Hey I’m Dave, welcome to my shop! I’m Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems engineer
from Microsoft going back to the MS-DOS and Windows 95 days, and I just hit the jackpot.
Both literally and figuratively! I managed to take a video of the secret service and configuration
menus of an active slot machine right on the casino floor after winning the top progressive
jackpot on that machine, and I secretly recorded the whole thing, including cool details like
the machine’s payout percentage, total drop, coin in, coin out, and so on. How’d I do it?
Well, this weekend I was at a casino with my wife and some friends. I was playing Max
Bet on a Mardis-Gras themed machine known as Spin Big Galaxy when I got the bonus wheel.
It’s a good thing too, as I was about to walk after losing what felt like 9 out of 10 games.
I spun the wheel, and for the first time in my life, it landed on the MAJOR award – the top
progressive jackpot for that bank of machines. How much? Well, good news bad news. The good
news is that it paid 675,166 credits. The bad news is that those credits were just pennies,
because I’m a cheap bastard and it was a penny slot. Still, that works out
to $6,751 and 66 cents, so I’m not complaining at all. But what happened next was even better,
at least for me, at least in some ways. As you may or may not be aware, you have
to pay income tax on any gambling winnings, including slot machine payouts. Now the
onus is on you to accurately keep track of your win-loss ledger and report it on your tax return.
But in the event you get a payout of $1200 or more, the IRS really wants to make sure that you
don’t forget. Any time something happens on a slot machine that pays $1200 or more the machine goes
into what’s known as Jackpot Lockup. This isn’t when you cash out, this is right when you hit
the win. You sit there any do your happy dance and wish you could find a waitress for a drink while
you eagerly wait for a slot machine attendant to do three things: First, they come over and
verify the win. Next, they verify your identity and your social and your income tax status to see
if they have to hold taxes back right then and there. Finally, they give you your jackpot, or
what remains of it after any withholdings, in good old cash along with an IRS form to file with your
annual return to claim the income. Then they count our your pile of cash right there at the machine.
What made this little adventure different, however, is what happened when they came
over to verify the win. Normally, a pair of slot people will come over. One validates the
win while the other checks your ID and so on. This time around was different for some reason,
and only one person came. Better yet when they went to verify the win they navigated through
the entire set of configuration and payout menus looking for whatever it is they were
trying to find. This was all information that the public never gets to see. Everything right
down to the win percentage was right there on the screen for a nerd like me to totally geek out on.
But how was I going to remember at all? I did what any reasonable man would do. I pulled out
my cell phone and recorded the whole thing right over her shoulder without her even noticing.
Now if you’ve spent any time in the big Vegas casinos before you're well aware that there is
massive security in the form of a camera, or at least a dome that could contain a camera,
about every six feet in every direction it seems. And security wanders around continually, even if
they’re discreet about it. The casinos are pretty sensitive about you using your camera in the
casino. I think it's primarily as an anti cheating and privacy measure, but suffice to say they don't
encourage you to take your camera out and just start filming in the casino, especially at a game.
Especially of their employees working on that game. And especially when they’re deep in the
secret accounting menus, as she was. Plus, I was right outside the sports book, which complicates
things further. I once almost got ejected just for naively taking a still photo of the big screen
showing all their sports odds, which I guess they treasure and are pretty secretive about.
But rather than rambling on and telling you all about it, I'll just show you the video
and pause it at the interesting parts to point out some of the cooler things that it revealed.
After the slot inspection, hang on until I tell you what happened during the cash payout.
It involves my wife pouring a drink on a screaming little old lady who I
was sure was about to roll me and take my winnings. But more about that later!
fortunately i immediately noticed that i couldn't really see the text and so i
switched to the 2x lens on the iphone and it helped a great deal now you can see it
really crisply actually it's pretty impressive how good it looks i think
up at the top we have a bunch of boring asset tag and accounting information
it doesn't really start to get interesting until right below that where we see the
ticket in limit and the ticket payout limit both set to three thousand dollars
apparently that means if you had a ticket the biggest one you can really get or carry around in
this casino is three thousand dollars after that you have to go to the cage the irs win limit is
set to 1199.99 meaning if you win 1200 or more you need to stop the machine and that's what goes into
the jackpot lockup and requires the attendant to come over credit meter limit not quite sure what
that is below that is perhaps one of the more interesting statistics which is the percentage
92.5 i assume that is the payback amount so that for every dollar that comes in 92.5 cents
is generally paid back out that's a terrible win percentage for a slot machine in this day and age
um normally on the strip you can get up to as high as 98 96 should be more normal 95
so 92.5 not a great ratio up in the versions tab we can find some information about the game itself
i actually googled around for a spin big galaxy v6 bmm.xc and a number of other file names just
like it but could not find anything so i was kind of disappointed i was hoping i was going
to find a copy if i knew the exact file name i would have to find one somewhere but no not in
the entire world it looks like this machine actually supports a multi-game menu as well
that's installed although there's only one game so it probably never shows the multi-game menu
okay let's have a look see at this screen at the very top of the screen we can see
hand pay irs limit exceeded that is the machine telling us that it has to make a payout to the
player that's me that exceeds the 1200 which is the limit we'll see that limit elsewhere but for
now that's what's going on there before that you can see about seven minutes before that i
inserted my ticket and i forgot how much that was worth um it was not the thousand and four you see
that was somebody cashing out about 27 minutes before i arrived at that machine so it was idle
for about 27 minutes and we can see all the other idle gaps and what other people inserted 100 bill
in i'm not really sure why it doesn't validate the amount of the ticket that you insert or it doesn't
log that in the event log i find that a little weird because i would expect it of anything so
if it's going to log dollars should also log tickets but maybe it does it elsewhere i i
don't know probably there is a voucher tab that we never see and i'm gonna guess that's where it is
