Katrina Bookman
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- Jun 17, 2017 Katrina Bookman, gambling at the Resorts World Casino New York City last August, took a selfie next to the screen where the figure appeared as noises, bells and lights announced to the floor a big.
- Apr 16, 2020 Katrina Bookman, it seems, was a hopeful part of this last group of people. So one evening in August 2016, the 44-year-old hit the Resorts World Casino in Queens, New York. There she sat at the “Sphinx Slot Machine,” a digital version of the traditional gambling game.
Anytime you go to a casino, you know the odds are stacked against you, that’s how they make so much money. For every hundred times you lose a bet there is that one time you win, and nothing will beat that feeling. The Psychological aspect of it is all about conditioning – which means that when you play and occasionally win (even if you lose most of the time), you’ll want to come back and try again and again, for that winning rush. And it is quite the rush!
But can you imagine thinking you’ve just hit jackpot and won a significant amount of money, only to have it taken away from you in a heartbeat? To get your hopes up that your whole entire life is about to be turned around, only to have those hopes crushed? One woman learned exactly what that was like, when she decided to try her hand in the Casino’s slot machines.
Veronica Castillo is a loan officer from Portland, Oregon, who just happened to be minding her own business while gambling in a Washington casino. With little chance of winning big, Castillo was happily playing for the fun of it, and if she happened to win something, then great.
It was in the casino where she would come across the unexpected, a massive jackpot, but before she even had to time think about spending it, the casino took it. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but the casino completely denied her of her winnings. So how did it all go down?
Castillo was happy to be on vacation, getting to spend some quality time with her mother. They were hanging out in a casino, gambling and just trying to have a good time. After looking around for a while, they decided they would use the slot machines.
The machines are pretty easy to use, all you need to do is put money in and pull the lever. Either you win, or you lose, it’s fairly simple but the jackpot Castillo was about to get would become a complicated matter.
Spending $100 easily
As she sat down in front of a slot machine, Castillo put in $100. She didn’t know if that would be enough to win something, but it would mean that she could sit in front of the machine along with her mom for a while.
Castillo put her money into a game called ‘Jurassic Riches’ which had a whole host of dinosaurs instead of the standard fruit symbols. It was this game that would soon give Castillo some life-changing winnings, but would she get to keep them?
Katrina Bookman Jackpot
When you step into a casino, you know from the beginning that your chances of coming out with more money than you start with are pretty slim. The reason we keep going back and gambling more is that if we do win, we will win big and come home with a life-changing amount of money.
In an ideal world, we would walk straight into a casino, make one bet and come home with millions in the bank. Castillo didn’t win the jackpot on her first try, but eventually, she won millions.
Can’t believe her luck
Sitting in a casino pulling the lever on a slot machine isn’t the most stressful of tasks, and Castillo was happy just chilling out. While watching the reels of her slot machine whirr, hoping to match enough to make it spew out some money, Castillo had the moment she could only have dreamt of.
The machine told her she was a winner and as she waited for her jackpot total to reveal itself, she could hardly believe her luck.
What began as just a regular old vacation with her mom, soon turned into a fight for her rights. She was watching her jackpot continue to rise, and with each dollar that was added to the total, her excitement grew.
It’s not often that you can go on vacation and by the time you come home your life has entirely transformed. It seemed as though the unthinkable had happened and Castillo had won a mega jackpot, but she would have to struggle to get her money.
Jackpot!
Ding ding ding! Castillo had won big, and she had managed to hit the jackpot, with the total continually rising it looked as though she would need a truck for her cash winnings.
As the numbers began to soar, soon Castillo was winning more than a million, more than two million, and eventually, it settled on over $8 million. This was such a lot of money to win, especially considering she was playing on a slot machine, rather than high stakes poker.
Completely in awe of her winnings, Castillo was unsure what to think, was this real? With so much money to spend, she started dreaming of all the things she could buy with the cash.
Private jet trips across the world, exotic vacation homes on desert islands, expensive jewelry, the list was growing all the time. $8 million can really come in handy, it’s the kind of money that will make sure you can be comfortable for the rest of your life.
Unexpected amount for everyone
While Castillo was busy celebrating her winnings and dreaming of the possibilities, the casino manager was making his way over. For what must have only felt like five minutes Castillo was a millionaire, but it was all set to come crashing down in no time.
Winning $8 million on a slot machine was totally unexpected, and not just for Castillo. The casino manager had made his way over and was suspicious of what the slot machine was saying Castillo had won.
There was a sting in the tail for Castillo, the casino manager wasn’t buying what the machine was telling him. He told Castillo something was wrong, and he didn’t think she would be able to keep her winnings.
The news came to the ecstatic Castillo like a kick in the teeth, and as quickly as she had reached a high, she found a low point. What did this manager mean she couldn’t have her money? She had been putting her hard-earned cash into it and she won it fair and square.
