8. One-Armed Bandits

The "One-armed Bandit," as the modern slot machine is now known, is without a doubt the most brazen, flagrant de­vice ever produced to swindle the general public. From its very concept, this contrivance was geared to one purpose, that of acquiring the customer's money and at the same time providing ironclad protection for the owner.

It is true that such games as Roulette have been developed with the prime purpose of separating the player from his cash, but the painful process usually takes place in elegant establish­ments which add social status to the undertaking and give the victim the feeling that he has lived, even though he has lost.

But the slots are often a back room deal, with no glamor at­tached and so little consideration shown for the customer that no one ever even thought of providing a left-handed machine for the benefit of southpaw players, though this has been done with golf clubs, baseball gloves and other items of sporting equipment far less profitable than slot machines.

In short, the relationship between producer and consumer is as remote as with any other slot device—say, as a penny weight machine or a subway turnstile. It's there to let you do the work while you pay the money. As a mechanical brain­storm, the One-armed Bandit rates tops.

This Frankenstein's Monster was conceived in the days of Penny Arcades, some say by a misplaced genius in San Fran­cisco, who flooded that town with slots about ten years before the Great Fire. People were taking to other types of slot ma­chines, so why not gambling devices? A good question and quickly answered in two words: They did.

It was a foregone fact, however, that if machines loaded with coins were left unattended, disgruntled patrons would try every possible way to beat or crack them. So they were made heavy, so that they would be hard to carry off, and strong, so they would be hard to break. Most important, they were geared heavily against the player so that by the time anyone got around to stealing them or wrecking them they would have paid off their initial cost and a big profit beside.

This was, indeed, foresight, as most communities declared slot machines illegal and what the players were afraid to do, the law moved in and did. Thousands of such machines have been confiscated, broken apart with sledge hammers and dumped overboard from barges that have carried them out to sea. But still the craze persists. 

Legalized Machines

In certain private clubs, slot machines are still operated and in places like Las Vegas, they enjoy legality. In other communi­ties and various states they have enjoyed either a temporary or quasi-respectability. Slots have cropped up on excursion ships beyond the local or territorial limits and they have been fea­tured on airplanes flying from Miami to the West Indies.

So, as part of the American scene, they are apt to be viewed by anyone, even those who are too wary to play them. As for the ways in which they have been beaten, or methods whereby players might win against them, those—though few and far between—will be detailed in this chapter.

First: As to the payoff made by the slots. The Big Six

The nearest that any such device ever came to being honest, was in the early days when the "Big Six" dominated the field. The Big Six was not the first slot machine to make its debut, nor are you likely to see one today. It wasn't actually a One-armed Bandit. It was armless, though by no means harmless.

This machine had six slots at the top and players simply dropped quarters into the numbered holes, then pulled a lever that made a wheel spin, but only to designate which slot was the winner. Should it be Number Four, for example, five quart­ers came out of a payoff pocket, bearing that number, at the bottom of the machine.

That is, six players each put in a quarter and five came back to one player. For acting as the "house" in a five-man round robin, the Big Six took a "cut" equal to 20 per cent of the win­ner's total. But you didn't have to scare up six players to tackle the Big Six. If a player dropped a single coin, he could still spin the wheel, taking a 1 in 6 chance that he had picked the slot that would deliver $1.25 for his investment of 25c.

But players wanted bigger payoffs. A nickel machine that promised as high as $1 in return for a 5c investment, was a better inducement than the Big Six. That held even stronger with a dime machine that doubled the return, while with a quarter machine, 25c could bring $5 on a single hit. When the "jackpot" feature was added, such machines—which, oddly, were direct descendants of the old San Francisco type—took over, full scale.

The suckers, however, were not wholly to blame. The opera­tors, too, were attracted by slots which, according to confi­dential ads, could be set for 10 per cent "rake off" and all the way up to 75 per cent.

