The Griffin Book is a listing of known or suspected gambling cheaters and advantage players published by Griffin Investigations, a firm that monitors casinos. Those listed may be anyone perceived as a threat to the casino’s profits, including card counters, people who mark cards and those who try to cheat slot [...]

Skill With Prizes (SWP) machines are a subset of slot machines, in which the payout a player receives is dependent on a game of skill rather than just luck.One common type of SWP game is the Quiz machine - where a player has to answer a number of trivia questions to win [...]

Cheating in casinos refers to actions which are prohibited by a casino’s rules. Cheating is usually illegal but the exact sanctions will depend on the jurisdiction in which the casino operates. In Nevada, cheating in a casino is a felony under Nevada law. In most other jurisdictions, specific statutes do not [...]

One dollar chips from various Las Vegas casinos.
Casino tokens are small colored metal or plastic discs used in gambling establishments.
There are two main types of tokens used in casinos: multicolor tokens of various denominations called chips, used primarily in table games; and metal token coins, used primarily in slot machines. Some [...]

Pachinko (パチンコ) is a device used for amusment and prizes and is related to pinball machines. Although originally strictly mechanical, modern pachinko machines are a cross between a pinball machine and a video slot machine. Pachinko is said to have been invented sometime after World War II in Nagoya, though the [...]

Charity gambling is the practice where typical gambling ‘games’ such as bingo, roullette, lotto, slot-machines, etc. are overseen by a charity or group of charities. The profits from the venture go to the charity or group of charities, rather than to a municipality or private casino. Sometimes this occurs as a [...]

Availability error, related to the gambler’s fallacy, is the distortion of one’s perceptions of reality due to the tendency to remember one alternative outcome of a situation much more easily than another.For example, if surrounded by slot machines people are more likely to continue feeding money into their machine, because they [...]

Fitzgeralds Las Vegas is a 34-story, 638-room hotel and casino in downtown Las Vegas. It has a 42,000 square foot casino, and several places to eat, as well as a business center and pool and spa. The hotel is located at the eastern end of the Fremont Street Experience. Fitgerald’s also has [...]

Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York developed a gambling machine in 1891 that could be considered a precursor to the modern slot machine. It contained 5 drums holding a total of 50 card faces and was based on poker. This machine proved extremely popular and soon there was hardly a bar [...]

US gambling revenue dropped  15% in May. In Las Vegas, the percentage is 16.4%. As for Atlantic City, the casinos gambling revenue down 11% in June, comparing with the same month of the last year (a single casino shows an increase in revenue, Harrah’s Resort Casino). In Illinois, gambling revenue was [...]