You can play a slot machine in Las Vegas before you’ve even reached baggage claim: there are tiny slots parlors in every terminal of McCarran International Airport. Once you pick up your rental car, you can stop for gas and play slots at a convenience store. And that’s all before you’ve even reached your hotel-casino, which — if it follows the modern standard — dedicates roughly 80 percent of its gaming floor to slots, and only 20 percent to table games. The room was silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consolesBally Technologies, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of slot machines, is headquartered 3 miles south of the Strip. When I visited Bally in mid-March, Mike Trask, the company’s senior marketing manager, walked me into the company’s showroom to play some games.

The top three slot machine manufacturers are Novomatic, SG, and JPM. These three stand out not just for the quantity of their productions, but also the quality.

Compared to the cacophony of a casino floor, Bally’s showroom was practically monastic, the lights low and the room silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consoles.Trask, a tall man in his 30s with dirty-blond hair, showed me the company’s new Friends-themed game, installed on Bally’s ProWave cabinet, a slick, 42-inch curved console. Friends celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, and the company hopes to tap some of that nostalgia.

'That person, that girl who watched every episode of Friends when it came out, is our demographic,' Trask said, standing alongside the cabinet.I took a seat in front of the unit, and Trask touched a logo on the display’s upper corner, selected a box on the display that ensured I would get a bonus round, and told me to hit the spin button. I did, and a pared down version of the show’s theme song played, the NBC sextet smiled at me from the prime of their youth, and five reels of symbols — a Central Perk decal, a guitar, screenshots of characters — scrolled down the screen. The Wheel of Fortune-style bonus round featured a clip of Rachel saying, 'Happy birthday, Grandma!' Wearing a wedding dress.Bally assembles all of its machines in a factory warehouse next to its game studios and tucked behind its Vegas corporate headquarters. Last year, Scientific Games, Bally’s parent company, shipped out more than 17,000 new units. On my visit, hundreds of freshly assembled slot machine shells, featuring the industry standard black exterior and jutting dashboards, lined the warehouse walls.A tag attached to each cabinet indicated its destination: Oklahoma, Washington, Michigan, Canada.

Only a handful were destined for Vegas casinos, a sign of gaming’s national and international expansion. Scientific Games acquired Bally last year for $5 billion. At the time, 23 states had legalized gambling, a heavily taxable industry, to quickly infuse deficient coffers. Technology built for slot machines has found admirers in Silicon ValleyBut the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less. New York, the latest state to introduce gaming, doesn’t even allow table games, and Pennsylvania, now the third-largest gaming state in the country after Nevada and New Jersey, only later allowed table games in an amendment to its legislation.

And increasingly, the psychological and technical systems originally built for slot machines — including reward schedules and tracking systems — have found admirers in Silicon Valley.In the factory, Trask and I passed a ProWave cabinet, a design released by Bally in mid-2014 that features a 32-inch concave screen, like an even more curved Samsung TV. Trask claimed that putting the same exact games on curved screens increased gameplay 30-80 percent. I asked him why that was. 'It looks cool; it’s incredibly clear,' he said in a tone suggesting a guess as good as any. Game designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying. As we stood over the gaming cabinet, Trask told me about the floor of the MGM, home to 2,500 machines and hundreds of different games. Trask’s mission, as he saw it, was simple: 'Our job is to get you to choose our game.'

The prototypical slot machine was invented in Brooklyn in the mid-1800s — it was a cash register-sized contraption and used actual playing cards. Inserting a nickel and pressing a lever randomized the cards in the small display window, and depending on the poker hand that appeared, a player could win items from the establishment that housed the machine. In 1898, Charles Fey developed the poker machine into the Liberty Bell machine, the first true slot with three reels and a coin payout. Each reel had 10 symbols, giving players a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting the 50-cent jackpot if three Liberty Bells lined up. The three-reel design was a hit in bars and became a casino standard, but for decades gaming houses considered them little more than a frivolity — distractions for the wives of table-game players.

