Really great article in the Seattle Times about one obsessive man’s quest to beat slot machines in casinos all over the country using a whole range of jury-rigged gadgets and contraptions:
In 1990, Carmichael returned to Las Vegas and bought IGT’s Fortune One video-poker machine. For six months, he toiled over a device — known as the slider or monkey paw — trying to compromise the machine. The slider — constructed of spring steel and guitar wire — essentially snaked its way into the machine through the payout chute and tripped a microswitch. That fooled the hopper, the bucket holding the quarters, into spitting out its payload. Carmichael’s approach was simple, he said: “Figure out how a machine counts money and then work your way into the machine.” The slider enabled Carmichael to bank about $1,000 an hour.
