Sit And Spin: Video Gambling Machines
How slot machines give gamblers the business.
Writer Marc Cooper exposes video gambling machines for what they are: theft by consent and gateways to addiction.
He shares his own insight, as he experiences video slots and poker machines in Biloxi, Mississippi (pre-Hurricane Katrina).
Marc Cooper's article, “Sit And Spin,” in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2005, pp. 121-130, is well worth a trip to your local library.
In one of the introductory paragraphs, Cooper summarizes America's addiction to video gambling machines:
America now has twice as many publicly available gambling devices that take money — slot and video-poker machines and electronic lottery outlets — as it does ATMs that dispense it. In the past fifteen years the number of such devices has grown fivefold, to more than 740,000, and is still mounting. This year a record 73 million Americans will visit one of the 1,200 gambling joints now stretching from coast to coast—a nearly 40 percent increase in visitors from just five years ago. Players make an average of six pilgrimages a year to these beckoning temples of luck, and more than a quarter of American adults now list gambling as their No. 1 entertainment choice. As much as 70 percent of the $48 billion in gaming revenues raked in by the casinos comes from slots. (Texas Hold'em poker and other table games may be the latest gambling fad both on TV and in Ben Affleck's social circle, but for the casinos it's all about machines, machines, machines.) Americans now spend on slots five times the amount they spend on movie tickets. ...
Read article introduction online
A few notable points made in Cooper's article:
The Lure Of Video Gambling Machines
• A profitable slot machine costs about $10,000 and can pay for itself in 30 days.
• These machines keep you more entertained and more engaged [than traditional slots], and create the illusion that you are winning while making it more likely you will lose.
• These new machines encourage you to play multiple low-denomination coins per spin. The machine developers discovered that the more lower-denomination coins people can bet, the larger the overall bets will be.
True Odds: Machines Win, You Lose
• The Donald Trump slot machine can cost $2 a spin, and if you're fast enough, you can spin 500 to 600 times in an hour.
• There's no guesswork or "luck" with today's microprocessor slots - by law, random number generators are preset to keep a certain percentage of money gambled.
• Marten Jensen (author of Beat The Slots) calculates that playing a 25-cent slot with a 90-percent payback will cost gamblers $12 an hour.
• Jensen calculates that a $5 slot will take $240 each hour from gamblers.
• There is no way to gain an edge on today's slot machines - the only real choice a player has is how to lose his or her money.
• Two choices in slots: a) Low-hit frequency where the player wins fewer times, but the payout is larger b) High hit frequency machine where the machine constantly trickles back part of what you put in, but rarely has big payouts.
• The writer played $20 on a nickel slot in just 4.5 minutes.
• One penny-slots machine allowed 500 "credits" per spin (or 500 pennies - a crudely disguised and ultimately bankroll-busting $5 machine)
• New-generation gambling machines have produced new addicts: not high rollers, but zoned-out "escape" players, who are fearful of someone sitting next to them and serving as a distraction.
• With random number generators, the very best a computer-perfect gambler can gain on a video poker machine is a less than one-percent advantage.
• Suppose a video poker machine has 100.75 percent average payback. Over the long term at $5 per play, if you're willing to risk $24,000 a day, you might make a little more than $150 a day - you might.
• The writer played a Multi-Strike video poker machine (where you play four hands at once - very complex) and lost $400 in just 20 minutes of play. He left with a pounding headache and pain in his stomach.
Toxic Fallout: Addiction
• Who, 50 years ago, would have figured that television was a gateway drug that would lead to gambling addiction?
• Video poker is the undisputed crack cocaine; fast pace and frequent payoffs accelerate addiction.
• Experts say getting hooked on video poker takes only a few months.
• Industry critics say the lion's share of slot machine profits come from a relatively small percentage of compulsive and addicted gamblers.
Read Quick Facts About Video Gambling Machines
Read Quick Facts About Gambling Availability And Addiction
Return to the Gambling Homepage
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