GAMBLING: How to Hit the Jackpot

The casino operators in the Carson City-Reno-Lake Tahoe area were gnawing the manicured arcs right off their well-kept fingernails. For neither the first nor the last time in the history of Nevada, the only state in the U.S. where gambling is legal in nearly all its forms (prohibited: dog racing, jai alai), an organized band had figured out a way to fulfill the fondest dream of hundreds of thousands of lemon-loathing laymen: hitting the jackpot on the slot machine, otherwise known as the one-armed bandit.

Bandit-beating is not the simple business it once was. In the early days of the slots, the process was called “spooning,” and it had nothing whatever to do with June or moon. A spooner would simply slip the handle of a tablespoon into the coin-return opening, wedge open the little trap door, insert his coin in the slot, and pull the lever. Down through the trap door would fall the take. One imaginative cheater was caught using a fine homemade machine tool with detachable heads, one each for nickel, dime, quarter, half-dollar and dollar slots.

The Skill. But spooning has become a crude technique, with a relatively picayune payoff. The real returns (from $15 to $1,000) come in hitting the jackpot. When that happens in most Nevada gambling houses, only a few coins tumble down. A bell rings, the box lights up, and a sharp-eyed change girl arrives at the machine, sometimes with an assortment of mechanic types who check to see that there has been no ham-handed tampering. If the win looks legitimate, the change girl pays the big money.

Cheating the modern slots is therefore no job for the amateur. It requires professional skills: the crust of the con man, the deftness of the dip, the skill of the safecracker. The professional cheater will buy a machine ($400 and up), take it home to his workshop for devoted scientific study. Disassembling it, he will examine each reel, spring and screw. How best to make his entry? What tool will do the job? What part of the mechanism should be jimmied with what tool? Then comes careful experimentation until at last he discovers the machine’s weak spot: the locked door, or a tiny opening for a wire, or a vulnerable glass plate. After patient hours of practice, the thief collects his tools and goes to work, preferably in a big club where from 40 to 400 slot-machine players are trying their luck at the same time.

The Drill. Some thieves use a tiny, battery-powered electric drill concealed in their sleeves, make a little hole in the machine (see cut), insert a wire into the works, and by careful manipulation “walk” the reels until they stop at the jackpot position. But since freshly drilled holes are too easily detected, other jackpotters have fashioned keys with which they can unlock machines and stop the reels by hand. A first-class crook can walk the reels, hit the jackpot in 30 seconds flat and, before the change girl appears, slip his small tools to an accomplice, who ambles away. Then he collects his money, goes off to make another strike.

For every innovation by the bandit-beaters, the operators develop a safeguard. And for every safeguard, there is a new way to hit the jackpot. “Hell,” says one disgusted slot-machine mechanic, “you could surround the thing with sheet metal, and they will find a way to beat it.” Yet for all the troubles with the professional jackpotters, there are always enough honest, ordinary suckers around to make the one-armed bandit history’s healthiest highwayman.