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."
Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Interesting)
in recent history that gambling casinos have used "mechanical problems" to evade honoring their promises?
I wager it will be used again. After all, aren't most winners too poor to afford lawyers to fight the casinos? It's the same problem with corporate abuse of DRM and DMCA lawsl.
No need to check the code... (Score:2, Interesting)
So now casinos just need something which they say that works in a way and if it works another way they don't pay the announced prize but what they say it should be (of course it's what the machine should have shown, but how do you know there really was a mistake?).
It used to be a good idea to check if a machine does what it is intended for, but this is supporting a I-don't-care behavior, because casinos can get rid of programming/coding errors by sending machines to some inspection *after* the error gets visible, and they aren't held responsible for it.
In fact, I wonder if I could just grab a machine and to the same kind of inspection on it to see if the 0 prize was really the intended one - or if the error makes the house win money noone looks at it?
I suppose this falls in some kind of breach of contract?
Mitch Hedberg called this one (Score:5, Interesting)
"I saw a billboard for the lottery. It said, "Estimated lottery jackpot 55 million dollars." I did not know that was estimated. That would suck if you won and they said, "Oh, we were off by two zeroes. We estimate that you are angry!""
Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ... (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, aren't most winners too poor to afford lawyers to fight the casinos?
If I win my lawsuit, then I'll get $11 Million or $42 Million or whatever and be able to pay my lawyer. And I remember seeing ads on TV for law firms that don't charge unless they win your case.
Or am I missing something important here?
Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam! (Score:5, Interesting)
A woman recently won like 42 million in a jackpot and they refused to pay her saying it was a bug.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/colorado-42-mil-jackpot-winner-jack/story?id=10235836 [go.com]
A quick google shows that this happens all the time, whenever someone wins a large number its always blaimed on a bug, and for some magical reason the winners do not get paid.
The casino's are ripping winners off.
Something similar happened in Argentina (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
That actually was a mistake.
I read an article a while ago about a guy who uploaded the software of a slot machine to a vmware-like environment. This way, he could revert back to the very same state over and over again. The machine always gave the user the impression that if he had made another decision, he would have won the jackpot. Except for when the user actually made that decision.
So I think any slot machine paying big bucks is either programmed to do so periodically as a way of marketing the casino or otherwise suffering from a serious bug.
Re: Winnings (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Law Suit!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell you that the machines are absolutely programmed to make you lose even if you hit the buttons at the exact right time to stop the rollers. Basically the operator programs the payout to be a ratio of the money deposited. Our machines were programmed to dispense 2 cents worth of prize tokens for every 25 cents deposited. The machine word operate honestly until the ratio got too far in the user's favor, then it would cheat on the last roller to correct the ratio. a jack pot scenario would only be allowed to happen if the ratio was already deep in the favor of the operator.
It was pretty comical, with the machine open I could stop the rollers right in the position I wanted by hand, and if the machine decided to "correct" the ratio it would use the stepper motor to index the last roller one or two positions past where I had stopped it. Pretty much undetectable to the human eye while the thing is spinning.
Re:FTFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
gambling is a form of entertainment. Even people with "money problems" (and they didn't discuss the magnitude, heck most people would say they have "money problems" of some sort) need entertainment. Gambling, done properly, can be a reasonably cheap form of entertainment. Particularly quarter slots.
But a previous poster was onto something when they said the previous players that day deserved a refund since they were also playing on a 'defective' machine that could have been meant to give out more than it did to them. "can't have it both ways" was the comment, spot on.
Taken another way, why can't *I* demand they take the machine to get inspected if I play it all day and don't win as much as I think I should have? If they can have it checked for faults not in their favor, and have them be binding, then so can I. You can't adjust the amount of review based on the outcome, which is exactly what they are doing here. It'd be like calling the opposing team for a review every time the refs made a call against you, but never when they made a call in your favor. In those cases both sides have equal power to call review. The same should apply here also.
Re:Law Suit!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always assumed most games of 'skill' are rigged. Remember those Storm Stopper games that look like a glass dome with the spinning light that you try to catch on the jackpot (you see them at Chuck E. Cheese places)? Every time, I hit it on either side of the jackpot. You'd think that I'd have at least 1/3 chance of getting if if that's the case, but I rarely actually got it. I would think that most games even outside casinos (cranes, stackers, those vertical ones with the red lights) that appear to be be dependent on skill are, once you hit a certain level, mostly luck. They're kinda fun to put a few quarters in, and I get that someone has to make money, but still, rigging is rigging.
Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have? (Score:3, Interesting)
The industry works very hard to find out, as it turns out. Every slot machine ships with what's called a PAR sheet -- this lists the actual odds of each pay for the machine, along with 95% confidence intervals on payout for various amounts of play. The casino will then have its slot technicians verify that the machines are paying exactly what they expect. There are legal reasons why they have to do this, but the self-interested incentive for the casino to do this is because they do not usually like to run their machines as tight as the law allows, because players can and will notice and you'll end up losing $20 over the course of 20 minutes when you could have entertained them with a few wins and wound up winning $100 over the course of an evening. A casino is going to be very, very upset if their machines aren't holding PAR due to a defect in the machine, regardless of the direction of error.
Funny story about how sensitive players are to changes in payback: one time, a casino wanted to loosen up their machines, ie. make them pay back more, in order to build up a more loyal following. So they have all their vendors reset the machines with more generous paytables. Their regular players freaked out and started complaining. They could tell that the casino changed the math, but couldn't tell for sure that the math was now more in their favor. They ended up having to go back to tighter math to keep their existing loyal players.
This is a tough spot for the casino. They don't make the machines, and they certainly don't bankroll 7-figure jackpots -- in this case, in sounds like a straight-up glitch that a number that large was ever displayed, but even when it's intentional, they're not the ones on the hook to pay the jackpot when it hits. They buy them from companies like IGT (the Microsoft of the casino gaming world, basically) that are in turn required to submit them for fairly rigorous testing and review from outfits like GLI which ensure regulatory compliance and just that the machine really works as advertised. Still, IGT doesn't have the pissed off customer that thinks they won $11 million when the machine is only holding enough money to fund $1627.82 -- I used to work at a smaller outfit that did bonus features on games. We installed a pretty ambitious project for us, and on our first night running in this brand-new casino, we had an issue happen where due to a ridiculously subtle glitch, our device gave away one luxury car as designed, and then on the very next play, gave away another. Understandably, the casino guys were pretty upset with us, and we ended up paying for the second car.
The article here is really badly written. The spokesperson is quoted as saying that the $11 million was the reset value, but I don't understand how a jackpot is going to be designed to reset from a hit at $1627 to $11 million. Usually, a progressive or mystery jackpot will be "reset" to some amount that a casino will pay -- like $1000 -- and then a portion of every wager will be tossed into a pool of money that's added to that reset value. I'd be interested to know 1) what machine this was, and 2) when did it first display $11 million?
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:3, Interesting)
The light accelerates or slows down in the vicinity of the jackpot light. Also, the jackpot bulb resistance could be different. So yes to some extent it's luck but it is winnable.
I win these pretty frequently when I take my family to these places, but when I stop and reflect, even 25 cents (best case scenario) for 100 "tickets" or whatever the reset value of the jackpot is, turns out to be a pretty shitty deal when you see what you can redeem 100 tickets for (and more realistically, I spend at least 10 quarters/tokens for a win, so it's even worse -- but the kids love to see it).
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger, the local football club used to sell scratch-cards in the town each weekend. They sold them for years. They were 25p each, with a max possible win of £20. I can remember buying a few from time to time, maybe winning £1 very occasionally.
Then, when we were about 14 somebody found out that a shed near the football club had boxes and boxes full of these unopened (and by then out-of-date) cards, and we took tens of thousands of them. We would spend ages scratching them off, looking for 'winners'. Took so long, that we gave up on that and we learnt just to scratch of the 'void if removed' box and recognise the most common codes... something like 18414 would always mean a loser, 85413 would be a £1 winner etc... we were always looking for a really unusual number that would be the £20 winner.
Any we never found one, not one £20 winner, despite examining tens of thousands of cards over several months.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
All games of "chance" and "skill" (like carnival games) are deliberately skewed in favor of the owner, otherwise there would be no profit in owning them. They are meant for entertainment of the customers, not their retirement plan. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
That said, the owners could be less greedy.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:1, Interesting)
True, however what most people expect for skill games is that the stacking is visible and forms a barrier they can be aware of and try to overcome by skill, and for nonskill games that it's ruled by luck and the stacking is due to skewed probabilities.
Deviations from this would cause upset in all other games than slot machines. For example:
- A game of shooting ducks (skill based) with a toy rifle, except that there is nothing in the rifle and the "hit/miss" is faked using a hidden and precise launcher.
- A game of roulette (luck based), except that there are electromagnets underneath that go on and off to control the movements of the ball.
Why are people upset when a machine controls their payout pattern instead of skill, luck? Well, why would they be upset if human court judges could be replaced by robots proven to use statistical techniques to have the same hit/miss rate as humans?
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g (Score:3, Interesting)
Tribal courts (Score:5, Interesting)
Or am I missing something important here?
Most US casinos are operated by native American tribes. Their reservations are their own legal jurisdictions. If you have a problem, your recourse is to sue them in tribal court ... which, of course, is operated by the casino owner. Good luck with those odds. Pity the customer. And how about the employees? The casino employees I know here in Minnesota are keenly aware that their employment rights are severely limited.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:3, Interesting)
A great deal of the confusion regarding games of chance is that they are actually games of chance. This a heavily regulated economy from the slot machines in vegas to the super stacker II game in the local pub.
Every machine has a payout ratio and slots actually tend to be closer to 1. This is essentially how all games of chance function and much like some other posters have pointed out... it is how the machines are designed.
Legally, the unit is set to within a specific level of commission for payout. In the casino territory there are regulators onsite that you can appeal to if you feel you have been cheated. They literally must take the unit offline for inspection and sent you a notice to their findings.
The system works both ways with the advantage being to the house. They know when the payout has been incorrectly dispensed because there is a tightly held ratio that should be observed. All large payouts will also require the machine to be inspected. There will be no slipping through the cracks on foul play.
There are a good number of stories regarding games of chance. My favorite being an engineer who spotted the pseudo random number generator was somewhat predictable in a kino game. This guy happened to be one of the state inspectors, but like any red blooded human he decided to keep it under his hat.
Him and his friends did not win a great deal because nearly immediately the payout ratio (predicted) was found to be too high in favor of the human.
On the plus side, there appear to be some tails that the super stacker II game is ready to payout.
Now, does it suck they did not get the 11 million. Unfortunately, they found the illusion of winning in vegas was pretty much just that.
Re:Winners? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ok, but if the 'experimenter' snatches back the food pill, then he's just a dick.
"There's more to science than being cruel to animals, but frankly it's the part I like best." (from a Dilbert comic)
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Interesting)
A machine that guarantees a certain percentage of return within a certain time window (probably measured in games played) is not random. If it's not random there's a pattern to how it dispenses winnings. If there's a pattern to it, it should be possible to notice which machines are about to increase their payoff to even the ratio, so it just might be possible to increase your rate of return.
Of course this doesn't guarantee that you can get it over 1. And it especially doesn't guarantee that the casino won't declare you a cheater and ban you, or do something nastier - frankly, these parasites are worse than Al Capone, who at least was providing an actual service to his customers.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the onus should be on the casino to ONLY allow functional machines to operate and be played.
If the machine is on the floor, the casino is stating that the machine has been tested and is fit-for-purpose. Otherwise they're essentially saying, these machines might be broken; where the error would result in OUR loss we will void your winnings; where the error might be your loss, that's tough cheese.
That's basically a scam. The law should be changed, or they should basically admit that 'anything goes' and the casino can always weasel out of any situation. (Maybe in big neon letters above the door).
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:4, Interesting)
They also list the maximum payout.
Anything above that automatically must be a malfunction.
If under that maximum value, there is no other basis for claiming malfunction.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the slot machine, if the wheels all came up jackpot, they should get the money, regardless of any errors the machine may have had. If the wheels came up anything else but said jackpot anyway, then no they shouldn't win. It's as simple as that. If casinos want their games run by computers, they need to accept any errors they make. No different when an employee fucks up.
I've actually seen this happen (Score:2, Interesting)
When it hits the jackpot, the machine reboots over and over to void play. The player gets some trivial payout and usually is none the wiser. BTW: Most Vegas digital slots run Redhat. Were you expecting Windows CE?
