“Lively like how?”
Maxine returned her gaze to the casino floor. “Do you ever play the slots, Mr. Stilman?”
“Not since I first got here,” Stilman responded. “I tried them once, just because it seemed the thing to do at a casino, but they always seemed to be pretty much a sucker bet to me.”
“That’s quite correct,” Max said with a nod. “They’re popular with the tourists, and because of that they provide a surprisingly high income for any casino. Even the lure of a high jackpot, however, doesn’t offset the fact that the odds are depressingly high against the player.”
“Yeah. So?” Stilman pressed, but Maxine was not about to be rushed.
“Take that island of machines over there, for example,” she said, indicating a cluster of slots with a nod of her head. “They only accept fifty-dollar tokens to play, but there’s a progressive jackpot attached to them, with a guaranteed minimum of ten million dollars. Of course, if you read the fine print on the machine, you have to bet the maximum of five tokens and hit a very rare combination of images to qualify for the big jackpot.”
“Are you saying that someone’s going to win the jackpot tonight? Ten million dollars?”
Stilman craned his neck to peer at the machines, obviously impressed.
Maxine smiled. “I know I’ve said it before, Mr. Stilman, but you habitually think too small. You’ll notice that, like all casinos today, Mr. Gunther is using the video-image slot machines as opposed to the old models that mechanically match the various images. This both reduces the maintenance necessary, since there are fewer moving parts, and lets the house control the odds more closely, as the payout rate is controlled by the central computer which all the machines are tied into-the computer, if you’ll recall, that we’ve paid substantially to gain access to.”