Accordingly, casinos were dense with table games, and slots were relegated to the periphery.That began to change in the 1960s, when Bally introduced the electromechanical slot machine. The new rig let players insert multiple coins on a single bet, and machines could multiply jackpots as well as offer up smaller, but more frequent wins. Multi-line play was introduced: alongside the classic horizontal lineup, players could now win with diagonal and zig-zagged combinations. The new designs sped up gameplay and breathed life into the stagnating industry.William 'Si' Redd, the bolo tie-wearing Mississippi native who oversaw some of Bally’s new projects during the era, was instrumental to that renaissance.

'The player came to win,' he said, 'he didn’t come to lose, so speed it up, give him more, be more liberal. Let him win more, but then you make money still with the speeding up, because it was extra liberal.' In other words, the new machines lowered slots’ volatility — gaming parlance for the frequency at which a player experiences big wins and losses. Video poker gained a reputation as the 'crack cocaine' of gamblingIn the 1970s, Redd left Bally and founded another gaming manufacturer that was later renamed IGT. IGT specialized in video gambling machines, or video poker. Video poker machines could be designed to have even lower volatility, paying players back small amounts on more hands. And video poker’s interactive elements made them extra engrossing, turning them into an enormous success: people lined up to play the first machines, and the game’s ability to command a player’s complete concentration for hours gave it a reputation as the 'crack cocaine' of gambling.'

If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,' Redd said at the time, instructing game designers to lengthen the time it took a poker machine to consume a player’s money.Redd also acquired the patent for the newly created Random Number Generator, which computerized the odds-calculator behind the spinning reels and allowed game makers to control volatility. A modern slot machine, at its core, is nothing more than an RNG going through millions or billions of numbers at all times. When a player hits a spin button, they are simply stopping the RNG at a particular moment. Everything beyond that — the music, the mini-games, the actual appearance of spinning reels, Rachel, Monica, and the rest of the gang keeping you company — is window dressing to keep you hitting spin. Price and I spoke on the floor of Harrah’s Las Vegas at 9:00AM — the slots players were already at their machines, or perhaps they’d been there all night. Last year, Harrah’s parent company, Caesar’s Entertainment, declared bankruptcy as a consequence of overextension and growing competition.

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During proceedings, creditors appraised Caesar’s vast store of customer data as the company’s most valuable asset, worth about $1 billion.Harrah’s pioneered the now industry standard Total Rewards player tracking system, first with a punchcard program introduced in 1985, then with a digital program and magnetic cards in the 1990s. Slots were easy to track, and stood at the very center of the program. The system grew even more sophisticated under the auspices of former CEO Gary Loveman. Loveman arrived at Harrah’s fresh from teaching at Harvard Business School, and he brought a methodical business savvy to an industry that, in many ways, had spent decades winging it. Caesar’s vast store of customer data has been valued at about $1 billionBefore the tracking system, the player management was as sophisticated as watching which players spent a lot of money and comping amenities to encourage them to spend more.

'We all looked around and said, there’s got to be a more automated way to do that,' said Price.Price and I stood behind a woman playing IGT’s Ellen Degeneres game. Ellen’s head whizzed down the reels on the parabolic display in high definition.

Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. Though his St. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. The time had come for an exit strategy.But Alex couldn’t just cash out as if he owned an ordinary startup because his business operates in murky legal terrain.

The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms—known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs—that govern how slot machine games behave. Armed with this knowledge, he can predict when certain games are likeliest to spit out money—insight that he shares with a legion of field agents who do the organization’s grunt work.These agents roam casinos from Poland to Macau to Peru in search of slots whose PRNGs have been deciphered by Alex. They use phones to record video of a vulnerable machine in action, then transmit the footage to an office in St. There, Alex and his assistants analyze the video to determine when the games’ odds will briefly tilt against the house. They then send timing data to a custom app on an agent’s phone; this data causes the phones to vibrate a split second before the agent should press the “Spin” button. By using these cues to beat slots in multiple casinos, a four-person team can.

