The resulting products represent a compromise-these machines keep you more entertained and more engaged, and create the illusion that you are winning while making it more likely you will lose. The machine operators want maximum revpac, revenue per available customer. They want to play as long as possible with their stake, and maybe even win. Customers, the suckers who put the money into the machines, want maximum TOD, time on device. Two contradictory, clashing principles-embodied in the terms TOD and revpac-drive the design of the modern slot machine. They either perform immediately or get yanked, junked, and replaced (a profitable machine that costs about $10,000 can pay for itself in just thirty days). More than 500 games a year are introduced on the casino floor, but each is granted only a few weeks' probation. The slot-machine market is so hot, it's in a state of perpetual shake-out.

(Texas Hold'em poker and other table games may be the latest gambling fad both on TV and in Ben Affleck's social circle, but for the casinos it's all about machines, machines, machines.) Americans now spend on slots five times the amount they spend on movie tickets. As much as 70 percent of the $48 billion in gaming revenues raked in by the casinos comes from slots. Players make an average of six pilgrimages a year to these beckoning temples of luck, and more than a quarter of American adults now list gambling as their No. This year a record 73 million Americans will visit one of the 1,200 gambling joints now stretching from coast to coast-a nearly 40 percent increase in visitors from just five years ago. In the past fifteen years the number of such devices has grown fivefold, to more than 740,000, and is still mounting. Some statistics, random but telling:Īmerica now has twice as many publicly available gambling devices that take money-slot and video-poker machines and electronic lottery outlets-as it does ATMs that dispense it.

But the recent proliferation of highly sophisticated, computerized, brightly lit, singing-and-talking slots has done away with any lingering social stigma attached to the betting life. And for decades thereafter, even as casinos low-rolled their way into the mainstream, gambling itself retained an air of disrepute (charming though it could be) that tended to keep decent folks away. When legalized casino gambling dawned in America, in the era of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, primitive slot machines-those one-armed bandits-served as little more than mechanical babysitters for the wives and girlfriends of high-roller card and dice players.

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