| The
earliest "nickel in the slots" were built
in America during the 1880s and were common by the
turn of the century. They featured many designs,
but the most popular was a machine created by Charles
August Fey in San Francisco. It was called Liberty
Bell, and it had three reels. Each reel had ten
sections, or stops, with a symbol at each stop.
The symbols included horseshoes, card suits, and
bells. A player put a coin into the slot, pulled
the handle, and the reels spun. If the reels stopped
with identical symbols in a line, the player would
win. The operation was strictly mechanical and (assuming
the machine wasn't rigged) the probability of hitting
any single three-symbol combination was 10 x 10
x 10 = 1,000, or 1 in 1,000.
The machine payout was a paltry twenty-two coins.
Many gamblers didn't understand the odds and were
surprised when they lost money. That's how slots
developed the nickname one-armed bandits.
Yet it was all exactly as it appeared. The handle
was directly connected to the mechanism, so pulling
it in different ways could affect the spin of the
reels. By the 1960s the handle had been separated
from direct contact with the rest of the mechanism
and the average reel size had been expanded to twenty
or more symbols, but the mechanics of winning were
basically the same. The reels spun and they stopped
where they stopped. You could figure your chances
of winning simply by knowing how many symbols appeared
on each reel. The reels decided everything.
That was the old way. You can take all the truths
connected to that and put them on the shel±,
Absolutely none of it applies to modern slot machines. |
