(These set of articles are written by a reader who would wish to remain anonymous. This reader has been gambling for over 40 years, and has some absolutely amazing stories to tell. At the risk of his life, we cannot reveal his actual name. You’ll know why when you read his stories.

Therefore we are proud to introduce to you: The Masked Gambler)

You can read Part One Here.

She asks if I would like something to eat just call room service and sign, and we will take care of it. I told her I would like to have breakfast. She said fine, and if there is anything else we can do for you let us know. You can only imagine how confused I am going to the room to get my suit case and going to my junior suite.

I later found out why I was taken care of so well. You see, when you put your players card in the machine, it records your wins and loses. Well, the brain of the machine was recording me taking a major loss in 15 hours because the brain of the machine doesn’t know that extra coins are coming out do to it over paying. So as fast as I was playing, I probably showed a huge loss.

That would explain why the guy was looking in the computer in amazement. He probably said to himself that this is the biggest idiot he has ever met in his life.When you put 75 cents a spin as fast as you can drop them in the machine ( and I was lightning fast) for 15 hours, it’s going to show a big loss. And through The course of the night I went through some really bad cycles.

Well, I get to my junior suite and order room service. I had two friends that worked in construction and were laid off and out of work. I’ll call them Mike and Tom. I called Tom up and told him to get a hold of Mike and get down here. I told Tom that I think I figured something out that is big. I ate and went to bed. They had about a four hour drive and got to my room about 8:00 that night. I took them down stairs and put $100 in the machine, and cashed out and it came to exactly $100.00. The machine was fixed.

We went back upstairs and I apologized to both of them, and gave them each $200.00. After explaining everything that went on last night, Mike came up with a great idea. There were 14 casinos in this town. He said, lets get as many five dollars bills as we can get and go to another casino and see if we can find another overpayer. His idea was, to put five dollars in every slot machine, and cash out and see if one of them overpays.

We went down stairs and got as many fives as we could get from them and then we went to the casino next door and got as many fives as we could get there too. On the way to the casino that we decided on, we all had rolls of five dollar bills in all our pockets.When we got to the casino we all took different sections of the casino. I went down the rows of slot machines putting in five dollar bills and cashing out. It was very easy to count the coins in the tray because five dollars is only 20 quarters.

After about a half hour or 40 minutes, I cashed out and got 21 quarters. One extra quarter. So I put $100 in and cashed out. I watched the number counting out the quarters and seen nothing indicating that it was over paying. I brought the cup of quarter over to the window and it came to $103.75. That meant the machine was overpaying about 4 percent.When I was leaving the window tom came over to me and said mike found a machine that gave him two extra quarters. He told me mike was sitting there waiting for me to tell him what to do.

Tom showed me where Mike was and I sat down in front of the machine. I put a hundred dollar bill in the machine and cashed out. I put the quarters in a cup and asked tom to cash them in.When I cashed out I saw the number stop a few times for a fair amount of time. He came back with $116.00. That’s 16 percent. Mike and tom sat at the machines on each side of me playing one coin at a time so they could observe what I was doing.

I kept putting hundred dollar bills in and cashing out until I emptied the machine. They came and filled the machine with $600.00 in quarters. I started with a hundred dollar bill and cashed out and tom had $63.00 in quarters we made profit by emptying out the machine. I showed Mike and Tom how to hold a handful of quarters in one hand and how to hit the spin button fast. I told them how important speed was. I put my players card in and started putting three quarters in and spin until all our quarters were gone.

The machine was cold and we went up and down for about five hours. During the five hour period they each took turns playing. The machine started to hit I finally filled up four cups. I show them both how to hide the full cups of quarters by putting a cup on each side and putting empty cups on top of them.You don’t want people walking by (especially when a slot attendant walks by) to always see cups of quarters.

I told them to play and put all four cups of quarters in the machine and you will go over 1000 credits with no problem. I went and got something to eat because they had to go back to the hotel and get some sleep. After eating, I came back and Tom was waiting to get hand paid. I walked around for a little while and came back and asked him how much we made. He was hand paid almost $500.00, He said he cashed out almost 2,000 credits. I took over and they went back to the hotel.They came back about 2:00 in the afternoon and I had made about $2,000.00. We were up about 2,500.00 at this point.

My guess at this point, the machine was overpaying about 60 to 70 percent.Tom sat down and started to play and I took my players card out and tom put his in. I go directly to the comp desk and ask if I can get a room. Same thing happens. The girl takes by card and looks in the computer and tells me to go to the desk and they will comp the room. I asked for two nights and she said no problem. While I was playing Mike went back to the machine that I had found that was paying about three and a half percent. He kept putting hundred dollar bills in and cashing out. When I came back down we decided to play both machines. At this point, we all know how to play overpayers, so one would sleep and the other two would play each machine.

On the 4th day I got caught.

One time that I cashed out, a slot attendant came up behind me and said we have to close down the machine because it was over paying.Now, this is the first time for me. I’m not sure what happens now.She was very nice and she told me I could play the machine after they fixed it. I took my quarters and players card and moved over one seat and started playing that machine. My heart was pumping. I said WOW, that was easy. I went over to the other machine and told tom what happened.

