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Slot Strategies |
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Popular Slots |
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General Slots Info |
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Top Online Casinos |
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HISTORY OF SLOTS |
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Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York
developed a gambling machine in
1891 that could be considered a
precursor to the modern slot machine.
It contained 5 drums holding a total of
50 card faces and was based on
poker. This machine proved extremely
popular and soon many bars in the city
had one or more of the machines
bar-side. Players would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and the cards they held, the player hoping for a good poker hand. There was no direct payout mechanism, so a pair of
Kings might get the player a free beer, whereas a Royal Flush could pay out cigars
or drinks, the prizes wholly dependent on what was on offer at the local
establishment. To make the odds better for the house, two cards were typically
removed from the "deck": the Ten of Spades and the Jack of Hearts, which cut the
odds of winning a Royal Flush by half. The drums could also be re-arranged to
further reduce a player's chance of winning. |
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Charles Fey - First Automatic Payout Slots
The first "one-armed bandit" was invented in 1887 by Charles
Fey of San Francisco, California, who devised a much simpler
automatic mechanism. Due to the vast number of possible wins
with the original poker card-based game, it proved practically
impossible to come up with a way to make a machine capable
of making an automatic pay-out for all possible winning
combinations. Charles Fey devised a machine with three
spinning reels containing a total of five symbols – horseshoes,
diamonds, spades, hearts and a Liberty Bell, which also gave
the machine its name. By replacing ten cards with five symbols
and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was
considerably reduced, allowing Fey to devise an effective automatic payout
mechanism. Three bells in a row produced the biggest payoff, ten nickels. Liberty
Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device
industry. Even when the use of these gambling devices was banned in his home
state after a few years, Fey still couldn't keep up with demand for the game
elsewhere.
Another early machine gave out winnings in the form of fruit flavoured chewing
gums with pictures of the flavours as symbols on the reels. The popular cherry and
melon symbols derive from this machine. The "BAR" symbol now common in slot
machines was derived from an early logo of the Bell-Fruit Gum Company.
Bally becomes a giant in the Slots business
During the 1960s and 1970s, Bally brought several innovations to slots that made
him the biggest player in the Slots business and revolutionized the way slots are
played to this day. In 1963, he introduced slots which were 3 coin operators,
consoles had been converted to casino slots, improved the hopper payout and had
front opening case. In 1983, he was responsible for the first 3 line payout slot
machine. In 1970, Bally introduced the a 3 line progressive, where each coin played
added to the value of the jackpot. Bally Model Slots from the 60s and 70s are still
highly sought after by slot collectors because of their historical importance.
Random Number Generators
Modern slot machines are computerized, so that the odds are whatever they are
programmed to be. In modern slot machines, the reels and lever are present for
historical and entertainment reasons only. The positions the reels will come to rest
on are chosen by a Random Number Generator (RNG) contained in the machine's
software.
The RNG is constantly generating random numbers, at a rate of hundreds or maybe
thousands per second. As soon as the lever is pulled or the "Play" button is
pressed, the most recent random number is used to determine the result. This
means that the result varies depending on exactly when the game is played. A
fraction of a second earlier or later, and the result would be different.
Some professional gamblers observe that the RNG does not actually generate
random numbers. Indeed, most RNGs (so-called pseudorandom number
generators or PRNGs) will eventually repeat their number sequence. This behavior
is due to poor programming, as it is relatively easy to build PRNGs with periods so
long no computer could complete a single period in the expected lifetime of the
universe. Having access to the PRNG code and seed values Ronald Dale Harris, a
former slot machine programmer, discovered equations for specific gambling games
like Keno that allowed them to predict what the next set of selected numbers would
be based on the previous games played.
Never the less, random number generators allowed the shift from mechanical slots
to electronic slots. Once electronic slots had been established and accepted, it was
relatively easy to link them together for progressive linked jackpots and also to put
the slots program code onto servers so slots could be played over the internet. |
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