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from the I-just-won-the-Jack-Not...-oh-wait dept.
A Queens gambler thought she hit it big until managers at the Resorts World Casino said her $43 million slot machine win was a technical glitch — and tried to pay her off with a steak dinner. Katrina Bookman was already thinking about what she would do with all that money back in August as she took a selfie beside the slot machine that said: Printing Cash Ticket. $42,949,672.76.
[...] "Upon being notified of the situation, casino personnel were able to determine that the figure displayed on the penny slot was the result of an obvious malfunction - a fact later confirmed by the New York State Gaming Commission," a Resorts statement said. "Machine malfunctions are rare, and we would like to extend our apologies to Ms. Bookman for any inconvenience this may have caused."
Money from the casino, like state lottery proceeds, help grow the state's educaton[sic] fund. Officials said payout maximums are put in place to protect that money.
Although the machine's screen displayed the multimillion-dollar jackpot, the printed ticket showed $2.25.
Is it a coincidence that 2^32=4294967296? Full story at NY Daily News.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @04:38PM
The machines are regularly randomly sampled and spot tested by independent regulators. The casino has independent auditors monitoring it as well. If a unit was malfunctioning either pro or against the player it would be detected and corrected... perhaps not immediately. But if you genuinely thought a machine was malfunctioning you could report it and it could be looked into. Your right an individual gambler is not likely to detect a non-obvious fault... which is WHY there is so much regulation and testing going on behind the scenes.
This sounds good in theory... but they clearly failed to detect the error in this one machine which had a false jackpot during routine auditing. Therefore it is reasonable to assume they failed to detect another error in a machine which will never jackpot.
When a jackpot is hit, an audit is triggered. When a non-jackpot is hit, no audit is triggered. This is the asymmetry which strikes me as unfair.
As a more obvious example, let's say the police stop all black drivers (jackpots) at an intersection for drug checks, but no white people are likewise checked (non-jackpots). They will certainly catch some black drug users (malfunctions benefiting the player), but will catch no white drug users (malfunctions benefiting the casino).
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:08PM
When a jackpot is hit, an audit is triggered. When a non-jackpot is hit, no audit is triggered. This is the asymmetry which strikes me as unfair.
First, this wasn't a 'jackpot', this was a display bug. She won $2.25. That was what was printed. That was what was logged. It printed "-1" which in 2's complement of a 32bit integer is: 4,294,967,296.
Second, the payout rates of machines ARE audited to be exactly what they were programmed to be. So a unit that never paid out absolutely would trigger all kinds of audits both internally and regulatory.