Category: Questions

The history of slot machine gambling, on- and offline, is awash with tales of players who have filed unsuccessful lawsuits against casinos for absurdly large sums of money that they believe they should have won because of a malfunction. Slot machines can malfunction for a variety of reasons, but it is not often that a player who has legitimately won a massive jackpot walks away without it.

That was, however, the case with Arizonian Robert Taylor who, in January, 2022, legitimately won a progressive jackpot worth $229,368.52 on ‘The Mask’ slot machine at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. A communication error on the wide area network caused the machine to malfunction, such that neither Taylor nor casino staff were aware of his windfall. Consequently, Taylor left more or less empty-handed but, when the glitch was discovered some days later, the casino contacted the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) for help in identifying its lucky, but unwitting, patron.

After countless hours of searching through surveillance footage, identify him they did, and the casino notified him of his good fortune nearly three weeks after his winning spin. James Taylor, Chief of the Enforcement Division at the NGCB, said, ‘We thought it was a long shot to be able to identify him. But we really wanted to put a lot of effort into this. It was the right thing to do to find the owner of this money.’

According to James Taylor, his namesake was ‘very appreciate’ of the efforts of NGCB agents in tracking him down. Robert Taylor did eventually return to Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, where he was presented with a ceremonial cheque for his winnings. Thereafter, he was unavailable for comment and requested, via the casino, that his privacy be respected.

In poker, specifically Texas Hold’em poker, a ‘bad beat’ occurs when the player who is the overwhelming favourite, statistically, to win a hand, loses to an opponent who, initially, holds an inferior hand but, more by luck than judgement, draws one or more cards required to snatch victory.

One example of a bad beat would be a player who holds a pair of tens, or ‘pocket tens’, going ‘all in’ against, and losing to, an opponent who holds a pair of fives, or ‘pocket fives’; mathematically, the player holding pocket tens should win four out of five, or 80%, of such hands. Another example is the so-called ‘runner runner’ bad beat, whereby a player who is, statistically, unlikely to win a hand after the flop draws the right card on both the turn and river cards to complete a winning hand. A frequent example of this type occurs when a player draws running cards to complete an inside, or gutshot, straight; a gutshot draw on the flop offers an 8.5% of making a straight on the turn card and a 16.5% chance of making a straight on the river card.

A bad beat may be a damaging experience, financially and psychologically, but worse still is an extraordinary and, thankfully, rare bad beat known as a ‘cooler’. A cooler occurs when an extraordinarily strong hand, such as four of a kind, or ‘quads’, played correctly, loses to an even stronger hand, such as a straight flush. Bad beats, including coolers, are a painful, but nonetheless unavoidable, part of poker. From the point of view of the person suffering a bad beat, an unexpected loss, or a series of such losses, may cause a loss of confidence, but should really be treated as a temporary downswing, rather than a reflection of the ability, or strategy, of the player.

In 1926, the biography of James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok reported that the man dubbed ‘The Prince of Pistoleers’ died while holding the ace of spades, ace of clubs, eight of spades, eight of clubs and another, unconfirmed card in a hand of five-card stud poker. In fact, Hickok had shot in back of the head by disgruntled rival, Jack McCall, at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory fifty years earlier; no contemporary accounts describe the exact hand Hickok was holding at the time of his death, but two black aces and two black eights has ‘officially’ been known as a ‘dead man’s hand’ ever since. Of course, even after his death, legends and tales about Hickok continued to appear in pulp fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so it is, perhaps, understandable that his name also became associated a term that had already existed for some time.

Nevertheless, several reliable references to a ‘dead man’s hand’ date from the period between Hickok’s death in 1876 and the publication of his biography in 1926, but make no mention of Hickok. A newspaper article dating from 1886 recounted the tale of a down-on-his-luck Illinois judge who staked his livelihood on his full house, jacks over tens, lost to another full house, queens over tens, and died of shock. Later reliable accounts, in the early years of the twentieth century, linked the term ‘dead man’s hand’ to jacks and sevens or jacks and eights.

In formal card games, such as those played in casinos, a ‘burn card’ is a card dealt from the top of the deck stub, but discarded, or ‘burned’, unseen and unused by the players. Burning a card before each round of betting is intended as a deterrent against illegally altering playing cards, by bending, nicking or otherwise marking them, so that their value and suit can be determined without seeing the face of the card.

In poker variants, such as Texas Hold’em and Omaha Hold’em, that use community cards, knowledge of the next community card is obviously extremely valuable. Consequently, before dealing the flop, turn and river the dealer deals a burn card, face down, next to the discard pile, or ‘muck’. Even in the event of marked cards, players cannot see the next community card until immediately before it is dealt, so have little or no time to take advantage of any markings. Without a burn card before each round of betting, a marked card could be lying, in plain view, at the top of the deck stub for the whole of the previous round, allowing players ‘in the know’ an unfair advantage over their fellow competitors and/or the house.

Of course, in a modern casino, any attempt at card marking is unlikely and, unless highly sophisticated, will probably be discovered sooner rather than later in any case. Nevertheless, burn cards are retained in bricks-and-mortar casinos as a matter of custom or tradition.