After losing about three hundred on the other machine we started to make money.The percentage got better and I think we spent about 5 days on that one. After the first two days I never put my card back in because I wanted the casino to think I went back home.Mike and tom had already got two nights apiece on there card and it was time for me to try and get two nights. I went down stairs to the gift shop area and used the public phone and pretended I was calling from home and asked if I could come down and stay for two nights. She asked for my card number and told me to come down. I told her I had a four hour drive and she said I’ll see you in four hours. I waited four hours and we had two more nights.

The same thing happened to Mike that happened to me. The slot attendant said she had to close down the machine and he just picked up his quarters and card and moved over a seat. We made about $8,000 apiece. I came out with about $9,000. On the way home we talk about our experience and of course we were happy about the money we made. We made plans to go back down in one week.

Well, we didn’t last a week.

After a couple of days we were itching to back down. This time we went to our banks and got five dollar bills. We must have had $4,000 in five dollar bills on the way back down.We also had cash coupons waiting in our mail boxes when we got home. We made a lot of money every time we went down. We were addicted to this. We all knew what we were doing and how to get rooms, and food ,and free shows. In fact Tom’s father started to come down with us once in a while. He was 70 years old and played the part beautifully. He loved to play.

After a couple of months things started to change. I was playing an over payer and a slot attendant came up to me and said, I know what you are doing. I looked at him and he said the next time you hit a jackpot, don’t push the cash out button until you see me, and wave me over.He told me he will be in this section for the rest of his shift. I didn’t know how to take that. All kinds of thing were going through my mind.

I went over 1000 credits but I didn’t cash out right away because I still couldn’t understand what that was all about. I looked at him and he started towards me and I cashed out. When he got to the machine I gave him $40.00 I had folded in my hand and he took it. He finished his paper work and went and got the money. After he paid me the money, he said hurry up. I’ll be here five hours. He even told me when he was going on break.

Now, I always tipped the slot attendants, but it was always ten or twenty dollars. This particular slot machine was really over paying and I could get the money out and full up my cups and put them back in to over 100 credit within a half hour or 40 minutes. When ever I had a machine overpaying too much, I used to slow down because I didn’t want to raise suspicion. Now I have a slot attendant telling me to hurry up.

Well, hurry up I did! Every half hour or 40 minutes I would look at him and he would start walking towards me and I would push the cash out button. I would fold up 40 or 60 dollars and give it to him and he would do the paper work and go get the money. One thing that worried me about this, was, didn’t it look suspicious that the same machine keeps hitting jackpots. To this day, I still can’t figure out how so many slot attendants could pay us off so many jackpots without closing us down. Back in the early 90’s slot attendants made about 4 or 5 dollars an hour so they loved those tips we used to give them.

One time I was playing and I was having a hell of time trying to get the machine to overpay more, plus the cycle was bad and I couldn’t hit much on the machine.I knew the slot attendant in my section and the coin got jammed. When he came over I told him I was having a heck of time trying to make some money. He open the door and unjammed the coin that was stuck and then he did something really fast with the screw driver. I told him thank you and he walked away. The next time I cashed out, Money started pouring out. I couldn’t believe that. When I thanked him, I was thanking him for unjamming the quarter that was stuck. I didn’t know I was thanking him for making the machine over pay more. I didn’t even know they could do that.

Well, it wasn’t long before there were a lot of people that were playing overpayers the way we were, They were getting harder and harder to find. The problem that most people had is, they would have to leave the machine to sleep. And the ones who had teams would cheat each other. That’s one great thing I had with mike and Tom. We knew we would never cheat each other. It would be easy to hit a jackpot on your shift, and just keep it and not tell anyone. But Tom and Mike and myself were always honest with each other and we were really good friends since childhood.

In fact, one machine we had for about five or six days, the jackpot was $5,000. That was the biggest jackpot we ever had. We hit that jackpot twice, and it was tom who hit it both times. Other teams of players would have kept the money and never told anybody. We never had to worry about that. The biggest jackpot we played for was 3,000 coins, which is $750.00. I kinda like that because as fast as we used to play, we hit a lot of those jackpots.

I have a lot of memories of those two plus years in the early 90’s. One time we had two over payers side by side. The most we ever made in one machine, was $29,000. We had a lot of really nice suites. We had really good seats to a lot of shows. All the food we could eat in the casinos best restaurants. The first year we made way over $100,000 a piece. The second year was much harder but we still made $100,00 apiece.

After that second year they were really hard to find plus so many people knew about them. I had a chance to talk to a guy who I would always see playing an over payer. He told me that before I showed up,that he used to go all over town and put a hundred dollar bill in all the overpayers and let the players fill the machine back up and used to make about a hundred dollars a day. He said that he never thought about doing it the way I did it. I told him I did it by accident. I wasn’t even a slot player.I asked him why he thinks we got away with it for so long.

He thinks its because the hotel casino’s were owned by stock holders, and everybody in the casinos, were making a lot of extra money, any way they could. He said, when the slot attendants realize what you were doing, they starting telling all their friends. Well, one thing is for sure. There will never be over payer ever again. All the casinos have slot machines that just take vouchers now.

But I’m sure someone, someday will figure out how to make extra money on vouchers.