she's not seeing what she needs here so she's gonna
fumble around until she finally changes us over to the counters page and we've got to look at that
now while the accounting denomination is one cent i'm guessing that might be distinguished
from other currencies because it the machine you can actually specify whether you want to play
one cent two cent three cents five cents per hand i was playing one cent unfortunately but
um you can change it in game and i don't think the change is here i think that is basically
what is the unit of currency here next we can see the amount of jackpots that have been paid by the
attendant which matches the amount of progressives that have been paid by the attendant which tells
me that all the progressives are actually over 1200 bucks because that probably means they all
have to be paid by the attendance i don't know what that pentendous paid cancelled credits
actually means in this case uh i have no idea i'd love to hear your take on that in the comments
now over in the game meters section we have coin in and we have coin out that tells us basically
how much the machine has received and how much is paid out and the difference which is i think
about 115 000 uh would be their profit total drop right below that is the amount that people have
actually put into the machine i believe and i think it's cash and vouchers probably combined
voters in and vouchers out tells us how much that the people have put in using the prepaid
tickets that you get out of the machine instead of the coins that you used to get at one time
and vouchers out is essentially the tokens or coinage that has gone out built in i'm
not clear on it it can't really be that this machine's only taking 1461 dollars in cash
so that doesn't make any sense to me more interesting is the gains one versus games lost
407 thousand games lost to 181 000 games one quite a difference
game recall ledger tab we can see my last seven games which i lost all but one of before finally
winning the wheel bonus of 67 51 66 to yield me back some number 7 863 dollars and 36 cents
next you can see because they debit you the number of credits that they hand pay you the full 6751.66
although i don't remember getting any pennies oh no you can see they roll over there to the
next credit which goes to 11 11 70. so that's the final amount because they back out the hand
pay amount and that's not carried through into the balance the delta between that 11
16 20 and the 11 1170 is the game price of 450 a poll which was the max bet at one cent
this screen appears to be some basic accounting of my game in my session you can see that the
game name is here progressive no that's because this is not really tied into a big set of multiple
machines that are all linked together this is actually just independent machines that look
like they are progressive that's hard to explain but they have a major prize that goes up and down
up on the top of the machine even though they're not networked and linked together
to share prize information so not technically a progressive machine but it acts like one
and that's why it had a jackpot huge number of games played on this machine 11 million 881
897 games now that's actual individual polls that's not people walking up to the machine
that's people tap in the button at least one time now the bingo card id and this
is pure speculation on my part but it looks like it's 128-bit grid as far as i can tell
so it's probably just randomly generated that way and they figure that that's unique across
time and space big enough um but what's going on here is i believe in some jurisdictions and it's
not true or i was but if you're on a native american reservation or something like that
in some places they require that they play bingo because you know they're allowed to have gambling
but not technology for some reason i don't really get it but the the reasoning behind it aside
they're only allowed to have bingo based games so they actually have to generate the slot machine
results from the bingo session so they generate this bingo session mathematically and then they
derive a slot machine session from that and in fact if you read the machines in those areas they
will say that the actual game is the bingo game and everything else just for entertainment it'll
show your little bingo card and i should have a card here yeah five by five card
and it's eight balls of bingo so it shows you where the balls land on the card and i have no
idea what you need to do to get a winning pattern on these cards because i don't play bingo and this
doesn't apply in my jurisdiction anyway so i have no idea but you can tell that's what's going on
next the video abruptly ends because she's done and i gotta put my camera away
I’ve taken great pains to not identify the specific casino even to the extent of a few
red herrings thrown in because I don’t want the employee responsible to get fired or reprimanded
or some nonsense. She was friendly and it was very busy and she had no idea that I was
filming over her shoulder. I’ve got no reason to throw her under the bus and wouldn’t want
her to get in trouble for something I did. That brings up an important point. This is
a somewhat technical video, of course, but it’s also well outside the scope of what I normally
do on my channel. I thought hey, peeking inside this machine was fascinating to me,
maybe it’ll be interesting to others. If you’re cool with that kind of diversion on my channel,
please take a moment to give the video a like. And if you’re NOT cool with it,
please leave a thumbs down. I’m not kidding, either, as I really need the feedback from my
viewers on whether its OK to go off on a non-programming tangent now and then.
The worst thing you can do is ignore it and do neither because then I’ve got NO idea
what’s going on! Or leave me a comment with your more detailed thoughts if you prefer.
And of course, if you’re not subscribed to the channel, please take a moment to do so,
lest this be the last time we ever see each other! There’s lots more cool tech
stuff where this came from, so join the party! You can click the little up arrow in the corner
which will pop up a subscribe button for your convenience. Stop by the discord server link in
the video description to chat live as well. Now, about that cash payout. After all the
shenanigans involving the jackpot confirmation it was finally time to receive my cash.
I extended my greedy little palms and they started counting the fat stacks of 100 dollar bills
right to me. That’s when my wife walked by and, squeezing between myself and the slot attendant
and another player, accidentally spilled a few drops of her club soda onto an old lady’s foot.
The lady completely lost it, and started flailing her arms, appealing to anyone who would listen for
help. This was literally halfway through the cash count, and she was SO animated and loud
and over the top that I was certain it was some scam to distract me, like she follows
around players about to receive cash hand pays, creates a big scene, and skims the cash somehow.
But it wasn’t. It was just an old lady who was angry about her foot being wet. We got
her a napkin and she shot us a few more dirty looks, and I consoled myself by sleeping on a
big pile of cash that night! I never win like that, so it was nice change of pace.
Thanks for joining me out here in the shop today. In the meantime, and in between time,
I hope to see you next time, right here in Dave’s Garage.