Big Bertha

With the advent of the slot machine, the race was on to build a bigger machine. Big Bertha was born, a six by ten foot super slot machine, costing more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to produce. The machine is powered by a five horsepower electric motor needed to drive the twenty-inch wide chain driven wheels. With eight reels containing 20 symbols each, there are 25.6 billion different possible combinations. That's right BILLION. Only one of which pays the 1 million dollar jackpot. A little basic math shows that with these odds, a player would have to pull the arm about 205 billion times at one dollar a spin. Not very good odds to hit the million dollar jackpot. Not the best return on investment ever conceived, except from the casinos point of view.

A long-standing record of $65,093 was won in one slots pull on a one-dollar progressive at Harold's Club in Reno in 1973. Quite recently (2001) a woman won over $1,000,000 in an Ontario, Canada Casino. It's worth noting the machine has a progressive that costs $100 a pull. If you would like to play slots we recommend the casinos in the table below.