LAS VEGAS, Nev., April 9 (UPI) -- I have seen the future of gambling, and I'm sad to say it's slots, slots and more slots. I think slot-machine noise is obnoxious, but I'm in the minority. I much prefer the quite whispery casinos of Europe, where there's an atmosphere of intrigue and mystery. But every casino marketing man would tell me I'm wrong. It's the serried rows of noisy crowded jammed-up slot machines that draw the customers in and keep them gambling.

If you ever get trapped in the Vegas airport for a few hours, you'll hear the "Wheel . . . Of . . . Fortune!" tape loop so many times you'll wanna take an ax to the machines. But that game is actually one of the most popular in the country, for reasons that have a lot to do with that very recording. If you're playing the machine and it suddenly shouts "Wheel . . . Of . . . Fortune!" it means you get a bonus spin that can result in anywhere from 20 to 1,000 coins. Of course, it's not really a spin--you don't really control how fast it moves--but the wheel does go around and give you money.

I've always thought of slots as a lonely game, but I think that's the whole point. I once made the mistake of whooping along with a woman who won a jackpot, and she stared at me like I was about to steal her money. I think the whole appeal of the game is that it's my game and my money and my little drama that no one else can be a part of.

There's a paradox, though. Even though 50 per cent of Vegas casino income now comes from slots--and that figure can be as high as 90 per cent in some midwestern casinos--people still want table games in the casino. Slots are much more efficient, profitable and low-maintenance than table games, so there have been a few casinos that tried to do away with table games entirely and just load up the space with slots. But for some reason people don't trust all-slots joints. It's a strange cultural phenomenon that Americans want to play games alone, staring zombie-like into a video screen working off a rigged computer program called a Random Number Generator (RNG), and yet they want to be surrounded by the more social and traditional table games while they're doing it.

Since the late eighties, all of this has been analyzed and studied to a fine mathematical point. Wall Street has performance statistics for each casino based on data like "win-per-position" (daily earnings divided by the number of places in the casino where a gambler can sit or stand), and "revenue-per-available- room" (because casinos with hotel rooms make significantly more than day-tripper casinos), and the popular "EBITDA per gaming square foot," which stands for "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization," divided by the total area of the casino floor. The leader in this category is the Bellagio, and yet the Bellagio is not the most profitable casino. It's basically an arcane measure of cash flow that takes into account table arrangement and the manipulation of betting limits.

Hard-core slots players are gold to a casino. But they're a finicky bunch, flitting from hotel to hotel like hummingbirds searching for nectar. There are players who use only "MegaJackpots" machines that are linked to other casinos and tied to a lottery-sized payout. There are customers loyal to a particular brand like "I Dream of Jeannie" (Jeannie murmurs encouragement to her "master" during play) or "The Munsters" (Herman Munster jumps up and down shouting "I'm rich!").

There's a slot machine called "Baby Boomers" featuring cooing toddlers, teddy bears and pacifiers. (In the bonus round, five babies appear in a crib. When you choose three of them, their diapers fly off into a pail, revealing prize amounts on their butts.) There are games called "Area 51" (based on the top- secret military area near Nellis Air Force Base where extraterrestrials are regularly sighted), "Chainsaws & Toasters," "Filthy Rich" (muddy pigs that are hosed off to reveal bonus payouts), and "Richard Petty Driving Experience" (Richard offers racing tips as well as slots strategy).

There are multimedia slot machines with 3-D graphics, reels that spin, reels that blink, and confusing payout machines like "Double Five Times Pay," which I honestly wasn't able to figure out. In their efforts to stay ahead of the curve, casinos add new machines, with new and more spectacular video graphics, as often as once every three months.

"The new trend is baby-boomer TV shows," says Wall Street gaming analyst Jason Ader of Bear Stearns. "I've talked to a guy who tied up all the rights to 'Gilligan's Island' and 'Happy Days.' He's getting anywhere from $200,000 to a million per trademark."

As this trend continues, the big slot-machine manufacturers like International Game Technology are no longer satisfied with merely selling the machine to a casino. Increasingly, a portion of the casino's win is kicked back to the slot company.

"More and more we're hostages to the slots guys," says Tom Jenkin of Harrah's. A casino veteran with salt and pepper hair and a hoarse soft-spoken voice, Jenkin is one of the few Casino Men aggressively pursuing the lowly $100-a-day bettor. "Actually the slots guys are always pushing the innovative, the new, the refreshing. And left to our own devices, we might not do that. We might not understand slots as well as they do, and that could cause us to self-destruct. Because slots today--those guys might be as important to the industry as the mega-resort builders. People don't like to think of it that way, but it might just be true."

While there's time, everyone should go downtown to Binion's Horseshoe and watch the old men with the fat cigars play poker. Their days are numbered. The future is a woman seated in front of a $100,000 video game in a plush chair, pulling a handle.

Actually, they don't pull the handle anymore. It's still there, like a vestigial organ, for nostalgia purposes. But they press a button instead. It's faster and it doesn't get your working hand dirty.

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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