Last week we took a look at John Kane, the man who once won a thousand dollar jackpot on Video Poker, without getting a winning combination of any kind, and without having played for an amount large enough to trigger such a jackpot in the first place!
Kane then called his friend, one Andre Nestor, and told him about this nice surprise.
They decided that Nestor should fly to Las Vegas so they could explore together this exciting phenomenon further.
In fact, Nestor went directly to the airport that very same day! It was late at night, but he apparently didn’t have anything better going for him at the time…
Nestor spent the night at the airport and took the first flight to the city of dreams (and nightmares) the next morning.
Kane picked up his friend at McCarran Airport, and after a quick breakfast they went straight down to the same downtown casino where Kane had won $1,000 the day before, with the intention of playing Video Poker on Game Kings machines specifically.
They had an inkling that there might be a programming error in the machines, which had led to Kane’s unwarranted win on the previous day, and thought they might be able to locate and exploit it.
They thus performed various methodical tests on the machines, using different combinations of amounts and plays, in the hopes that they could find the magical combination.
The pair tested different games and different levels, each of them playing on one machine.
With the meticulous precision, they tested all the different combinations, hoping that sooner or later they would find the needle that they by now were certain existed somewhere in the haystack.
Now, on the game in question you could choose between 6 different levels, from 1 cent up to 50 cents per game.
The key to finding the flaw in the machine was that, given certain specific combinations, you could retroactively change the level you were playing.
In other words, you could play for one cent until you won a jackpot. Then you went back and changed the stake to 50 cents, and got a 50 times higher payout than what you had actually won.
This wasn’t easy. It was actually quite complicated. Kane and Nestor had to do perform the right moves in exactly the right order to make it work.
But after seven hours of sitting in the chairs in front of the machines, testing different variations and combination, they had found all the steps in the process and figured out how to get it done.
They then picked off a few jackpots, until they were sated, and celebrated later that evening with a fancy dinner.
As you can probably guess, they washed it all down with champagne, while dreaming of how they would go on to become dollar multimillionaires.
The best stroke of luck was that the machine with the programming error was Game Kings, which happened to be the single most popular and commonly-found Video Poker machine in all of Las Vegas.
These machines were everywhere, from the swankiest casinos to the local Seven Eleven.
This was important, as they of course realized that they could not just get as many jackpots as they would like from the same machine without attracting unwanted attention.
But by switching machines regularly they thought they would be able to win jackpots undetected for years to come. The pair didn’t even dare imagine how many Game Kings machines might be available worldwide.
It’s not hard to imagine how happy Kane and Nestor were. — the 2 players, who had gambled their last penny far too many times down the years, thought they were finally getting somewhere and had discovered as sort of gaming ‘holy grail’.
In theory they could win unlimited amounts of money on the slots, and starting the next day, that’s exactly what they set out to do.
They didn’t get much sleep that day, and spent the night pacing up and down in Kane’s large house, where no less than 3 Steinway grand pianos graced the living room - Kane was a promising pianist at one time, and he still had it in him to play, so he sat down and performed melodies in a fit of joy and excitement.
It’s not clear what tune he chose, but it was perhaps closer to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons than Beethoven’s fifth! And no doubt Andre Nestor was tapping his feet to the rhythm until his shoes were starting to smoke!
They were finally ready to make it happen…
To be continued later this week…
Written by Ken Lennáard.
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