Slots The Rhythm Players

I'm a 19 year machine pro. I cover video poker, video keno, video line games, accumulator slots, slot progressives. I've always been interested in the history of professional machine play. I got started in 1996 but I know that video poker pros go back to the 1980's. Frank Kneeland's "The Secret World of Video Poker Progressives" is one of the books I've read on the history of professional play. I read lots of other gambling books, whether they are how-to, or gambling stories, or even gambling fiction.

I recently found an ebook at Amazon called The Queen of Chance: Story of a Lady Gambler. The bio of the author, Jackie Shirley, is that he was a professional seven card stud player in Vegas for years. When he retired he started writing novels. Queen of Chance is a fictional account of the story of the slot hustlers who called themselves "rhythm players."

The secret world of the rhythm players has been an even more well kept secret than Kneeland and the progressive teams. They operated during the days of the old mechanical slots. The last of the mechanicals disappeared in 1990 and from then on its all been RNG machines. This put the rhythm players out of business for good.

But the story of what they knew is fascinating. It was more in depth than one might think. In the next post I will explain their strategy.

 

According to Jackie Shirley, there was a man who showed up in Las Vegas in 1946 and crushed the casinos on the old mechanical slot machines. They could never figure the guy out. He won everyday. But then he made a strange move. He opened up a school and charged people to teach them "rhythm play." The casinos were losing lots of money to the rhythm players. In 1951 the manufacturers installed a device in the machines called a "variator." The variator changed the speed of the reels on each spin. This put the rhythm players out of business. That is, until the 1970's when the variator was figured out. The most common variator had seven different speeds. The rhythm players figured out the sequence of the speeds.

But the strategy was more complex than that. The rhythm players had to know their math. They had to map the reels. Most all of the old mechanicals had 22 stops on each reel....and had three reels. So there was 10,648 possible outcomes on a spin, 22X22X22. Jackie Shirley described one type of machine in particular. He called it a "fruit machine." The symbols on the reels were:

7's
Bars
Bells
Oranges
Plums
Cherries.

I have read that the way the old slot hustlers mapped the reels was by making a spin then recording the symbol above the line, the symbol on the line, and the symbol below the line. They would make about 100 spins recording the results. Then they just culled out all the duplicates. That told them how many of each symbol was on each reel. Then it was just a simple matter of doing the payoff times probability math to get the payback percentage of the machine, which Shirley listed as 94.5%. But the position of each symbol on the reels was also very important as you will see.

The second reel was the key reel. That was the one they manipulated through rhythm play. While there were several plums on the first and third reels, there was only one plum on the second reel. The object of rhythm play was to get the plum of the second reel to land on the line or close to the line every time. This increased the chances of getting 3 plums which payed payed 20 for 1. And it also increased the chances of getting bell/plum/plum or plum/plum/bell which payed 14 for 1.

But there was another key ingredient to the strategy. The five symbols above the plum and the five symbols below the plum. That side of the reel was loaded with 7's, bars, and bells which were the highest paying symbols on the reels. A good rhythm player could get the plum to land one the line about 1 time in 6. The rest of the time it landed very close. This increased the chances of making bar/bell/bell or bell/bell/bar which payed 18 for 1. It increased the chances of making 3 bells which payed 20 for 1. It increased the chances of making 3 bars which payed 50 for 1. It increased the chances of making three 7's which payed 100 for 1.

The whole strategy was applied mathematics and turned a 94% game into a 110% game. Very ingenius.

 

I had an email exchange with Jackie Shirley. His picture at Amazon looked very familiar. In the late nineties/early 2000's we both played poker at the Horseshoe. I had some questions for him. Was anyone ever prosecuted for rhythm play? He said that Nevada Gaming never knew about rhythm play and no one to his knowledge was ever prosecuted. He also said that he had a big advantage with rhythm play because, being a former professional drummer, he had excellent timing. He also said that the couple that taught him rhythm play took $2,000,000 out of the mechanicals on the strip while the play lasted.