Silver Strike slots have a cult following, and fans of the machine report experiencing heart palpitations upon discovering the machines been removed from the casino floor at downtown’s Four Queens.
Four Queens is one of just two casinos (the other is Plaza) in Las Vegas with the slot that dispenses collectible tokens.
The good news is Four Queens will bring back the Silver Strike machines, although their return is veiled in secrecy.
If you thought we were kidding about Silver Strike machines having a cult following, please refer to “The Official Web Site of the Silver Strikers Club,” a Web site we’re pretty sure was designed on a manual typewriter.
If you have no idea what we’re talking about, here’s a video of us demonstrating a very sophisticated strategy for winning a Silver Strike token of your very own. It’s a strategy we call “pushing a button.”
Basically, if you hit the Silver Strike symbol, you get a token valued at $10. Some tokens have different values, but nobody’s ever actually gotten one of those.
Players can turn the tokens in for cash, or keep them. Casinos just hate when people take the tokens home. In the business, it’s called “breakage.” It’s like when collectors buy casino chips and don’t cash them in. It’s pure profit for the casino. Which would seem to contradict our earlier statement about casinos hating when people take tokens home. You must be new here. We invented sarcasm around the same time the Silver Strikers designed their Web site.
Anyway, this quirky game is a hoot, especially since many old-timey slots are incredibly boring and repetitious. Silver Strike changes things up a bit.
Basically, Silver Strike is to Four Queens and Plaza as Sigma Derby is to The D. Long story.
Four Queens constantly refreshes the designs of its Silver Strike tokens, also known as “Silver Premium Tokens.” It sounds like a pain in the ass, frankly.
Restocking these machines is akin to when casinos used coin-operated slots. Casinos switched to TITO (ticket in, ticket out) vouchers to save costs, including having to compensate slot attendants for back injuries suffered from lugging around giant bags of coins. Seriously, it was bad.
Prior to the slot voucher era, $100 bags of nickels with 2,000 coins weighed 21 pounds. Quarters? The $500 bags had 2,000 quarters, weighing 25 pounds. Dollar bags (which doesn’t sound right) had $600 in coins and weighed 30 pounds. That’s the weight of nearly four human heads! For our fellow youths, that’s a reference to a movie called “Jerry Maguire,” released about three decades ago.
That said, Four Queens isn’t your typical casino. It’s a throwback, and staff know Silver Strike die-hards will keep coming back, not only gambling, but dining in their restaurants and staying in their hotel rooms.
As we said, Four Queens is being tight-lipped about what’s next for their collection of Silver Strike machines, but the bottom line is don’t freak out. We said that in the headline. If you were paying attention, you wouldn’t have had to read all these additional words.
We’ve been assured by Four Queens management we’ll get to break any Silver Strike news that arises, so check our site hourly for updates. Take that, Silver Strikers Club.
