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How Slot Machines Give Gamblers the Business
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. 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. 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. Some statistics, random but
telling:
America 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. In the past fifteen years the
number of such devices has grown fivefold, to more than 740,000, and is
still mounting. 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. 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. 1 entertainment choice. As much as 70 percent of the $48 billion in
gaming revenues raked in by the casinos comes from slots.
Read the
entire article at:
The Atlantic Online
2005 Online Casino News
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