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Mechanical poker machines were popular in taverns as far back as the 1880s: the player put in a nickel and pulled a lever, which caused five rotating reels with playing cards painted on them to spin and deal a poker hand. These machines didn’t give direct cash payouts—there are too many different winning combinations in poker for the machine to be able to pay them all. Instead, when you got a winning hand you showed it to the bartender. He poured you a free drink, made you a sandwich, or gave you whatever other prize was listed next to the machine.
    Then in 1887, a man named Charles Fey built a much simpler machine called the Liberty Bell. It had only three reels and only five possible symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts, and bells. The simpler design made automated payouts possible: when a player got three bells, they won the highest jackpot of all—ten whole nickels! Mobster Bugsy Siegel was the first in Las Vegas to put slot machines in his casino, the Flamingo Hotel, in 1947. At the time they were little more than novelty items designed to keep wives and girlfriends busy while the men played poker or blackjack or shot craps. Today they’re computerized, and they bring in between 60% and 80% of a typical casino’s total profits.
    VIDEO POKER
    Description: Just like it sounds—a video-game version of poker. You put in your money, the machine deals your “cards” onto a video screen, and you play poker as if you were sitting at a poker table.
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    History: Another descendant of the early mechanical poker machine, video poker was invented after slot machine manufacturer Si Redd saw the Pong video game in the early 1970s. “We just copied it,” he told an interviewer in 2001. Redd started out making both blackjack and poker machines, but dropped blackjack after gamblers realized that their money lasted a lot longer in the poker machines.
    As with slot machines when they were first introduced, Redd thought video poker was little more than a novelty; he figured people entering the casino would play a few games before getting down to more serious gambling. Wrong again—gamblers too intimidated to play at the poker tables made video poker machines a mainstay.
    THE BIG SIX WHEEL/WHEEL OF FORTUNE
    Description: If you’re familiar with TV’s Wheel of Fortune , you already know how this game works. The only differences are that in casinos the wheel is mounted vertically, not horizontally the way it is on TV, and the dealer spins it instead of the players. Pegs divide the wheel into 54 different sections that offer different payouts according to how many times they appear on the wheel. Sections that pay $1 for every dollar wagered are scattered all over the wheel, but there may be only one or two sections that pay $20. When the wheel is spun, the pegs rub against an arrow pointer that slows the wheel down; the winning section is the one the arrow is pointing at when the wheel stops spinning.
    History: The wheel of fortune is so old that nobody knows for sure how it originated. One story, most likely apocryphal, is that Roman soldiers invented the game as a means of divvying up the battlefield spoils of defeated enemies. Rather than fight over who got what, each soldier inscribed a mark in a section of the wheel of an overturned chariot. A spear was stuck into the ground next to the wheel to serve as a marker, and then the wheel was spun. The booty in question went to the person whose mark was closest to the spear when the wheel stopped spinning. From there the game is said to have spread to harvest festivals and other public gatherings, where the large wheel made it possible for crowds of people to follow the action. Roulette, which means “small wheel” in French, may have started out as a more portable version of the same game.
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UNCLE JOHN’S STALL OF FAME
Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the creative ways people