Question of the Day - 10 July 2017

The short answer to a long (and good) question is yes.

According to the prevalent casino policy, the person who hits the spin button is entitled to the winnings, even if a stranger happens to walk by a Megabucks machine and hits the progressive for millions of dollars. This is the case whether it's the main spin, a bonus spin, or any spin.

We've had several questions about this since the previous QoD (4/25/17) and a couple people commented on that page that it's a dumb rule. One asked, what's to stop someone from hitting every spin button in the casino and claiming any and all jackpots? (Our answer would be: casino security, big players who take exception to the practice, and even little old ladies with canes who've been known to protect their games to within an inch of their lives. It would be a foolish scammer indeed who hung around machines he just reached in on, uninvited, waiting to see if an unlikely hand-pay materializes ...)

So perhaps it is an inane rule, but it's still pretty strictly enforced, even if an observer/passerby is invited to hit the button, as in the example in the question. Of course, the stranger who hit the spin button would have to make an issue out of it, rather than doing "the right thing" and handing over the winning cash to the player or players whose money is in the machine and who invited him or her to get in on the fun in the first place. 

But money often makes people behave in strange and unexpected ways—as in the case cited in the previous QoD, where the player's girlfriend ran off as soon as she was handed the money and, as far as we know, hasn't seen him since. 

So you have good reason to be concerned about letting strangers hit the spin button on a bonus round. Indeed, you might even want to have a written agreement with your friends that formalizes the jackpot split—just in case one of you hits a big jackpot and another one of you does something unexpected.