Poker Machines

History of Pokeys

In 1891, two men, Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York developed a precursor to the modern slot machine containing 5 drums with 50 card faces based on poker. The machine was so popular that almost every bar in the city had one or more of the machines in the bar. Players inserted a coin, usually a nickel, then pulled a lever to spin the drums and the cards, looking for a good poker hand. As there was no direct payout mechanism, players could win a free beer, cigars or drinks. Prizes were set by each establishment. To improve house odds, two cards were removed from the "deck": the Ten of Spades and the Jack of Hearts, reducing the odds of a Royal Flush by half. The drums could also be re-arranged to further reduce a player's chance of winning.

The first "one-armed bandit" was invented in 1887 by Charles Fey, in San Francisco, California, who devised a much simpler automatic mechanism. Due to the vast number of possible wins with the original poker card-based game, it proved practically impossible to come up with a way to make a machine capable of making an automatic pay-out for all possible winning combinations. Charles Fey devised a machine with three spinning reels containing a total of five symbols - horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a Liberty Bell, which also gave the machine its name. By replacing ten cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was considerably reduced, allowing Fey to devise an effective automatic payout mechanism. Three bells in a row produced the biggest payoff. Liberty Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device industry.