A New Jersey woman said she won more than $2 million on an Atlantic City slot machine — but the casino isn’t coughing up the dough, leaving the septuagenarian “very anxious” about being unable to help her homeless son.
Roney Beal, 72, claims she hit it big on a Wheel of Fortune slot machine at Bally’s Casino in February, but when she went to collect her winnings, the casino claimed the jackpot was due to a technical glitch and therefore didn’t count, she told The Post Saturday.
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“What’s the use in playing then?”
After losing $1,000 on various machines that day, Beal revisited the Wheel of Fortune slot machine.
When she gave it another six or seven spins, she said she hit the jackpot.
She said she eventually got the words “wild,” “wild x2” and spin on a diagonal on the slot area of the machine. This entitled her to a free spin on the Wheel of Fortune wheel on the top of the machine.
After spinning, the wheel ended up on the word “Jackpot” with a dollar sign — and she said she heard the words “You’ve won.”
Then, 3-D gold coins came out and a blue light went off, she said.
“And then the people behind me got up and they’re like, ‘oh my god, oh my god.’ This guy says, ‘lady you’re a millionaire. A millionaire,'” she said.
But when she used a call button to summon help, a tilt message popped up, indicating the machine was unplayable due to an error or malfunction.
A Bally’s employee told her she didn’t win before telling her to leave the casino.
So, every game on a slot machine is usually logged, including the seed that generated it (for debugging).
You can quickly verify if a game was legitimate by checking these logs.
It’s hard to believe the integrity of anyone when hundreds of thousnds of dollars are on the line a game of chance.
In the UK, logging is law because of disputes like this.
Fun fact, in the states all games use weighted reels (by law they can’t use rejection mechanics), so the kind of error that causes a jackpot trigger is far less likely than the jackpot itself by quite a few orders of magnitude.
If I were in the lady’s shoes I’d have the machine checked for tampering, as this is more likely given the unusually specific outcome.