A dealt royal -- and an even bigger surprise

I was recently playing $1 Jacks or Better at Hooters in Las Vegas when I hit the deal button and a royal flush popped up. That's a rare event -- about once in every 600,000 hands, or once a year for a full-time player. But what happened next was even more of a surprise.

When a jackpot of $1,200 or more is hit on a machine, it's supposed to lock up. That's because such jackpots are taxable, and casinos have to issue tax forms to the player and the IRS. Employees pay such jackpots by hand, then adjust the machine to remove the equivalent amount of credits.

But the machine at Hooters never locked up -- it just racked up the 4,000 credits for my royal and let me keep playing. I was getting double points, so I kept going for a while. When I was ready to leave I hit the cash out button and the machine printed out a ticket for $4,100.

My intent was to take the ticket to the cage and explain what happened. But before I could leave the machine, a slot attendant approached. I told her what had happened, and she called over one of her co-workers. The two of them reviewed the hands played on the machine as far back as it would let them, which wasn't all the way back to the royal. They then got a supervisor involved and didn't tell me anything about what was happening (language was at least part of the problem). I asked to see a manager and told them I was losing patience and wanted to get the matter resolved.

About a half hour after the royal the slot people reached a manager. They were told to issue the tax forms for the jackpot, pay me by hand and take my cashout ticket. This is exactly how the matter should have been handled, only without the half-hour wait. After I was paid the manager came over and we had a brief chat. I asked him what the maximum ticket amount the cage at Hooters will pay without a hassle, and he said $1,200. Taking my $4,100 ticket to the cage would have set off a process that would have taken longer than what I experienced, he told me.

While I was waiting to be paid, a troubling question crossed my mind: Would the casino claim the machine malfunctioned and refuse to pay me? I was prepared to argue that any malfunction involved only those parts of the machine that are supposed to lock it up for a hand pay, not the random number generator that dealt me the royal. Fortunately, I never had to make the argument because the issue never came up.