04/03/2001 Gaming Control Board urges lawmakers to reject slots payoff bill
Last week a bill that would force casinos to pay off even if a malfunction caused slot reels to line up and show a jackpot was proposed. Casino regulators urged lawmakers to reject the bill ?You have a whole army of people out there trying to make the machines malfunction,? explained Gaming Control Board member Scott Scherer. ?It's much more difficult to have a winning combination come up than it is to make it malfunction.?
The senator behind the bill, Joe Neal, said casinos are responsible for their machines and it's not the players? job to make sure the slots are working. If the reels line up, the player should win, he continued.
Last year, casinos earned over 60 percent of their gross revenue - approximately US$6 billion from slot machines.
Neal said that although he understood the casino regulators and other opponents concern about people who will take advantage of the system, he wanted to keep Nevada?s image clean for the sake of tourism. ?They're concerned about the cheaters,'' Neal said. ? But I'm very much concerned about the house.?
Marc McDermott, chief of the electronics division for the Gaming Control Board, said that slot machines in the state constantly checked by regulators to make sure the casinos do not reprogram the computers. However, as the reels are designed to stop when someone tries to open the door, cheaters could try getting the reels stop on a jackpot with little effort.
The Gaming Contol Board estimates gamblers played over 100 billion slot machine games in 2000. There were 310 complaints of faulty machines and of those, forty cases required administrative hearings by regulators.
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