Just like that, the casino manager took Castillo’s winnings away from her, giving her the reasoning that the machine had malfunctioned. Castillo was told that she wouldn’t be getting $8 million, even though that’s what the slot machine had told her she was getting.
It was a bitter pill to swallow for the loan officer who was probably already spending half of that cash in her five minutes of glory. Castillo had been putting money into the machine, but now it was just being taken away.
If Castillo had any fears she would be left empty-handed they were soon put to rest. The casino manager was kind enough to offer her an $80 voucher in place of her $8 million winnings.
It seemed to Castillo that she was being deceived and the casino just didn’t want to pay her what she believed they owed her. Whatever the exact reason was, all Castillo knew was that she was given a lousy voucher when she should have been celebrating on a private island.
Needless to say, Castillo was devastated to be left without piles of money, just like pretty much everyone else would be too. With the flashing lights of the machine declaring her winnings becoming a distant memory, Castillo’s attention was directed to a small sticker.
The sticker was a disclaimer that pointed out if a machine malfunctions then the casino has no responsibility to pay out. It was almost as if Castillo was doing well to get her $80 voucher, even though she had put $100 into the machine to start with.
Castillo was unsure whether to believe the casino bosses or not. Was this just some story they had cooked up to prevent her from winning big, or does this happen fairly regularly? When the casino bosses checked the machine it said she had only won $80, so that’s what they gave her.
Castillo said she felt insulted and cheated. She was incredibly upset by it all but also worried that this has happened to other people out there.
It wasn’t just an $80 voucher that Castillo received though, she was put up in the adjoining casino hotel for a few nights. She wasn’t exactly living the millionaire lifestyle by staying in the hotel for a couple of nights, but it was definitely better than nothing.
The hotel was even offered to her with food included, so she could have eaten her way through the $8 million the casino owed her if she wanted.
Castillo didn’t take advantage of the offer to stay in the hotel. She said that it almost felt as though they were rubbing it in and no matter how many free meals they gave her it wouldn’t make up for the lost $8 million.
She could buy herself a whole bunch of meals, and probably even her own hotel if she had been allowed to keep the cash. For Castillo, no reward would do the $8 million any justice and that was the only thing she wanted.
It seemed like a convenient excuse for the casino, but had they actually done anything wrong? Was it okay to just point out a sticker when they didn’t want to pay out on their jackpots, or had they discovered there was actually a problem with the machine?
It is understandable that Castillo felt cheated by the casino, but if the machine had malfunctioned, then it would be extremely unfair on the casino to shell out $8 million.
The Lucky Eagle casino in Washington was opened in 1995 and the CEO, John Setterstrom, claimed that the incident involving Veronica Castillo was the first ever.
In all of his time there he believed the incident had never happened before and that he would be getting his team to look into the problem. The incident was an embarrassing one as it happened in 2015, the 20th anniversary of the casino’s opening. Mr. Setterstrom had to get to the bottom of the incident.
To find the explanation behind the situation, Mr. Setterstrom sent the supposed faulty machine off to be checked by experts. They would perform a forensic investigation on the slot machine and determine whether something went wrong, and if so, what the issue was.
The casino wanted to get to the bottom of what they perceived as a display malfunction, and after a while, they found out why the machine had displayed the astronomical jackpot.
The forensic investigators found that there was no way the slot machine could have ever promised winnings of $8 million. It had a set maximum of $20,000, meaning that was the single biggest payout a gambler could win from the machine.
The investigator also found that because of the money that Castillo had put into the machine, the maximum she could have won was only $6,000. That is a long way away from the $8 million Castillo thought she had won that day.
Although she was given a seemingly fair and reasonable explanation, Castillo has sought an attorney to look into the case. She was upset she couldn’t win the money but said she just wants to prevent it happening to someone else.
On her social media account, she said at the very least she wanted to raise awareness about how casinos work when people get big winnings, suggesting she still feels cheated. For a few minutes, Veronica Castillo was a multi-millionaire, only to have it snatched back from her in an instant.
Veronica’s story is, unfortunately, not very rare. As slot machines grow more and more sophisticated – and at this point they’re basically video games – so do malfunctions become more common. In perhaps an even more infuriating case, 44-year-old Katrina Bookman thought she won an incredible $42,949,672.
Instead, the casino told her the machine was broken and offered her a steak dinner instead. She took the casino to court, with the New York State Gaming Commission getting involved to say she should be paid what she actually won – $2.25.
All these stories – and there are quite a few of them now – beg the question of why the casino doesn’t just pay out the winnings. $42 million is a bit much, but when it comes to smaller sums, why doesn’t the casino just pay up and recoup the losses from other machines?
