on your free games (Gee, could the machine spare it?) and then you won the Maxi on the next spin. If you had won it during the free games, it would have been included in your free games winnings.

What amount was on your tax form? $10,000 or something else? If it was $10,000, then hitting it was not related to the free games.

Either way, congratulations!

Here are the answers to the Connections puzzle.

The groups are listed in order of The Times' difficulty ranking, Straightforward at the top and Tricky at the bottom.

When I first saw the words, I saw Bar, Bell and Cherry right away and thought one group must have to do with slot machines. "7" might have been in a TV show name, but all of the other show names are the exact show names, so "7" doesn't belong in that group. There's probably a book title with "7" in it, but "7" is definitely a slot machine symbol. I didn't see any other entry in the grid that could be a slot symbol, so the first group I tried was the Slot Machine Symbols group.

Sometimes a connection that The Times considers one of the trickier connections jumps out at you because of your knowledge of the connection.

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