Alex, who insists that his hacking doesn’t violate Russian law, fancies himself a bit of a Robin Hood—a champion for the common man against an avaricious casino industry. “Gaming manufacturers claim they provide ‘entertainment,’ but we all know the nature of this ‘entertainment’ a little too well,” he says by email. “All they and I are really doing is moving money.

Their job is to help casinos take money from the people; my job is to help myself and the people take money from the casinos. Just a little counterweight to the global gambling system, where the house always wins.” Yet he also knows that his self-described “milking system” is considered criminal in several countries, including the United States: In 2014, four of his agents were after sweeping through casinos in Missouri, Illinois, and California. Determined to find a way to score one last payday before shutting down his enterprise, Alex reached out to Aristocrat Leisure, an Australian slot machine manufacturer whose vulnerable products have been his chief targets. In a November 2016 email to Tracey Elkerton, the company’s global head of regulatory and product compliance, he offered to direct his agents to “cancel their work on Aristocrat slots to stop compromising your trademark” as well as “help your developers eliminate all design flaws.” He did not mention the fee he expected to be paid for these services, though he did note that he wished “to extract maximum money from my developments.”. Clearly unsettled by the tenor of Alex’s approach, Elkerton suggested that they meet on neutral ground in the US. “If we were to arrange a meeting, our goal would be to understand the method that you have developed that is being used in various countries to cash out more money than expected from certain Aristocrat slot games,” she wrote in her reply.Alex could never agree to such a meeting, of course; by setting foot on US soil he would be risking arrest. Frustrated by what he perceived as stalling on Aristocrat’s part, he decided to make Elkerton aware of just how much havoc he could wreak on her employer.My own dialogue with Alex began in February of this year, after he read a I’d written about his agents’ exploits in the US.

(“I keep an eye on what becomes public regarding my business,” he explained via email.) His name had already come up twice in the course of my reporting—once from someone close to the fraud investigation in the Eastern District of Missouri and once in conversation with Willy Allison, a casino security consultant who has been the St. Petersburg organization for years.After much back and forth, Alex agreed to an on-the-record interview on the conditions that his surname not be used and that he could disregard questions about his personal life that struck him as too invasive. To bolster the veracity of what he shared, Alex supplied corroborating evidence in the form of emails, mathematical proofs, and audio recordings. I was able to verify several of his statements by checking them against legal documents or by consulting with people familiar with his organization’s work.There are still several aspects of Alex’s story that could not be confirmed, however, starting with his education. He claims that after studying math and programming at a top Russian university, he spent two years at the FSB Academy, a government-run school that trains prospective members of the country’s intelligence apparatus. He also says he was once employed at a that specializes in teaching cryptography and hardware hacking. During his formative years, Alex says, he never had the slightest interest in slot machines: “As a mathematician, I was aware of how odds work at an early age,” he says.

“Mostly gambling appeared to me as nothing more than taxation on stupidity.”Alex’s life-changing introduction to slots came about a decade ago, while he was working as a freelance hacker. A Russian casino hired him to learn how to tweak machines manufactured by Novomatic, an Austrian company, so that their odds would favor the house more than usual: The machine had been programmed to pay out 90 percent of the money it took in, a figure that Alex’s client wanted him to adjust down to 50 percent. In the course of reverse engineering Novomatic’s software, Alex encountered his first PRNG. He was instantly fascinated by the elegance of, which is designed to spew forth an endless series of results that appear impossible to forecast. It does this by taking an initial number, known as a seed, and then mashing it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example. In 2008 Alex unleashed his newfound mastery on the gambling world, hiring a small group of employees to “milk” Novomatic machines throughout eastern Europe.

