~ Blacked Out ~

It’s interesting how things come together sometimes! Within a three day period I received Mike Busetti’s email about how they were painting over the playing fields and backglasses down in Australia to try and disguise the Bingos from law authorities, I decided to rewrite my Pinball Laws page and saw reference to an F.B.I. training article on “How to teach agents to recognize Bingo pinball gambling machines,” and then I saw these painted over Philadelphia Bingos posted out on ebay.

Skirting the Laws:

You know recognizing a Bingo isn’t too tough, even for a hick-town sheriff, so I can’t imagine the FBI’s training guide was too in depth and I can’t imagine that the various disguises they made to the machines were very effective. After all, if the machine has one or more bingo cards in the backbox and has a replay meter, the jig is basically up.

So I always wondered if disguising the machines was more to hide names that may have been on some “pinball blacklist” developed for authorities to follow and/or so owners/operators could claim stupidity stating that “they had never heard of a bingo machine named so-and-so….”

But you have to wonder since some of the disguise jobs, like the Six Shot game by R. Bros, were very well thought out and elaborate. I wonder if this was a money-making venture in it’s own right, to sell substitute backgalsses – etc.

There is a lot of evidence that there was some pretty good money to be made form these pins, so the incentive for keeping them on route for as long as one could was probably pretty huge.

And some of the disguises seem to taken baby-steps over time, so it’s likely true that this also played into the shell-game that many of these machines were put through.

For instance, just switching the games over from nickels to dimes was known to have kept many of these machines alive.

Some Links:

An interesting article from Raymond Watt’s site on “typical take in” on some Bingos called into question in California:

http://rwatts.cdyn.com/download/Tax Matters/tax matters.pdf

Working on the machines as much as Phil Hooper has, you tend to run across some pretty interesting stuff:

Bingo Pinballs - profits

In the Bingo Manuals, Bally originally listed all of the parts for either nickel or dime play and I am sure that they did this with some long term vision in mind that had to do with upgrade over time as the economy continued to grow and improve – It’s just happenstance that later this helped some operators work the system and keep their machines in play: