Malfunction Costs Couple $11 Million Slot Machine Jackpot 479
ainandil writes "Engineering mistakes, while frustrating, seldom definitively alter the end user's life. Not so in Cripple Creek, Colorado — MaryAnn and Jim McMahon thought their money troubles were over when they hit an $11 million jackpot at a casino Tuesday. Before paying the jackpot, the Wildwood Casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. A glitch was found, aha! The Wildwood Casino blamed a slot machine malfunction for the $11 million jackpot. Total actually won by the McMahons? $1,627.82."
Enough with the perky summaries (Score:4, Informative)
What's wrong with just writing a dry summary? It's more pleasant to read and lets the facts of the situation speak for themselves:
"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon of Cripple Creek, Colorado were playing at the Wildwood Casino, Tuesday, and hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine. Before paying the winnings, the casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. After deciding that the win was due to a malfunction, the couple was paid only $1627.82 in winnings."
Reading this revised version doesn't make me sick and want to punch someone for trying to be witty and entertaining (that is, annoying and stupid).
Re:Law Suit!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Won't matter. This has happened before and they have never had to pay out.
And What Recourse Do Players Have? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. From TOA
"It's the second time in three months a Colorado slot machine has made a multi-million dollar mistake. In March, a machine malfunction was blamed for a $42 million dollar jackpot."
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Winnings (Score:3, Informative)
The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.
It's disappointing for the people that they didn't win their jackpot, but the rules are presented very clearly beforehand.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:3, Informative)
Every machine here in Nevada says right on the front "malfunction voids play" or something similar.
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Informative)
The court charges, but in general, when you're talking about two parties with dramatically differing levels of available resources, the only time the smaller party pays for the larger party's attorney fees is if the lawsuit is frivolous (summary judgment) or if the law specifically provides for that (e.g. the defense loses certain types of suits). This is clearly not frivolous.
Besides, it would never go to court. The company would almost certainly settle out of court for a few hundred thousand just to get them to shut up. Otherwise, the story hits a few major networks, and that casino's business dries up because people suddenly realize that if they win big, the casino is just going to screw them out of the money.
Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one (Score:5, Informative)
It's "estimated" because the lottery winnings are a percentage of all tickets sold, and they haven't yet sold all the tickets for the next lottery.
They usually close the sales 15 minutes before the drawing.
UK fruit machines they are not the same as US game (Score:4, Informative)
UK fruit machines they are not the same as US game as they pay out to a target % and do cheat you on high / low and other bonus games.
http://www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk/fruit/ [fairplay-campaign.co.uk]
Re:FTFA... (Score:1, Informative)
I too, need profanity to get my points across.
Dick
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Informative)
"They actually won $1627.82," said Burmania, "The $11 million was what we call a 'reset value.' It's what the jackpot would have been after the prize was claimed."
I don't get this last sentence it seems ambiguous. It seems to indicate to me that the "reset value", in this case an $11 million jackpot, would have been the prize on the next play. Had the couple been able to play one more round the prize -would- have been the $11 million. Since this mechanical error caused the machine to be shut down, the couple lost out anyways.
I would think that 1 months' worth of business would easily have that casino lose more than $11 million. I'd say pay them out, or they risk losing more money long term.
I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party. Instead, I found the rep's behavior in the video absolutely inappropriate since he's laughing throughout the interview.
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, here's a follow-up on that $42.9M story [denverpost.com]:
At the time, the top award on the slot, a progressive game that takes a percentage of bets placed in all similar machines, was $251,183.16. But to be eligible for the top award, a maximum wager of 400 credits, or $4, was required. Chavez's 40-cent wager was eligible for a prize of 20,000 credits, or $200, if she would have hit the progressive.
So.... you're playing a 40 cent game for $200 max, who cares if it shows 42 millions when it's impossible? I can tell you what happened too, a 32 bit unsigned has a max of 4,294,967,295 <-- seem familiar? Somehow a subtraction lacked a bounds check and it underflowed to be UINT_MAX cents. And for that they should pay out 200,000 times her largest possible theoretical winnings? Sorry, but I'll side with the casino on this one.
Re:Something similar happened in Argentina (Score:5, Informative)
Congratulations for living in a country that does not have a corrupt legal system. Wish I could say the same.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Informative)
I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party.
Sure, they're neutral. The same way MMS and Interior Dept were neutral in the BP oil spill. The gaming commission depends on the casinos for their livelihood, many of them come from a background in gaming. If there's no consequence for "mistakes" like this, they'll keep happening. There's no incentive to insure accuracy.
I'd take that prize money and hire a lawyer, subpoena the machine records and the gaming commission investigation notes.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:0, Informative)
Well, in the UK there are quite a lot of laws regarding 'skill based games'. It is only a few weeks ago that the owners of a crooked hoopla game were sentenced to 14 weeks in jail (suspended for a year) [telegraph.co.uk] because the game (whilst not impossible) was too difficult. This was in Blackpool, which is the UKs most popular 'amusement' resort.
Your friendly language Nazi! (Score:1, Informative)
Its BLAME not BLAIM!
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:3, Informative)
Why do I mention all this? Because it will only make economic sense to an attorney to handle this type of lawsuit on a contingency fee basis if he is sitting on enough money or other reliable cash flow to dedicate his resources to it long enough to get to an outcome, which with this kind of case could certainly involve multiple appeals before you see a dime. You'd also have to have a source of funds for expert witnesses to review the technical aspects of it and testify about what happened and how it happened. In some states, that source of funds must be the client as lawyers are prohibited from paying the costs of a lawsuit as an ethical matter. In the other states, you still need that money to go forward, though.
It would be a fun case, though, if you were a lawyer in the position to handle it on a contingency fee basis or if the clients had another source of money to pay you. (But, as they spend enough money in casinos to hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine, the safer bet is that their financial management skills leave them unable to pay out of pocket.)
Re:Law Suit!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes,
The machine will have to be taken offline for inspection and a report will be mailed to you. I've read up on the gaming commission and several stories. (Mostly in regards to my fascination with that damn super stacker game). The regulations for "games of chance" are pretty much out there for anyone to read. Tons of interesting stories and material there to fill a day of reading.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Informative)
Just like these claw crane games that you find in vide arcades or amusement parks: those with a joystick to control a crane to grab stuffed animals or whatnot. Curious, one day I browsed the web to find operator's manuals, and they are programmed to make it look like the crane accidentally drops objects. The operator can enter parameters to define the average price of prizes, the average winning rate, etc so that in the end, just like slot machines, the payout percentage can be controlled very precisely. For more info read Machine configuration and chances of winning [wikipedia.org].
Knowing this completely takes the fun out of it, doesn't it ?
Why errors don't get jackpot payouts (Score:5, Informative)
If they're paid, it becomes easy to use a casino for money laundering. Walk into the casino with a bunch of cash you obtained illegally, dump it as a high roller at the craps table, hit the deliberately-broken slot machine your accomplice in the casino management set up to get most of your money back, and when you go to the bank and have to explain where you got the money you're depositing, hey, you won it from a slot machine, perfectly legal source.
To stop that, when a big payout is hit, the machines are audited by the gaming commission and checked for errors. If there is one, you don't get the payout, so a crooked casino manager can't set up a broken machine as part of a money-laundering operation.
Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have? (Score:1, Informative)
submit them for fairly rigorous testing and review from outfits like GLI
GLI is paid for their certifications by the manufacturers. They can and are bullied by the manufacturers to permit exceptions on some compliance issues.
