Video slot machines are well established in many parts of the country, but here in the greater New York metropolitan area they're nowhere to be found. That's about to change, however, as two local New York tracks, Aqueduct Racetrack and Yonkers Raceway, are placing a total of about 1,000 of these machines on their premises. This got me thinking about the companies we cover in EEPN and who might be selling to the manufacturers of these machines. I typed "gaming" into the search engine on our site (www.eepn.com) and found companies like Zendex (www.zendex.com), American Bright Optoelectronic (www.americanbright.com) and 3M Touch Systems  (www.3M.com).

Here's what we wrote about the Zendex product: "Zendex makes the ZXE-855 video-gaming board that promises a rich visual experience expected in casinos. It allows users to configure it for optimal speed, power consumption, or cost." And here's our writeup for the American Bright product: "American Bright's Wedge-Based LEDs feature a service life of 100,000 hours and produce a similar color output as industry standard white T-1/34 (5 mm) wedge-based incandescent bulbs. Designed for use on circuit boards, computers and peripherals, the LEDs are also finding use in the gaming industry as replacements for incandescents in such areas as "bet" and "credit" illuminated buttons on slot machines. As for 3M Touch Systems, we wrote that "its Dispersive Signal Technology (DST) enables creative, multi-player gaming applications such as table games, bar top games, and giant slot machines." It's good to see that some of the companies we cover are taking advantage of this boom in video slot machines. And, as you probably know, video terminals can deliver more than just slot machine action, poker and other types of games are available, too.

This got me wondering who the above companies might be selling to. Since we don't cover companies that make end-user products in EEPN, I typed "video gaming terminals" and then "video gaming machines" into Google. I came across companies such as GTECH (www.gtech.com) and Bally Gaming and Systems (www.ballygaming.com). At GTECH's site I located some information for its customers at (http://www.gtech.com/site_resources/pdfs/ES_Video.pdf), which I found pretty interesting. Then I found the web site for the Gaming Standards Association (www.gamingstandards.com), which had further links to manufactures as well as information on industry trade shows. If your company has not yet sold to these manufacturers, I think attending one of these trade shows might be the place to start.

Let's move on now. Recently, I found myself in a conversation with my brother as to which gambling game was the easiest to beat. He thought blackjack and I thought horse racing. My contention is that beating a 5-deck blackjack shoe in a typical casino is not possible for the average guy, while my brother contends that horse racing is just a game of luck. To find out more about both games, I perused my bookcase and found a book called "The Mathematics of Gambling" by Dr. Edward O. Thorp. If you're not familiar with the name, Dr. Thorp is the guy who wrote the famous blackjack book "Beat the Dealer" back in 1962, when most casinos used just one deck for blackjack.

What I found most interesting in the book was Dr. Thorp's explanation of the foundations of "Beat the Dealer." From what he says in "The Mathematics of Gambling," he spent a great deal of time researching the game of blackjack and then decided to try to publish a paper called "A Winning Strategy for Blackjack" in a journal called the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." To do this, he needed a member of the Academy to approve and recommend the paper for publication. The only mathematics member of the Academy at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was none other than Claude Shannon, the father of modern digital communications! Shannon suggested changing the name of the paper to "A Favorable Strategy for Twenty One" and the paper was published!

But this is not the end of the story. Dr. Thorp was also working on a way to beat roulette by considering the physics of the spinning ball and the wheel. Shannon was so impressed with Thorp's blackjack paper that he decided to help out with the roulette scheme. Here's a paragraph from the book:

And then he (Shannon) asked, "Are you working on anything else in the gambling area?" I (Thorp) decided to spill my other big secret and told him about roulette. Several exciting hours later, as the wintery sky turned dusky, we finally broke off with plans to meet again on the roulette project. Shannon lived in a huge old three story wooden house on one of the Mystic Lakes, several miles from Cambridge. His basement was a gadgeteer's paradise. It had perhaps a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronic, electrical and mechanical items. There were hundreds of categories, like motors, transistors, switches, pulleys, tools, condensers, transformers and on and on." Sounds like EEPN come to life, doesn't it.