(Three years later, Novomatic became the first slots manufacturer to that some of its PRNGs had been compromised.) After Russia largely in 2009, resulting in a massive sell-off of gaming equipment, Alex was able to get his hands on an Aristocrat Mark VI slot machine cabinet. He reverse engineered the PRNGs for numerous Mark VI games and the popular machine—more than 100,000 are still on casino floors worldwide—soon became his burgeoning organization’s favorite prey: In the 2014 case in Missouri, for example, every count in the indictment relates to the bilking of a Mark VI.Alex recruits his field agents online and meets few of them in person, ensuring that they won’t be able to reveal too much about his operation if they’re ever caught and interrogated. Besides his Robin Hood justification, Alex defends his enterprise as cunning but by no means criminal. “We, in fact, do not meddle with the machines—there is no actual hacking taking place,” he says.

“My agents are just gamers, like the rest of them. Only they are capable of making better predictions in their betting.

Yes, that capability is gained through my technology, it’s true. But why should it be against the law?

On the basic level, it’s like using a calculator for counting faster and more accurately, rather than relying on one’s natural capacity.” It is logic very much in sync with Russia’s culture of cutthroat capitalism.Just before Aristocrat shut down for Australia’s Christmas break last year, Tracey Elkerton received an unexpected phone call from a man who identified himself only as Peter. “I’m calling on behalf of Alex,” he explained in lightly accented English, without informing Elkerton that he was secretly recording the call. (Alex let WIRED listen to the recording.) “He is a guy from Russia that you had an email exchange with?

He hired me as an interpreter and he’s currently on the other line with me. Can you speak for a few minutes with him?” (Alex knows some English, but he prefers to use a translator when handling sensitive business matters.)On the recording, Elkerton sounds initially flustered by the situation and appears to try to nip the conversation in the bud by saying that she has a meeting to attend.

But Peter cajoles her into remaining on the line so he can relay Alex’s message, and the veteran Aristocrat executive gradually becomes more assertive as the half-hour conversation wears on. “He is talking of a deal with you where he can help you neutralize the exploit and stop the occurrences in the casinos,” Peter says on Alex’s behalf.

“Like, he wants to be paid for it. So his question is whether you are willing to negotiate on that issue.”. Elkerton does not dismiss the possibility outright.

In fact, she says that it does at least seem plausible. The Helixes that Aristocrat had been shipping, she says, “do not yet contain the solution that we have implemented.” (An Aristocrat spokesperson stresses that “Ms. Elkerton’s comment in response to the extortionist’s cheat allegation against unspecified games on Helix cabinets simply acknowledged a theoretical potential.”)Sensing that he now has the advantage, Alex instructs Peter to demand that his proposal be passed along to Aristocrat’s most senior decision-makers, whom he believes would accept his offer if they knew their Helixes were in peril. But Elkerton counters by citing not only Aristocrat’s commitment to being “truly ethical” in its dealings but also her fear that Alex might not be a man of his word: “I have no guarantee that Alex shuts down this crew slash syndicate if we were to pay him a fee, a consulting fee, whatever we want to call it.”Before ending the call, Elkerton poses a question to Alex: Why, after many years of earning millions with his milking system, is he now eager to cut a deal with Aristocrat? Why is he no longer content to continue making a small fortune by sending his agents around the globe?

“He does know that in some countries his system is illegal, and that does concern him because he does not want to be criminal,” Peter answers. “He decided it would be better for him to get out of the illegal field and just shut it down and get a certain payment from the company for consultation and the patch.”Upon hearing that Alex’s fondest wish is to be a straight arrow, Elkerton bursts into grim laughter.Alex waited three weeks for Aristocrat to have a change of heart, then sent Elkerton a lengthy email in which he detailed the specific services he could provide in exchange for a sum that ran into eight figures. He also outlined some of the steps he might take if Aristocrat continued to dawdle, such as sharing his vulnerability information with the company’s competitors so that they could secure their own machines as well as poach Aristocrat’s customers.As in his earlier email, he offered mathematical evidence of his bona fides—in this instance a breakdown of how the PRNG works for a game called 50 Dragons that runs on Helix machines. The proof also included a photograph of a Helix machine that Alex’s organization had allegedly targeted at the Sands Macau Casino; Alex urged Elkerton to have one of the company’s engineers check the machine’s logs to verify his claims.Aristocrat parsed its words carefully in response to my inquiry as to whether Alex has cracked a Helix game’s PRNG.

