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.
