Posted on 10/25/2007 6:20:52 AM PDT by Anti-Bubba182
For about an hour last August, Gary Hoffman was a very lucky man.
Hoffman was playing the nickel slot machines at the Sandia Resort and Casino on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, when he appeared to hit the jackpot: the machine said he won nearly $1.6 million.
"I became ecstatic," he said.
But the ecstasy was short-lived. Hoffman says in a lawsuit filed earlier this year that Sandia refused to pay, claiming that the machine malfunctioned. Instead, he said, they gave him about $385 and a few free meals at the casino.[snip].....
[snip]Regardless, a jury may never get chance to hear Hoffman's case. Native American tribes, as independent nations, have their own court systems and can be sued in state courts only under limited circumstances. New Mexico law generally does not allow tribes to be sued in a state court over a contract dispute, Kleiman said.....
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
For me, it does. I've got a cousin whose been working in casinos for 20 years and his tales convinced me that gambling is just throwing money away.
However, casinos which are not bound by contract law would seem to be an even more foolish risk.
Yeah he doesn’t look very happy for a guy who just won $1.6 mil. I think he knew full well it was an error. He could have walked a way with a nice $2500 but decided to push his luck.
Well, in all honesty, I have never heard of winning 1.6 Mil on a nickle slot machine... 25cents? maybe... $1.00, $5.00? Yes. But nickles?? That be a whole lotta Nickles come pourin’ out of that machine!!
This happens quite often at Indian casinos. I have no doubt it often is a ruse to avoid paying off big jackpots. Interesting that all the people who used that machine that day don’t get a refund for all the money they lost on the “malfunctioning” machine.
I remember this happend at a Harrahs' Indian casino a few years back but the casino's malfunction claim was so bogus, and the Tribal justice so corrupt, that Harrah's International (the parent corporation) went ahead an paid the lady off to stop the devestating publicity appearing in the gaming media.
Non Indian casinos
Yea, I wasn’t reading the question right.
Amazing enough, most large casinos actually have huge signs out front that tell you how much you can expect to lose. I know in Vegas, a lot of the casinos have signs that will say, "OUR SLOTS PAY 95%" (the amount varies a bit). And, they are bragging when they tell you that you can only expect to get back .95 out of every dollar you play.
“I spent about 30 minutes in Foxwoods and Mohegan”....”Connecticut.”
Then they have learned much in the past decade from the lousy example set by the ones out here. The ones I have been to were much smaller and out here in the SW. Plus, in CT they have a much larger market, short drive, etc. Visit one of the smaller local casinos and you will not be impressed. But then, after having been to Vegas and Laughlin I was also unimpressed with Atlantic City. WAY overpriced for rooms and if you ever go there do not even think of walking a block behind the casino’s....it would be like commiting suicide.
Yup, anything on Indian land or within the confines of a structure owned by Native Americans is considered “Indian Country,” legally.
Anna Nicole Smith was “found unresponsive” on tribal land at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, FL, owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida. She was declared dead later, after leaving Indian Country, at a hospital in Broward County.
For a variety of reasons, some believe her drug overdose wasn’t an accident and needed to be investigated further.
However, because of where the overdose happened, and because the Seminole Tribe police and first responders declared it an “accidental death,” the hotel room was never treated as a crime scene.
Some of the needed investigative work was done, but the results have never been released, nor will they ever be, simply because the Seminoles decided against it. Bad PR for the Hard Rock Casino.
Not exactly “welfare recipients” in every sense of the word, the Seminoles of FL (not to be confused with the Seminoles of Oklahoma, thank you) have now bought out all the Hard Rock Cafes in the world.
Luckily for those of us concerned about this investigation, the California DOJ has gotten involved and recently conducted a raid on the offices of the CA doctors who prescribed the meds used. What happens next remains to be seen - but I doubt we’ll ever see the Seminole files, thanks to sovereign immunity (and I speak as one of the “sovereign”).
The $16 million award shown on the screen is obviously a malfunction.
According to the disclaimer, that voids the transaction.
What he is entitled to is his nickel back, not $16 million dollars.
The casino made him a very generous offer of paying him the maximum jackpot that machine is supposed to provide. That means they offered to pay him the most money he could have reasonably expected to be able to earn from that machine from that transaction.
The casino didn't try and screw him. He's trying to screw the casino through the lawsuit lottery. His claim has no merit, but he's hoping to get a sympathetic jury to take money from the big, bad casino and give it to the poor little guy, despite the casino already offering him more than they were obligated.
You know,it's funny that you mention the Seminoles in Hollywood.When I was a kid...about 50 years ago....our family vacationed in Ft Lauderdale and one day we went to Seminole reservation not far from where we stayed (I assume it was in Hollywood) that featured alligator "wrestling".I can remember as if it was yesterday a guy standing over a gator and showing the audience his hand and telling us that his finger was missing because a gator had bitten it off.
I haven't thought about that in decades!
You just convinced me to never step in an indian casino again. I only went to Foxwoods once and the machines were super tight. I try to go to Vegas every Spring and thats The only place i’ll go now. I’m not much of a gambler anyways.
At one point in my career, I did the software for one of the first video poker machines ("Talking Draw Poker 5000" for the Vegas market). Slot machines installed in Nevada have to pass a rigorous series of state tests, which include having your random number generator certified my a mathematician. Software errors are generally obvious, and show up as a consistent pattern of easy payoffs. There is a subculture of players who spend their entire lives in smoky casinos trying odd combinations of buttons on every new type of machine, hoping to find a software error. When an "exploit" shows up, casino staff find about it in short order by checking the pattern of play.
If this happened to a player in Nevada, he could subpoena the casino's logs. If no error pattern is evident, the casino could not evade payment. IN any case, the bad publicity would be so massive that no sane casino would do such a thing.
Reservations, on the other hand, are out of state jurisdiction. Since NV (and possibly NJ) are the only states with a gaming enforcement apparatus, slot play in any other jurisdiction should be considered as strictly for entertainment. Reservation casinos are a sucker bet!
This is another factor. The only slots with million-dollar payouts are "progressives", in which a large number of machines feed a common jackpot pool. If this machine is not a progressive, there is no way it could pay a million.
Oh, God, Mount Scary. I worked there in the 80’s when I was in high school. It was an absolute trash magnet then. I can’t imagine that adding gambling helped.
True.The ones in CT are an easy drive from Greater Boston,all of RI,much of CT and metro New York City.
Visit one of the smaller local casinos and you will not be impressed. But then, after having been to Vegas and Laughlin I was also unimpressed with Atlantic City. WAY overpriced for rooms and if you ever go there do not even think of walking a block behind the casino’s....it would be like commiting suicide.
Everything I've heard of Atlantic City these days suggests that it's a God-awful slum that only a fool would get within 50 miles of.
When the machine fails to give out a jackpot- do they detect the error and give out that amount anyway?
I doubt it... I’m guessing they just keep your money.
I don’t know. This happened a number of times in Erie and from what I heard (supposedly from the newspaper)they comp you, give a couple hundred in scrip and hope you don’t go public. In some of the other places in PA (Scranton, Meadowlands, etc.) I don’t know what they do, but it is all kept quiet, very quiet.
Check this out . Just opened on Monday !
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=NEWS0942
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.