In Detroit, Michigan, the Gaming Control Board Lab, a testing facility for casino games, resembles a mini-casino, but it’s quiet enough for employees to hear the ventilation fans overhead. “We turn the volume down. We don’t need that noise all day,” said engineer Nader Jadallah. The lab operates in a windowless office in the basement of the former General Motors headquarters. A swimming pool used to occupy the space and employees still can smell a trace of chlorine outside the secure door to the lab, where five engineers test slot machines and other games for compliance with state standards before they’re installed in the city’s three casinos.
Lab Manager Chris Adams said, “We want to make sure that it’s random. We can actually extract the random number generator output. We’ll run a battery of tests on the number to make sure that it is indeed random.” Adams added, “We had a manufacturer once who said, ‘If it looks random …’ and we said, ‘Wait, w don’t want it to look random, we want it to be random.'”
Adams said his team tests about 1,300 games a year. A vault on the premises contains copies of the proprietary software used to the run the games, which manufacturers are required to submit for audit comparisons. If the software doesn’t match, the casino or the manufacturer can be fined, Adams said. The most common violations involve machines that were programmed to meet another state’s specifications, because Michigan rules are more stringent than several other states, Adams said.
Richard Kalm, executive director of the Michigan Gaming Control Board, said state law requires games to pay out at least 80 percent of the money they take in for prizes, although the actual payouts typically are higher due to competition for customers. “It’s proprietary and it may change, but we have to make sure that they don’t go below that 80 percent,” Kalm said.
