The majority of us love going for a slap-up meal, but if it was a choice of that or winning $42.9 million (£38 million) most would opt for the cash….and then treat themselves to culinary delights every night for the rest of their lives.
Katrina Bookman could not believe her eyes when she won a $42.9 million jackpot while playing the Sphinx slot game at Resorts World in Queens, New York. It’s an amount that almost seems to good to be true, and would have broken the record for the highest slots payout in history.
And it was too good to be true, it turns out. Bookman was the unfortunate victim of a slot machine malfunction, and in actual fact she should have won just $2.25 on her $0.01 bet. As an act of apology, Resorts World even promised to throw in a free steak dinner as a consolation prize.
So should Resorts World have been made to pay out on their error, or should Bookman have accepted her free meal and enjoyed every morsel of it?
Let’s take a deep dive into one of the most bizarre casino stories of the past decade.
Beef with Genting
Bookman, a single mum of four, decided to enjoy some leisure time at her local casino in Queens back in August 2016. And she’d earned it: raised in foster care and at one time homeless and on the streets, she rebounded to put a roof over the head of her children and get them through high school.
She was playing one cent per spin, so was clearly budgeting to play for as long as possible, on a slot that had a stated maximum payout of $6,500 – remember this bit, because it will be important later on.
Somehow, despite that guaranteed top prize, a winning spin of the reels from Bookman declared she had won $42,949,672.76….a rather more sizable sum than she would have expected from a single cent spin.
Presumably in such instances, you take leave of your senses – if she had remained grounded, Bookman would surely have realised this was an unfortunate error. However, that’s not a criticism….many of us would have surely reacted in similarly jubilant fashion.
She tracked down an attendant and regaled them with her good news. However, her joy was to soon turn to misery when the casino worker revealed that Bookman had, in actual fact, won loose change instead of her life-changing prize.
Bookman was escorted from the casino after making her fury known, and told to come back the next day for an official ‘decision’.
Going through the motions, Resorts World staff apologised profusely for the error, and promised to pay Bookman both her $2.25 prize and a free steak meal by way of recompense.
“Casino personnel were able to determine that the figure displayed on the penny slot was the result of an obvious malfunction,” a spokesperson for Resorts World confirmed.
But hell hath no fury like a slot gamer scorned.
“The struggle I’ve been through, it’s hard to cope,” Bookman revealed when interviewed by US news agencies.
“I kept thinking about my family. I said, ‘What did I win?’ The casino rep said, ‘You didn’t win nothing.”
Understandably angered, Bookman went home and got straight onto the phone to her lawyer….
See You In Court
Bookman’s attorney, Alan Ripka, put together a lawsuit against Genting New York, the parent company of Resorts World, in a writ that also featured the name of SPIELO, the slot machine manufacturer responsible for the Sphinx game that Bookman had played.
He claimed that his client had suffered ‘mental anguish’ after having her big win taken away, and that Resorts World were ‘negligent’ in allowing a broken slot machine on their gaming floor. Ripka and Bookman were going for the full $43 million in damages from Genting.
“The machine takes your money when you lose. It ought to pay it when you win,” Ripka commented.
“You can’t claim a machine is broken because you want it to be broken. Does that mean it wasn’t inspected? Does it mean it wasn’t maintained? And, if so, does that mean that people that played there before [Bookman] had zero chance of winning?”
The problem is that he is battling a set of terms and conditions and free passes that are almost legendary in their ability to prevent casinos having to cough up. For example, all slot games on the casino floor are covered by a simple message: malfunction voids all pays and plays.
As if that wasn’t enough, the New York State Gaming Commission – whose rules oversee the Resorts World casino that Bookman had frequented – have also covered their clients with a number of statutes designed to protect them from technological mishaps that are beyond their control.
Genting escaped punishment because they removed the faulty slot machine from their gaming floor immediately, and packed it off to SPIELO to be fixed.
Their response to the legal case put forward by Bookman’s representatives is that the message displayed on screen after her win was an ‘obvious malfunction’. Given that the game had a stated jackpot of $6,500, it’s hard to argue with that conclusion.
Now, five years later, it has never publicly been revealed how Bookman’s legal case fared. But given all of the defence mechanisms we have explored already, it’s evident that she would have a hard time convincing a judge of the merits of her position.
The Worst Slot Game Malfunctions Ever
We’ve all worked with computers and technology long enough to know that things don’t always go as planned with them.
But to have a $42.9 million ‘win’ taken from you, no matter how clear and obvious it was a tech flaw, is galling to say the least.
As if it would be any cause for consolation, Bookman is not the only player to have been wronged by a gremlin in a slot machine. Back in 2011, a 90-year-old woman thought she had won $41.7 million playing the Miss Kitty slot game, and having been denied she embarked on a four-year legal battle to get her back what she felt she was rightfully owed.
Unfortunately, the Iowa Supreme Court came down on the side of the casino, and decreed that the woman should receiver her rightful winnings only – the princely sum of $1.85.
In that case, the slot game in question had a defined maximum jackpot of $10,000, and the ruling judge decided that the player and the casino enter into an unwritten contract that those are the accepted terms.
And it’s for that very reason that Bookman probably should have taken a moment to calm down, think rationally and order extra fries with her on-the-house steak dinner….
But sometimes, the story does have a happy ending. One slot gamer won $230,000 back in February 2022….without even realising it.
A slot game at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino had malfunctioned, and didn’t inform Robert Taylor that he had won big. Instead, he left the casino none-the-wiser.
Treasure Island staff later learned of the error, and went full Poirot trying to identify the player using footage from security cameras. Eventually Taylor, who had returned to his home in Nevada, was identified and informed of his jackpot prize.