Comment on How can casinos stay open when they lose so much money?

SoupBrick@yiffit.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  4294967295 is the limit for an unsigned 32bit integer.

  Her cash ticket said $42,949,672.76.

  This is clearly a machine error. I’ll explain:

  1. It is clearly an error - integer overflow.
  2. Wins over $1,200 are taxable in the US, meaning a $43 million win would be handled by an employee
  3. Image is a screen shot displaying “Printing cash ticket”, meaning she’s cashing out her remaining balance. Machines can only hold so much cash as credit on them, $2000-$3000. Diagnostic software would give the casino employees the actual balance of the machine (Article lists $2.25, and dinner for her trouble).

  She didn’t “win”, the machine glitched out. All machines have a “maximum payout”, and I’d bet (and win) $43 million far exceeds what the maximum payout is on any machine at this casino.

  Casinos are required by law to pay you your winnings, not for integer overflows. Gambling is stupid, don’t bother.

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  • lemmyman@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I can agree with all of that and still think it looks like the casino saying “uh, no we don’t want to pay you.” I think something is missing.

    Maybe the key point is that the value displayed on the screen is, say, “derived” and not the “ground truth.” If you get cherry-coin-grape and that’s worth $2 but the display says $42 million, it better be well-established that cherry-coin-grape is the deciding output and not the display.

    What if you get triple-treasure-chests and the casino says nah that’s a display bug, it was really cherry-coin-grape internally. Where’s the line here? Im sure it is legally established but of course shitty news articles aren’t going to go to that level of detail when they can quote the plaintiffs attorney instead

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    • urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      it better be well-established that cherry-coin-grape is the deciding output and not the display.

      Yes, this is how it works. This is the regulated language. All symbols have pays associated with them.

      I will give you another example: You hit red seven, red seven, red seven on a progressive machine. The progressive displays a value of $1,079 (and does not reset after the win) but the machine only pays $1,000. This is a problem with the settings of the machine, and the casino is required to pay the progressive amount of $1079 and possibly be fined for having a misconfigured machine. This is because the pay table lists this as awarding the progressive prize. Pay table is law.

      I also suspect that the machine did not display a win of $43 million at all. I suspect the glitch occurred either when the win was added to her credits or when the ticket was printed (an error in memory, not in game logic).

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      • SoupBrick@yiffit.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Huh, that’s pretty neat! Would not trust casinos myself, tho.

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  • AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah but the chance of a glitch is basically a jackpot already

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    • urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My job is to literally pay jackpots, I do it several times a night.

      We’ve never had a glitch like this where I work, and if we did we’d fucking meme on it forever lmao

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  • ExLisper@linux.community ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yep, it doesn’t look like a jackpot win. Jackpots are separate events that would have distinct screen. I don’t believe she took a selfie with generic screen and not the jackpot screen so probably there was no jackpot screen.

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  • mr_satan@monyet.cc ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The only issue I see is the integer one. I highly doubt that the machine uses integers for handling data. It’s a common practice to use decimals for anything money related. Other than that, there’s no way in hell a casino is paying that amount of money and there must be safe guards that limit how often and how much can be won on a slot machine.

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    • urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You could be right, but I think it’s a 32-unsigned for three reasons:

      1. Slot machines have no need to handle fractions of pennies.

      2. Slot machines operate with “credits” as it’s base unit. 1 credit is the smallest unit. This is most likely a penny slot, so 1 credit = 0.01, and the most it can probably store in memory is probably 4,294,967,295 credits, which is very nearly $43 million (suspiciously the same as the erroneous amount on the screen). Older dollar machines have $1 = 1 credit, and can’t handle pennies at all, and will reject tickets less than a dollar. If you give these older machines, say, $1.69, it will hold $1 as credit and print a ticket for $0.69 because it has no way of handling it.

      3. Diagnostic software handles “credits” as an integer. Coin in, coin out, current credits are all whole numbers. When using the software to inspect a machine, you have to know the denomination of the machine to know how much money is on it (denom times credits = amount).

      This machine looks old as hell from the image in the article. I’m not familiar with this style, though, we don’t have these where I work.

      And you’re right, this is certainly more than the “maximum payout” reported by the makers of the slot machine. The innards of a slot machine aren’t very mysterious from a technical standpoint, they can only produce a finite set of payouts, this isn’t one of them. There isn’t a sort of hard-and-fast stop for how much a machine can pay, more like it can only algorithmically produce a finite set of payouts.

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