Ten facts and factoids about UK online fruit machine games
It is what it says it is: Presenting ten essentially random bits of trivia about your favorite online game, the pub slot machine, in both its modern forms for your fun and amusement.
• According to research undertaken by Vernons.co.uk, 62% of online pub slots players are female, and online slots gaming as an activity is most popular with 35- to 50-year-olds.
• In fact, according to a UK Gambling Commission study, the 35-to-50s have just passed the 18-to-35s in number of online casino visitors 2008, with 15.7% in the older age group stating they’d gambling online in the past year. Some 13.7% of those 18 to 35 years of age played in the same period, representing nearly a complete flipflop from 2007 results.
• Charles Fey is typically credited with the creation of the modern pub slot machine, a game called “Liberty Bell” which was released in the USA in the late 19th century.
• A new variant on combining cards with the pub slot machine is European Slot Poker, a wickedly addictive game which involves playing a specially-designed deck of virtual cards slots-style. It’s available online at RTG-powered casinos.
• A study to be published in the Winter 2009 edition of The Journal of Consumer Research and commissioned by the University of Western Ontario entitled “Blackjack in the Kitchen: Understanding Online versus Casino Gambling” most dramatically reveals that online slots players and real-life pub fruity players rarely, if ever, switch milieus: “Casino gamblers perceive online gambling as bereft of social connections, which was pivotal to the enjoyment of gambling for them. The online gamblers also perceive this lack of social connectedness in virtual gambling. But for them, this aspect is positive; it is one crucial reason the online gamblers gave for their choice to stay home and gamble. Many online gamblers chose the online environment because of the perception of the lack of social connections.”
• In the first five years of its incorporation, slots software design/production company Microgaming, though its Microgaming Progressive Jackpot network, paid out over a quarter of a billion U.S. dollars in progressive pub slots wins alone.
• Malta was the first European Union country to regulate remoting gaming, thereby allowing players to play the online pub slots safely and securely before any other nation.
• Some 7.8% of UK citizens have gambled online in the past 12 months, with online pub fruity machines and football betting the most popular forms of playing.
• The term “pokie,” though sort for “video poker machine” actually refers to the traditional pub slots as well as online fruit machines. Seems that down in Australia, the video poker machines are typically set side-by-side with the pub fruity machines and thus were collectively referred to as such as a matter of course.
• The largest prize ever given to an online slots tournament winner – an even €1 million – will be awarded in October in the final of Microgaming software’s “Grand Slam of Slots” tournament.