The Boys Who Beat the Slot Machines on Shanklin Pier!

When we were about 15 years old, my mate John and myself went camping on the Isle of Wight and we stayed in a small town on the coast called Shanklin. Being a popular holiday resort, most of the coastal towns on the island, like Sandown and Ventnor, had piers and Shanklin was no exception.

I can’t remember what it was called but one of the attractions on the pier displayed a large map of the island high up on a wall for everyone to see. The map must have been about 15 feet wide and 8 or 9 feet high. Dotted around the map coastline were a number of light bulbs each positioned next to one of the towns on the island.

Every minute or so, a single light would start to wiz around the map from one town to another in a random order. After a few seconds, the light would come to rest on a single town. The idea of the attraction was for the punters to gamble on which town the light would stop on.

Under the map were 6 chest-high slot machines each with a display for town names, a slot for accepting a penny bet and a tray for paying out winnings.

The names of the towns were distributed among the slot machine displays. Some displays had 4 names on them, some had 2 and some had one, but no town was on more than one display.

While the light was wizzing around the map, the town name on the corresponding slot machine would light up in sync with it. Whichever town the light eventually stopped on, only one machine paid out. The winning pay out was most for the machines with one name, and least for the machines with 4 names. Because there were 6 machines, up to 6 people could bet at any one time.

John loves a gamble, so he loved to play on the machines. Me, not so much. Anyway, after a number of goes, we were talking and one of us (I don’t remember who) said that he thought there was a repeating pattern on the towns the light stopped on!

The next day we came back to the machines armed with a notepad and a pencil and started to list every town the map light stopped on in sequence. One of the pier staff saw what we were doing and told us that we were wasting our time because the display was controlled by a random number generator! But, anyway, we chose to carry on until we must have had at least 150 names listed.

What to do now? We decided to look for repeating patterns of 2 names. For instance, if the map light stopped at Sandown after one run, and then stopped at Ventnor the next, we quickly looked down our list until we found that sequence and then whatever the next town in the list was, one of us would rush over to the slot machine with that name on it and put in a penny bet!

Of course, this strategy didn’t work all the time, or even most of the time, but it worked often enough for us to begin to build up a winning pile of coins!

There was a bit of a hiccup in the proceedings when some other lads noticed what we were doing, and seeing what slot machine we would head for, they would get there first! The bastards. We handled this by pretending to go for one machine, and then at the last second betting on another!

Anyway, we were so successful that in the end we got thrown off the pier by the management! Not before we had amassed over 10 bob in penny coins (120 pence) though. We should be millionaires today!