Katrina Bookman was a forty-two-year-old single mother of four from Queens, New York. She worked as a home health aide. She lived in public housing in the South Jamaica section of Queens. On the evening of August 30, 2016, she drove to the Resorts World Casino in Queens with approximately forty dollars in spending money. She intended to play penny slot machines for two or three hours.
She selected a machine called Sphinx II, which was a penny denomination slot manufactured by IGT and themed around ancient Egypt. She played for approximately ninety minutes. She had approximately twenty dollars remaining in the machine credit balance when she pressed the spin button for what would become the most consequential single spin in modern American slot machine history.
The display showed a jackpot of forty-two million nine hundred forty-nine thousand six hundred seventy-two dollars and seventy-six cents. The exact figure was forty-two dollars and 949,672.76 cents above a baseline amount. The figure is mathematically significant because it is exactly two raised to the thirty-second power, divided by one hundred. The figure is the maximum value that can be stored in a thirty-two-bit unsigned integer counter. The display was a software overflow error.
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Bookman did not know that. She took a selfie with the screen showing the jackpot amount. She called her sister. She called her four children. She told them that the family was leaving public housing. She told them that the children college tuition was now paid. She waited at the machine for a casino representative to come and verify the win.
A casino floor representative arrived after approximately fifteen minutes. The representative looked at the screen. The representative called a supervisor. The supervisor arrived. The supervisor called the machine manufacturer technical support line. The technical support representative confirmed that the displayed figure was a software malfunction. The actual prize that the machine was designed to award on the symbol combination shown was two dollars and twenty-five cents.
The maximum jackpot that the Sphinx II machine was capable of awarding was six thousand five hundred dollars. The machine had a notice posted on its glass front stating in standard regulatory language that malfunctions void all pays and plays. The notice is a standard requirement of the New York State Gaming Commission for all electronic gaming devices. The notice is on every slot machine in every regulated casino in every American jurisdiction.
The casino offered Bookman the two dollar and twenty-five cent actual payout. The casino also offered her a complimentary steak dinner at the Resorts World steakhouse. She refused both offers. She left the casino. She contacted Howard Schoenfeld, a Manhattan personal injury attorney, on the morning of August 31, 2016. Schoenfeld filed a lawsuit against Resorts World Casino and against IGT on her behalf in Queens Supreme Court in October 2016.
The lawsuit alleged breach of contract, fraudulent misrepresentation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The damages claim was forty-two million nine hundred forty-nine thousand six hundred seventy-two dollars and seventy-six cents, exactly matching the displayed figure. The case was widely reported in national press throughout late 2016 and 2017. It became the most-discussed slot machine case in American legal history.
The trial court ruled in favor of Resorts World in March 2018. The judge held that the malfunctions void all pays and plays notice constituted clear and conspicuous disclosure of the terms governing the machine, that Bookman had constructive notice of the terms by entering the casino and using the machine, that the displayed figure was indisputably the result of a documented software malfunction rather than a legitimate result of the random number generator that governed game outcomes, and that the casino had no legal obligation to honor a payout that the machine was not physically designed or regulatorily permitted to award.
Bookman appealed to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. The appellate court affirmed the trial court ruling in February 2019. The case was further appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which declined to hear the case in late 2019. The Bookman litigation effectively ended at that point.
The Bookman case is now the defining American court ruling on slot machine malfunctions. The case is cited in essentially every subsequent slot machine malfunction lawsuit filed in the United States between 2019 and 2026. The doctrine that the case established is that the regulatory notice on a slot machine and the underlying technical specifications of the machine collectively define the maximum payout that the casino is obligated to award, regardless of what figure the display shows during a malfunction event. Katrina Bookman returned to her work as a home health aide in late 2018 and has not commented publicly on the case since.