Hacker News Reader

Comment by zorked | Hacker News Reader

The poker machines are connected? Why wouldn't they just jackpot locally and indepdendently?

Can't have several machines "jackpotting" at the same time or similar time. The prizing algorithm is very strict.

Is this widely known? Presumably the jackpots are sufficiently geographically distributed so that a player who observes one wouldn't be incentivised to pause playing?

I don't think it is widely known how much casino gaming machines are allowed to control outcome. Indeed, in some cases they are required by law to control outcome.

These are probably the kind of machines you sometimes see in gas stations and bars, there's only a few of them in any location at most so there's never too many players nearby to be dissuaded from playing. Plus, a jackpot isn't the only way to win money.

toast0's answer below is the correct one. Plus in Australia, gaming/gambling is heavily regulated - my state government didn't even allow poker machines until 1991.

So we never started with a network of disconnected poker machines, the whole thing was built from the ground up with a centralised jackpot system. I don't know what hardware the original jackpot platform ran on but I know it used hardware RNG units. By the time I started there ~2003 it had been migrated to Stratus.

Networked jackpots are a user visible and aparently user desirable feature.

When the jackpot is fed by all the machine in the state, they can grow much faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com