“Aristocrat received information from the extortionist alleging to be proof of a cheat,” the company informed me in a written statement. “However we could not verify any cheat based on the information provided.

Aristocrat reiterates that it has no evidence of any actual or potential cheat of any title other than the handful of Mark VI vintage titles previously reported.” (Aristocrat has informed its customers that the thousands of compromised Mark VI games “are no longer supportable” and urges them “to replace this old, end of life technology with new, more modern products.”). It seems improbable, however, that Alex could send Aristocrat a proof that the company’s engineers would instantly recognize as fiction. Were he to do so, Aristocrat would have good reason to dismiss him as a charlatan whose threats are idle. But based on its reaction to my various inquiries, the company seems far from nonchalant about the Alex situation.

(In response to a specific question about whether Alex’s email contained the 50 Dragons proof, a company spokesman said: “Aristocrat has confirmed this extortion attempt, the fact that it has been referred to the relevant authorities, and managed in compliance with all relevant protocols. It would be inappropriate to comment further.”). MagazineAfter Alex shared his most recent Aristocrat PRNG proof with me, I showed it to David Ackley, a computer science professor at the University of New Mexico. Ackley discovered that the algorithm had a peculiar backstory. On a hunch, he took some of the equation’s values that were expressed in hexadecimal format and converted them to decimal format.

When he did, he noticed that the resulting numbers were familiar: One was an approximation of pi (31415926), one was an abbreviation of the mathematical constant e (271828), and one was a slightly ribald jest (69069). By tracing those jokey references back, Ackley found that those exact numbers had also been used in a PRNG featured in, a 1988 program for the that simulated travel through a star field. When I contacted the author of SpaceOut, he recalled that he had cribbed his PRNG from the second volume of Donald Knuth’s, a classic of the discipline. I was able to locate that PRNG in the edition of the book that was published in 1981, though it may also appear in the original edition from a dozen years earlier.This coincidence raises at least two possibilities. The first is that Alex sent Aristocrat a fake proof full of mathematical in-jokes and wagered that the company’s engineers would be too dense to realize that he was putting them on. The second is that Aristocrat has been basing some of its PRNGs, at least in part, on an algorithm that is at least 36 years old and which has long been in the public domain.If the latter is the case, then Aristocrat—like all slot machine manufacturers—has a ready defense against any suggestion that its PRNGs are too feeble. Because government regulators must vet and approve all PRNGs before they’re used in casinos, those regulators are easy to blame when hackers like Alex find flaws in the code.

“Every single Aristocrat game that is on a venue floor—regardless of where it is—has been approved by the relevant regulators and complies fully with the standards required at the time it was placed,” a company spokesperson told me.Aristocrat has held fast to its refusal to negotiate with Alex, a decision that not all of its corporate peers have made when dealing with similar crises. In fact, plenty of companies confronted by hackers with damaging information have opted to play ball and transmit the requested bitcoins to their tormentor.

“You might be able to live with the cost of paying off the lawsuits and that sort of stuff, but the potential reputational damage might be too much to bear,” says Steve Stone, a leader of IBM's X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services division, which advises client on how to handle cyberextortion. When he inevitably tires of the slot-machine racket altogether, Alex is prepared to exit the industry in a blaze of mischief. “Sometimes I fantasize about just putting my tech out there for everyone to use,” he says. This would result in what he terms his “zombie apocalypse” scenario: Equipped with Alex’s information and software, both obtained online for free, anyone with a smartphone will be able to turn a vulnerable slot machine into a gaudily decorated ATM.“Can you imagine something like that?” Alex asks.

“It could uproot the entire slot machine industry. And the world just might become a slightly better place. Well, for most people at least.” Should that future come to pass, the losers will only have their mathematical sloppiness to blame.Brendan I. Koerner is a WIRED contributing editor and the author, most recently, of.