The Modern Machine

The One-armed Bandit today has three wheels bearing the symbols long familiar to the deluded American public: Cher­ries, Oranges, Plums, Bells, Bars—and last but not least-Lemons. *

Contrary to a somewhat common error, Lemons do not ap­pear on all three wheels. It is impossible to hit three Lemons. The same applies to Cherries. Both these fruits are found on two wheels only; Cherries on the first and second; Lemons on the first and third. It is also possible to win even when a Lemon shows, a piece of information which may surprise some readers.

To clarify all this, let's check the symbols which do appear on the wheels. Usually, they are:

1st WHEEL 2nd WHEEL               3rd WHEEL

Cherry             Cherry                          BAR
Orange            Orange                       Orange
Plum                 Plum                           Plum
Bell                    Bell                             Bell
BAR                 BAR                         Lemon
Lemon

These are merely samples of the various symbols. They are repeated in various quantities on the particular wheels where they appear and Lemons are plentiful upon the First Wheel, where they are sure losers. But this is nullified on the more mod­ern slot machines, as they have large wheels which allow for"dummy" symbols between the "live" ones—and, of course, the dummies are mostly the big winning type—like Plums, Bells and Bars.

"Certain variants in fruits existed on older machines, apples and other symbols sometimes appearing as substitutes. The bars often carried the name of a product that the machine was supposed to vend, to make the contrivance "legal."

Here's what happens when the player drops his nickel and shakes hands with the One-armed Bandit:

A pull of the lever, the wheels spin and finally come to a jolty stop in one, two, three fashion, showing any of a great variety of combinations—three symbols in a row. The payoff combinations are as follows:

Two Cherries with Bar, Orange or Plum .. 3 coins
Two Cherries with Bell or Lemon. 5 coins
Three Oranges ...............................  10 coins
Three Plums.................................... 14 coins
Three Bells...................................... 18 coins
Three Bars............ Jackpot plus 20 coins

These payoffs vary, some machines giving 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20 instead of the figures named. Such machines presumably yield more "hits" to compensate for the smaller "payoffs." But nothing should be presumed where these machines are con­cerned and the only persons actually compensated in the long run are the operators.

The coins land in a return slot at the bottom of the machine and this pocket is also large enough to receive the Jackpot when the Bars are hit.

The Jackpot

The Jackpot is visible through non-breakable glass at the front of the machine and, when filled, it contains about 80 coins, though this, too, can vary with different makes. For round figures, you may hit as high as $5 on a nickel machine, $10 on a dime machine, $25 on a quarter machine, $50 on a half dollar machine and $100 on a silver dollar machine. These totals, of course, include the 20 coins that the Bars deliver as their own hit.

Jackpots were added to the original Bar payoff and they are "fed" by coins put in by the players. This was a bad feature, originally, because players ignored the machine after a Jackpot was hit, as they could see that it had been emptied. This produced the quandary: Who would fill the Jackpot if the players wouldn't?

The answer was solved by dividing the Jackpot into two compartments, the Jackpot and the Reserve Jackpot. After a Jackpot is hit, the next coin played automatically causes the Reserve to dump into the Jackpot.

A player who once hit a nickel Jackpot and the Reserve, several plays later, states that he took $4.80 on the first Jackpot and $2.80 on the second, namely, the fund from the Reserve. That was an old-style machine, however, or it probably wouldn't have delivered two Jackpots so close together. They had to send for the operator not only to fill it, but fix it, after the occur­rence of so rare a phenomenon as two Jackpots in five minutes.

A beginner who has never hit a Jackpot often thinks it in­cludes the Reserve, as a bar of metal on the front of the ma­chine hides the division between the two compartments. But when he sees he gets only the lower half when three Bars hit, he is soon initiated into that phase of the thing.

Naturally, the dropping of the Reserve gives the next Jack­pot a good start and while some players are leery, thinking the}' haven't much chance of another Jackpot hitting soon, others are glad to see a machine that has hit at all and therefore are; happy to play it.

