Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

30 Silvio E. Petricciani
made all of his money when he first started
out. He started out with those Pace machines,
and people just took to them and they went
like wildfire for some reason or other. I don’t
know why because mechanically they were
just terrible to try to keep going. They were
built very cheaply, and they’d break down all
the time, but people liked them, so just fix
them and let them keep on going. But even
up to and including after the war, you didn’t
have any electronic slot machines for a long,
long time. Let’s see, Bally came out with the
first electronic slot machine, well, it was in
the early sixties, around ’63 I think, ’62, ’63
when they first started to come out with
the electronic slot machine, you know, the
hoppers paying off instead of slide payoff and
so on and so forth.
So slot machines per se remained about
the same except for one thing. When they
first built them years and years ago, they had
what they called a ten-stop reel. They had a
reel with twenty figures on it, but only ten
of those figures could come up. And, oh, we
operated those and they were legal insofar
as—and even the big Caille slot machines with
the round dial. Percentage was set by if you
played the red or the black on the dial, why,
then it was strictly let it fall where it may on
the cog that you would see, the geared wheel
around the front. But if you played a twentyfive
cent payoff, why then there was a little
lever that moved in towards the back and they
had little prongs that would stick up, and it
would only allow a certain number of those
twenty-five cent payoffs to hit because if the
bar would come down, it would kick it off.
But this was not illegal per se because it was
all figured into the percentage of the keep of
the slot machine—in other words, the number
of coins paid out. And if the person wanted
to play twenty-five cent payoff or fifty cent
payoff or a dollar payoff on the slot machine,
then this little cog would move in and keep the
percentage of the machine static. As a matter
of fact my dad told me one time that with the
symbols on the wheel, he said he tried it just to
see what would happen if you didn’t have this
cog come in. And it cost him about a hundred
dollars to find out what would happen because
the percentage went to the player, you see.
But like I say, this was not illegal. That was no
more illegal in those days than arranging the
different symbols on the slot machines today
to give the machine a certain percentage of
keep, so whether you do it with lemons or if
you have a different combination of different
symbols. And, of course, the Mills people also
came up with what they called a twenty-stop
reel which stopped with every figure, and then
you figured your percentage from that point
as opposed to the ten-stop reel. The ten-stop
reel was kind of flukey because it would stop
so abruptly, you know, instead of letting it just
come into its—well, you stop twenty symbols
in ten stops, why you know it s going to stop
right now. Whereas now with the twenty-stop
reel, now they have twenty-five- and thirtystop
reels, and they have that many symbols
on the reel.
But when the Gaming Commission
came in they said, “No, we can’t do this.” Not
because it was illegal, because the percentage
was right, but whatever is on the reel must be
able to show up. We don’t care how tight your
machine is, but whatever you symbolize must
be able to show in the window on the payline.
So at that time then, of course, they went to
the twenty- and twenty-five- and thirty-stop
reels, and then they figured their percentage
from there. Of course percentages on slot
machines now, today, run, oh, anywhere from
ninety percent payoff to ninety-eight percent
payoff. It all depends on—you have certain
machines that are leaders, you know, and so
on, and then others that—. But you can have