A blue moon in your eyes (non-poker content)

About the title of this blog post--you either get it or you don't. You either excitedly thought, "Cool, a post about the Sopranos!" or you thought, "What the hell is 'blue moon in your eyes' about?"

There was a big gaming expo here a month or so ago. The only news from it that caught my attention was the announcement of a Sopranos-themed slot machine. Now, I could easily go the rest of my life without touching a slot machine and not feel the loss. But with the best television show in history now off the air, anything new related to Tony and the gang will get my heart beating a little bit faster. Upon hearing the news, I vowed that I would deviate from my usual abstinence from the slots and give David Chase et al. one dollar of my hard-earned money when I first found one of these beauties.

And tonight it happened. While playing poker at the Silverton, I noticed a banner announcing that the Sopranos slot machines were here. When I was done playing, I went looking for them. As you can (maybe) see from the blurry pictures (some day I have got to upgrade to a phone with a better camera), they are arranged in banks, with a big TV screen overhead. The screen rotates between playing the show's famous opening (the drive from New York to New Jersey, with the song, but without the credits rolling), the current jackpot amounts, and photos of the Soprano crew with quotations.

The machines use mechanical reels rather than video-simulated ones, but don't bother with an arm to pull--just a button to press. In addition to more traditional slot-machine symbols on the reels, there are photos of the main characters, plus a few locations, like Barone Sanitation and Satriale's Meats, that can line up.

As with most modern slots, there is a bewildering variety of ways the symbols can line up in various combinations to win, and if you really want to understand them, you have to crouch down and read about 30 paragraphs of fine print. I didn't bother. I inserted my $1, selected one winning line and ten credits (at $0.01 each) per line, which meant I would get ten shots at winning, for ten cents each. That's me, Mr. Big-time Gambler.

The first seven times I pushed the "spin" button, the only outcome was 10 fewer credits in my bank. But then....

I have no idea what combination I hit. It didn't look particularly special to me, but the machine started going crazy. In addition to racking up some credits, it gave me eight free spins. Unlike any machine I've played before (which admittedly isn't many), however, it started doing the free spins for me right then, just one after another, and it seemed that every one of them was hitting something and adding more credits and more free spins, which it also ran automatically for me. It felt vaguely like watching a nuclear chain-reaction in slow motion, and I was just hoping that it would spit out a "pay" ticket before it went all China Syndrome on me.

This went on for about two minutes. When it finally stopped ringing and dinging and spinning, it showed me having accumulated 430 credits.

Well, I know that this is as good as it's likely to get, so I cashed out my big $4.30 ticket and took it to the cashier's cage for my cash. I was willing to give the gang $1, but when they were nice enough (probably because I've been such a loyal fan of the show) to make me a winner by quadrupling my money, I didn't want to insult their generosity by just losing it back.

So I did what any good "wise guy" would do: I took the money and ran.

Thanks, T!