Pokies and Slot Machine Information

13,500 slot machines destroyed

February 14, 2006 on 2:48 am | In Slot machine articles online |

When hurricane Katrina swept through the Southern USA in 2005, it destroyed huge swathes of the countryside. Included in the destruction were numerous floating casinos and their ubiquitous slot machines.

“Some of the one-armed bandits were washed into the sea. Looters ran off with others. And the vast majority … were destroyed”

Sfgate Article

Its a bit unlikely looters actually ran off with some of the machines. With the weight of many units over 70kg (150lb), it’s more likely they hobbled off quite slowly and still have bad backs now.

Slot machines are highly sophisticated, very expensive electronic money gobblers. The replacement cost for so many machines is multi millions of dollars. Instead, some manufacturers are trying to repair or rebuild the gaming units. Its a difficult task when so many of them were immersed in salt water.

There is an additional concern. One of the reasons modern slot machines are considered technically impregnable is that so few people have access to their internals and software.

“With people always devising ways to cheat the machines, IGT may have to rewrite the slots’ software. The fear: People could have broken into some of the machines and stolen the software with hopes of coming back to a casino and rigging a jackpot”

Rewriting software isn’t all that difficult, but deploying it on the tens of thousands of machines IGT have installed around the world certainly might be.

There was a case a few years back where a pokie player had inside knowledge of how to trigger a large jackpot on a certain type of machine (not an IGT game). Unfortunately for the player, he made the mistake of ‘winning’ twice. It made it very easy for him to be identified and arrested.