Another option is going after the machine’s manufacturer, and getting the difference from them. That would certainly go a long way in creating good will among the casino’s customer base, as opposed to insulting two-dollar offers.
In fact, one woman was successful in getting her money from a casino despite claims of a machine malfunction. In 2014, an unnamed woman won $100,000 at a British Columbia casino. Once again, the casino claimed that the maximum payoff was only $1,000.
However, since the place couldn’t determine what exactly went wrong with the machine – if anything – it decided to pay the woman the full $100,000 and indeed demanded Konami, the machine’s manufacturer, make up the difference.
Of course, the “one-armed bandits” of old malfunctioned every now and again too. The difference was in the scope. Today, machines are incredibly complex and have jackpots of millions of dollars.
The old slot machines, meanwhile, used randomly spinning drums that almost never malfunctioned and were very simple, technologically speaking. They also rarely paid more than 100 times the initial bet. Early electromechanical machines, meanwhile, were still unsophisticated and had low payouts. Even if one did malfunction, the payout was so low that it wasn’t worth fretting over.
What complicates things even further is the issue of progressive jackpots. Another new invention made possible only through technology, progressive jackpots mean that several casinos, usually in different states, pool earnings from the same machine used at all of them.
Then, when a jackpot at a particular casino is made, all of the money in that bank gets sent to the winning casino. With multiple casinos across state lines involved in winnings, everything is going to be examined with a fine-tooth comb and leniency isn’t likely.
When it comes down to it, it appears the lesson imparted to us by classic Cold War 1980s movie WarGames has a lot of relevance even when it comes to gambling.
While the movie deals with the far weightier subject of nuclear war, its final lesson still stands – “the only winning move is not to play.” After all the trouble she went through, Veronica stood to make $80 on a $100 investment. Hardly seems worth it, does it? They don’t say that the house always wins for no reason.
Still, some people have still managed to walk away with big wins – big to the point of life-changing. World War Two vet Elmer Sherwin may the luckiest man in the world, for winning the jackpot twice!
Although he started gambling as soon as he was old enough, he had won nothing until he was 76, at which point he hit a $4.6 million jackpot on the Megabucks slot machine. Then, 16 years later, at 92, he won the jackpot again. His prize money this time? A cool $21 million.
Sophie Lewis, CNN
National
Published at
(CNN) — It was a selfie she thought was worth nearly $43 million.
Katrina Bookman hit the jackpot on a slot machine in late August at Resorts World Casino in Jamaica, Queens. She even took an excited self-portrait with the machine displaying her winnings: $42,949,672. It would have been the largest slot machine jackpot in US history.
“I can’t even describe the feeling. It’s like my whole body just got numb,” Bookman told CNN affilate WABC.
But when she came back the next day to find out the exact size of her jackpot, a casino employee crushed her excitement.
“I said, ‘So what did I win? He said, ‘You didn’t win nothing,'” she told WABC.
The New York State Gaming Commission said that Bookman’s machine had malfunctioned. The machine, like all the ones in the casino, has a disclaimer stating, “Malfunctions void all pays and plays.”
Instead, the casino offered Bookman a complimentary steak dinner.
“All I could think about was my family,” Bookman told WABC, her voice breaking. She grew up in foster care and raised 4 children as a single mother.
The New York State Gaming Commission told WABC that they immediately pulled the machine from the casino floor to fix it, and it is now up and running once again. The commission said that by law they can only award Bookman her actual winnings of $2.25, printed by the machine.
“They win, and now the house doesn’t want to pay out. To me that’s unfair,” says Bookman’s attorney, Alan Ripka. He’s fighting for the casino to pay Bookman the maximum amount allowed by the Sphinx slot machine — $6,500.
Katrina Bookman Lawsuit
“The machine takes the money when you lose. It ought to pay it when you win,” Ripka said.
A Resorts World spokesman told CNN: “Upon being notified of the situation, casino personnel were able to determine that the figure displayed on the penny slot was the result of an obvious malfunction — a fact later confirmed by the New York State Gaming Commission.
“After explaining the circumstances to Ms. Bookman, we offered to pay her the correct amount that was shown on the printed ticket. Machine malfunctions are rare, and we would like to extend our apologies to Ms. Bookman for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Katrina Bookman Resorts World Casino
Veronica Castillo Casino Settlement
The casino couldn’t send a portion of its revenue to a New York state education fund, as mandated by law, if had to pay out massive jackpots like the one displayed on Bookman’s machine, said the Resorts World spokesman, who asked his name not be used. In five years, the casino has generated more than $1.6 billion for the fund, he said.
Katrina Bookman Slot Machine
But Bookman remains frustrated.
“I should win the max. And I feel like I should treat him (the casino employee) to a steak dinner,” she said.