Reel Strip Question

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Reel Strip Question

Postby quadibloc » Thu Jan 09, 2020 1:35 pm

As collectors of old slot machines know, there is a wide variety of arrangements for the symbols on the reel strips of slot machines.
John Scarne's book, Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling, illustrated how slot machines worked with the Mills "Twenty-One Bell", which had overprinted symbols on some of the stops, because it had particularly generous payouts.
Reading several books on casino gambling, I had run across two particular arrangements for the reel strips on a slot machine that seem to have been repeated again and again.
One of them is this one:
Code: Select all
Lemons       3  -  4
Cherries     7  7  -
Oranges      3  6  7
Plums        5  1  5
Bells        1  3  3
Bars         1  3  1

This is for an old-style machine, which pays out on cherry-cherry-lemon and cherry-cherry-bell.
I recently found out what actual slot machine this arrangement referred to. From the book "The Facts of Slots", plus other sources that gave additional detail, this arrangement came from a Mills Extraordinary confiscated by the police from an illicit gambling operation, and then given to the custody of the statistics professor Dr. Philip G. Fox.
But I haven't been able to determine where this arrangement, also seen repeated in a few other books on casino gambling, came from:
Code: Select all
Cherries     5   7   3
Oranges      4   1  10
Plums        6   1   4
Bells        1   9   1
Melons       2   1   1
Bars         2   1   1

Some books replace "Melons" by "Horseshoes".
This arrangement is for a more modern slot machine, with three cherries as a possible winning combination.
I do have my suspicions; this distribution of symbols very closely resembles the one on the V-12-70 set of reel strips for Jennings machines, so I suspect this is from a somewhat later one by that manufacturer.

EDIT: I finally found a Jennings machine that had a set of payouts that seemed to correspond to this arrangement of symbols on the reels.
The Jennings Standard Chief Bell, or Jennings Export Chief, as pictured in Dieter Ladwig's book "Slot Machines" had one and three cherry pays and an additional pay symbol - which was even a horseshoe.
However, when I calculated the payout of the machine, it turned out that it would have returned 9304 coins out of every 8000 played, and so those reel strips would have to belong to something with lesser payouts (presumably for the cherry combinations) instead. So I think I've gotten closer to answering my question at least.

EDIT: Having recieved a few days later a copy of Daniel R. Mead's Handbook of Slot Machine Reel Strips, as well as trying to Google a few other obscure varieties of slot machine, I now more fully realize what had escaped me earlier. The number of different reel strip arrangements on slot machines - even if one limits oneself to major American manufacturers - is immense, and even the Handbook of Slot Machine Reel Strips merely scratches the surface. So asking about a particular reel arrangement in hopes someone has the identical machine, in all but the most common cases, is likely to be fruitless.
quadibloc
 
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