coin slots

[dewey089]

Grochowski, who writes for the American Casino Guide, has some reflections on the old coin machines here

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I'd like to add that Eastside Cannery has an entire section of "coin droppers" but we can't earn points playing them.

My favorite are slots next to the elevator at the El Cortez that use half dollars and drop them. These are the oldest machines of their kind in Vegas. I can't quite remember the details, but the way they work is not fully electronic and so they are rare. You can earn points on these and they are rumored to be loose, although I suppose that is a rumor on most slots we like.

[dewey089]

Re: coin slots

I found the details on these machines in my notes as explained to me by a friend who seemed to know what he was talking about. Here is how he answered my question on how these worked.

As for the machines at El Cortez, they are a dying breed. To recap a bit of our conversation at Bighorn, there has been an evolution of slot machines over the years. The early machines were purely mechanical devices (until recently there were playable examples at Pioneer in Laughlin). Today these are not to be found in commercial operation, but can be seen in display cases in the lobby of Main Street Station, and outside of cases at New Life Games in Laughlin. These machines had no 'spin' button... The energy to run the mechanism (from reel spin to payout) was provided by the player's pull of the handle to charge an internal spring.

The next generation of slot machine was the electro-mechanical slot. These had lights inside, and a motor that provided the energy to work the machine. The handle was still there, but technically unnecessary to provide the motive power to run the machine. These machines, compared to modern slots, were very low-variance devices, since the win/loss function of the game was dictated by pins falling into slots (thereby the name slot machine) which would correspond to symbols as the reels stopped.

In the modern era, nearly every machine is nothing more than a computer which notes your buy-in for the spin, spits out a bunch of random numbers, and compares the resulting number to a bunch of virtual-reel-strips to determine the outcome. This allowed for much higher variance (and much bigger jackpots) to bring the players in, but the upshot is that a slot machine could eat your bankroll faster than anything else in the casino unless you had a statistically-unlikely big hit or abnormally high ratio of medium hits. This technology has enabled things like Wide-Area-Progressives (i.e. MegaBucks) offering top prizes that would be casino-killers in the days of mechanical and electro-mechanical slots.

All that said, the mechanical machines, as far as I know, are now completely out of commercial operation since the Pioneer took theirs out of service (Doc Holiday, the slot manager there, is an old-school-machine wizard, and it must have been truly nearly impossible to continue to maintain them for him to drop them from active inventory).

That said, there still exists the opportunity to play a non-computerized slot in Las Vegas, where your luck depends on a pin dropping into a slot rather than some bizarre coincidence of numbers in a computer chip. There are two electro-mechanical slots in operation (2-coin, $1 denom) at El Cortez downtown. You can recognize them by their old-school appearance (faceplates may remind one of 1970s era transistor radios), and the total absence of bill acceptors (just use a nearby coin-dropping IGT dollar slot as a bill changer - throw in a bill and cash it out for $1 coins to feed 'em with). They are on the wall next to the parking garage elevators at El Cortez, and are the last of the non-computerized electromechanical slots I know of in operation today. One of these days, I'd like to meet the back-of-house guy(s) (and/or ladie(s)) who keep 'em going. From what I have read, keeping a pair of those machines alive may involve literally manufacturing long-discontinued replacement parts, similar in may ways to what it takes to keep a Hudson on the road today.