Other Inducements

In the old days, when nickel slot machines were chiefly the pride of private clubs, the operator—usually a well-liked club member—used to run a lot of nickels through to help fill the Jackpot. Of course, only a portion of these went into the pot, the rest into the machine itself, where they would deliver on lesser hits.

To stimulate play, the operator would drop in three or four $5 gold pieces—which then were current—stating that any of them might show up on the smallest hit, or in the Jackpot itself. This created such a sensation that manufacturers of some machines introduced three new symbols in the form of medals, which they termed the Gold Award.

When a player made a hit, a big medallion plunked out by itself and the winner turned it in for $5. This was the equivalent of an added Jackpot and helped keep the machine going after a Jackpot had been hit and the Reserve was piling up.

One-armed Bandit's castiron front is set against the player so badly that any of his normal chances pale into insignificance. We say "normal" because there are certain factors that help the player in a small way. First, let's see what happens when the wheels spin, or rather, when they stop.

Then, a projecting stop pin engages a hole, so that the wheel halts with a given symbol showing. These are apportioned so that the machine will pay off on a percentage basis which, according to one estimate, may run as high as 85 per cent, a point with which we have no quarrel, as 15 per cent sure take is pretty nice for a gambling house and, therefore, should satis­fy the normal slot machine operator.

Plugged Machines

But, again, we are talking in terms of "normal" and that is foreign to the gambling situation generally, for there, nothing is ever truly normal. Suppose that when the honest manufac­turer has delivered the machine, the trusting purchaser is horri­fied to find that local problems such as rent, taxes, fees, over­head, underhand—or what-have-you—already are eating up 25 per cent of the expected take. What does he do? Ship the ma­chine back?

Certainly not, considering that shipments of slot machines are illegal and getting one to the buyer is something of a prob­lem in the first place. He simply plugs some of the holes in the interior mechanism, using special plugs provided for that pur­pose. The wheels won't stop on so many winners after that. The machine has been "set" to reduce the player's percentage.

Weighting a wheel so that it flops off a big pay symbol is another gimmick, but it's not so good. Players get suspicious when they see a "winner" transformed into a loser, slow-motion style. They like the smooth-running machines that stop with a short plunk. They also like to see nice things like Plums and Bells that they almost hit but just missed.

Those, of course, are the dummy symbols. All the more rea­son for plugging a machine properly. A player should always be left hopeful; never disappointed. Properly plugged, a machine can reduce the player's chance to a mere 40 per cent and this becomes necessary at times.

A private club once put in a slot machine and the house committee was pleased that it only took 15 per cent from the players. Nice, not seeing your friends lose too much, even if the profits did go to the club's benefit fund.

One committee member read the instruction book that came from Chicago with the machine. He suggested plugging the machine so it would take 30 per cent, which really wasn't too much, but would help the fund all the more. So the others finally agreed to the boost in the club's favor.

After a month, they found out the "take" was exactly the same. A certain number of club members played the machine and kept at it until they had lost all they could afford. Then they quit, mostly through sheer necessity. When the machine was taking 15 per cent they had twice as long a play as when it took 30 per cent. That was the only difference.

From then on, the committee went back to the 15 per cent take, except on week-ends and holidays, when they set the machine for 30 per cent so that the regular players would lose more quickly and let some of the newcomers have a chance.

Play Until You Lose

What the committee learned was this:

The habitual slot machine player has only one system. That is, to pour his coins into the machine until they are all gone. Start him with a nickel to a hundred dollar bill and give him time, he'll feed it all into the craw of the iron monster.

The lure of the Jackpot simply adds to the futile, incessant craving in which the player goes wild every time he hits for ten or more but never counts the cash that he feeds into the machine.

With some players, hitting the Jackpot is a sufficient tri­umph to call a halt to the evening's festivities, so far as that one player is concerned. But his success encourages many others to tackle the machines, particularly when he goes around brag­ging about how much he won, forgetting to mention any previ­ous losses.

Dice, ancient and modern, Rolling Logs, Put and Take Tops, from the Radner Collection.         

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