As much as 70 percent of the $48 billion in gaming revenues raked in by the casinos comes from slots. Players make an average of six pilgrimages a year to these beckoning temples of luck, and more than a quarter of American adults now list gambling as their No. This year a record 73 million Americans will visit one of the 1,200 gambling joints now stretching from coast to coast-a nearly 40 percent increase in visitors from just five years ago. In the past fifteen years the number of such devices has grown fivefold, to more than 740,000, and is still mounting. Some statistics, random but telling:Īmerica now has twice as many publicly available gambling devices that take money-slot and video-poker machines and electronic lottery outlets-as it does ATMs that dispense it. But the recent proliferation of highly sophisticated, computerized, brightly lit, singing-and-talking slots has done away with any lingering social stigma attached to the betting life.
And for decades thereafter, even as casinos low-rolled their way into the mainstream, gambling itself retained an air of disrepute (charming though it could be) that tended to keep decent folks away. When legalized casino gambling dawned in America, in the era of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, primitive slot machines-those one-armed bandits-served as little more than mechanical babysitters for the wives and girlfriends of high-roller card and dice players.
