Fifteen large

Fruities, or 'pokies' as they're called here, are a huge earner for pubs and clubs. Rather than have one or two dotted about the pub, they have to be sectioned off in their own room or area, and there's normally as many as the place can fit in to that room, seeing as they make a lot of money for the place. When they banned smoking in pubs and clubs a few NRL clubs nearly went out of business as revenue from the pokies nosedived due to the two going hand in hand and people stopped playing if they couldn't have a snout to calm the nerves as they pissed away the week's wages. They're the big Vegas jobs and weirdly when I went to Atlantic City, all the machines that were in Caesar's Palace etc were made in Australia.

Like the yank versions, you can vary how much you stake on each spin, how many rows/combinations you play etc and they generally go from 1c a credit to $1. You can get to the point where you've covered all the bets on three credits a spin and can be playing over $20 a spin (over a tenner, and this is in a pub rather than the Belagio or summat).

Anyway..., I'm in the local the other night (The Golden Sheaf, it of the famous five quid bottle of Heineken, though I discovered the beer's cheaper at the bar in the pokie room...) and I'm having a small flutter one of the machines. I'm playing $1.50 a spin which despite being 80p a go is obviously small beer, especially when there's a lad next to me who's playing $10 a spin. Who wins $15,500. Fifteen grand. Pleased? He certainly offered to buy his mates a round. The maximum one-off prize you can win on any machine is ten grand, you know this because every machine has a sign on it saying so, along with "your chances of winning this are no greater than one in a million", and then there's usually little cards for gambler's anonymous that you can take away with you when it's all come on top.

Like the jackpot on fruities back home is thirty quid or whatever but you can often get a repeater, he won two and half grand six times (or something like that). He got a cheque for fifteen grand and five hundred in fifties. It's a massive amount to win on the fruities, but in the big world hardly life changing. It's about eight grand - I'd pay off my credit card, get the m.o.t. and insurance done on the motor, then pay for a trip back to the UK, then that would be that. Even then, the lad who won was talking to his mate and I was picking up that he's a regular big player - he was about forty and he said summat like "I've been playing since I was seventeen, I'm not even close to breaking even". Funnily enough he was saying it with a huge grin on his mooey whilst getting the drinks in, so he didn't seem too fussed about stumbling upon this insight at that particular moment.