One area where there isn't much wiggle room is math. They verify the math rigorously under lab conditions. However, they don't really audit code quality. If some glaring bug fails to appear during GLI's testing process it will end up in the field and produce yet another news story about Bob the slot player NOT collecting his 13 zillion dollars if only because there are legally mandated limits on the size of awards.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Informative)
When developing a new game, the company decides on the payout, for example, 95%, which means that on average, out of every $1 played, the company pays out 95 cents back to the players. The company then decides on the prize distribution, for example (not a real game distribution, just an example):
Count Prize Payout Amount
387,251 0 0
10,000 1 10,000
2,000 5 10,000
500 25 12,500
200 200 40,000
30 1,000 30,000
15 5,000 75,000
3 30,000 90,000
1 100,000 100,000
400,000 136,231 367,500 Total
So out of 400,000 games played of $1 each, the casino is paying out $367,500 and making $32,500 profit. The prizes are randomized and the resulting distribution inspected to make it is distributed appropriately.
The prize distribution is saved in a central casino database. Every time a play happens, while the graphics or reels are moving, the machine talks to the central server over a secure network and requests the next available prize. The server finds the next prize in the the list, marks it as played, and sends it to the machine. If it is a win, lights flash, bells ring, etc.
Casinos in general want big jackpots, as loud and as attention getting as possible, since it gets more players to play longer. They have no interest in cheating you out out of big prize, since they are making money on average every time you play. Their interest is to keep you putting in money into the machine as long as possible, and they do that by having jackpots as often as they have calculated they should do it.
Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts (Score:1, Informative)
That already happens, you just don't hear about the ones that get caught doing it because the gaming commission in Nevada keeps all of it's investigations tightly wrapped so the Whales will keep beaching themselves in Vegas.
6 words (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:3, Informative)
You are exactly right. It is actually illegal in some jurisdiction (Nevada, at least) to make a gambling machine where the user's skill can influence the outcome. Even the ones that look like a video game where you control an avatar (a dude, a car or a spaceship) are absolutely not rewarding skill or penalizing inability.
Yes, the "Storm Stopper" is trivial to rig (Score:5, Informative)
In high-school I was a game tech at an arcade across the street. (A dream job for a geek! Much better than McD's, even though McD's paid better.)
The manual for Cyclone/Storm Stopper, etc. explicitly let you set the number of mSec the jackpot light would be lit. The manual also included suggested payout layouts and jackpot light times for maximum play at specific average payouts. (i.e. if you want five tickets average per play, set up the non-jackpot lights like this, the jackpot minimums and increment like that, and jackpot light time for another value.) It was a delicate balancing act involving many tradeoffs. Starting the jackpot large and incrementing quickly gets a lot of players attracted to the machine, but the ensuing need to drop the non-jackpot payouts causes players to leave quickly. Setting the jackpot timing too fast means some moron who puts a couple of hundred tokens in the thing will take his compulsive gambling somewhere else. (Yes, we had compulsive gamblers at a kiddie arcade; we had a setup where you could "bank" tickets long-term, so you could save tickets over months to save up for a CD player or a TV. We dropped the average ticket value for the higher-end prizes to keep highly-skilled players from costing us too much.)
Our arcade machines were not bright enough to adjust parameters based on average payout, but they were all adjustable, which we did by monitoring the token and ticket counters for each machine on a weekly basis. If a machine paid out too high or two low, we would adjust the odds and/or payouts.
For the arcade overall, we shot for an average of 7 tickets (worth about a penny each) for each token (worth about 21.7 cents each.)
SirWired
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:3, Informative)
Just like these claw crane games that you find in vide arcades or amusement parks
Dubious programming craw crane games is just a red herring. The real scam with those crane games is that the prizes inside aren't worth the money even if you had a 100% success rate in grabbing them.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:2, Informative)
No, the $11 million would have been the prize the next time the jackpot was awarded, not the next play. You aren't awarded the jackpot every play. Still the $11,000,600 number was an error. It should have displayed $600 which was the correct reset value. This couple won $1600, plain and simple.
I'm not sure which manufacturer this game was on, but evidently the display sequence showed four things to the screen after they won:
1) The word JACKPOT
2) The prize just won, ie $1600
3) The word CURRENT
4) The next prize reset value, in this case $11,000,600 although it should have said $600
So while there was definitely a malfunction there was no ambiguity that they didn't win that much money. Their prize was the $1600.