Jackpot size decides (Score:2, Interesting)
A $5k jackpot is a win that a player will brag about long after they've lost $50K more. It keeps them coming back. An $11M jackpot is a prize where the winner moves to a new home and changes their name, giving up gambling forever - it provides little advertising benefit.
Re:Mistake my ass. (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing with probability is that the past should not alter the future. If you toss a coin, the chances of it being heads on any given toss are fixed. Even if you have tossed tails a dozen times on a perfectly fair coin, the odds of the next toss being heads are still 50/50.
Gambling on a machine has little to do with probability. Even so, there is a difference between a system that is skewed in the house's favor because the game is unbalanced versus a system that is skewed in the house's favor because it's rigged. An unbalanced system can still be "fair" in that you know that you have a non-zero chance of winning at any given time. In a rigged game, the chance of winning is either 1 or 0. It can never be anything in between. Even if both produce the same number of winners and losers in a day, with the winnings for each being identical, anyone with a sense of fairness is going to prefer the "honestly unbalanced" system over the rigged one.
Why? Because in an unbalanced system, the house is also gambling. It is a contest, no matter how warped. It is possible, as with the coin tossing, for the house to lose more than it expects on a given day. It is also possible for the house to win more. It'll even out in the end. In the rigged system, the winnings are pre-determined. The house is guaranteed to win around X amount from a given machine. It has zero risk.
In this particular case, a valid result according to the rules of the game was rejected because the game wasn't corrupt enough. It would be on-par to someone racing in Formula 1 being disqualified despite a perfect race because the bribed engineer failed to remove the fuel tank. IMHO, if a player plays by the rules and wins by the rules, they are entitled to victory under the rules. It is a bet, with agreed-upon odds, agreed-upon stakes and agreed-upon victory conditions. If a betting office was found doping racehorses or bribing footballers, do you seriously imagine they'd be able to claim they could withhold winnings when the person they tried to make lose won anyway?
Casinos in the US are not betting offices or really "gambling". You can't gamble in a deterministic world, you can merely win or lose when instructed to do so. I doubt this case will force any kind of change to the system, but I'd rather see ACTUAL gambling legalized in the US and game-rigging of any kind banned outright. Mind you, this would mean putting half of Nevada in jail. Not that I can see anything wrong with doing that.
Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts (Score:1, Interesting)
Far easier to set up a chain of cash businesses than launder thru an industry that is heavily scrutinized by the authorities.
Ever wonder why there seem to be 1000's of short lived store front businesses for finger nail care? One might think this business model wold have been debunked decades ago.
Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, I can see about a million problems with that idea. First of all there's the trillion or so cameras the casinos have watching every square centimeter of the floor. Then there's the fact that if illegally owned cash that needs to be laundered keeps turning up in the casinos deposits, law enforcement is going to want to have a look at those video records. Then they'll spot you, doing your thing and they'll get the casino for their collusion in your scheme.
That said, casinos probably are a decent place to launder money since the slot machines are all rigged. In most jurisdictions casinos required to have a minimum average win to loss ratio. Something around 80% near where I live. Usually that's across the whole casino, so to guarantee that ratio, the casinos rig the slot machines to act as a sort of pressure relief valve. So if people are losing their shirts one day at blackjack and roulette and other genuine games of chance, then the casino just increases the payout on the slots, maybe even above 100%. If people are doing really well in the other games and cleaning the casino out, then they drop the payout on the slot machines. So, after an 11 million dollar payout, it might be a bad idea to play the slots for a little while until the casino has recouped its losses. Other than that though, over time and with enough people playing at enough machines, the slots are a pretty good investment if your goal is simply to swap the money you have for other money. Hire a bunch of homeless people to go in and play the slots with your illegal cash and you get your money laundered at about a 25% loss (5% going to salaries). Not too bad. You might have to slice up one of your mules every now and again for skimming as encouragement to the others, of course.
Over all, the casinos are pretty crooked. They generally act within the law these days, it's just that the law itself is crooked. The government has decided that gambling is a vice and must be restricted and controlled for the protection of gamblers... and to funnel as much of their money as possible into the state coffers, or at the very least into the pockets of corrupt politicians and regulators.