Texas Bartender Wins $2.2 Million on Wheel of Fortune at Palms

It’s the Vegas dream in a nutshell: Palms guest from Texas wins $2.2 million on Wheel of Fortune with a $3 bet with leftover vouchers. When the win happened, there was 46 cents in credits remaining.

All this while waiting for food from McDonald’s in the Palms food court.

We’ve got all the details of this life-altering win.

First word of the win, a whopping $2,170,581.77, was shared by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Kidding! They suck harder than a Dyson trying to drink an In N Out shake. The Review-Journal hasn’t broken a story since Elvis signed for a two-week run at New Frontier in 1956. And that was probably the Sun.

It was us. We shared it first. Do you know this blog at all?

The next day, Palms confirmed the win in typical fashion, with a Tweet that looks like it was written by a cap key-challenged middle schooler.

Here are the details you won’t get elsewhere.

The winner was, as mentioned earlier, a bartender from Texas. Then again, after her win, it may be “former bartender.”

She was, and is, staying at Palms and was part of a group of 30-40 people here for a wedding.

We’re told the winner didn’t have the money to come to Vegas, so a friend picked up the plane ticket.

The jackpot winner was playing Wheel of Fortune near the food court with friends, and said she wanted to get rid of her leftover vouchers in the amount of $2 and 98 cents. As the bet was $3, that wasn’t the total amount put into the machine, we heard it was about $20 (via security in the casino).

As mentioned, she won on her very last max bet spin, or $3. Just 46 cents remained.

Initial reports from casino staff claimed the lucky visitor won on her “third spin,” but that was figurative, not literal.

Reports are when she hit the $2.2 million jackpot, it was “pandemonium,” as friends, other players (and a good number of security guards) swarmed the machine to congratulate the winner.

From what we’re told, the big win couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, and she’s faced a personal loss in recent months.

The winner now has a 24/7 escort from Palms security, and she and her boyfriend have been upgraded to a seriously nice penthouse.

We’re told Palms closed down an entire bar for the winner and other wedding attendees last night, pretty much everything comped.

The Las Vegas dream isn’t something just concocted out of nothing, like A’s ballpark attendance projections (“We expect 33,000 people at every Las Vegas game in this 30,000-seat ballpark!”), multimillion-dollar jackpots are real and happen on a fairly regular basis.

Big jackpots (called “wide area progressives,” or WAPs) aren’t paid by casinos, they’re paid by the slot manufacturer, in this case IGT. Slot manufacturer IGT says it has made 1,180 millionaires on its Wheel of Fortune machines.

As with many jackpot winners, the lucky winner at Palms wants to keep her name out of news coverage. Not so much her photo, as Palms shared a group pic of the winner and her friends on Facebook.

We know how you are, and we asked if she tipped after her big win, but the answer wasn’t forthcoming. In the vast majority of big wins, people don’t tip. There are lots of reasons, including that many big winners don’t realize tipping attendants or other staff is customary, or they don’t have cash on them, or the paperwork process can take hours and often the staff who assisted them aren’t around.

In this case, we’d have tipped the McDonald’s staff for their slow service that provided time for this jackpot to hit!

This whole scenario is great for the winner, her friends and Palms. It’s been quiet over there, with Rio getting all the attention for its renovations and new venues across the street.

Palms is owned and operated by the San Manuel tribe, or possibly the Yaamava tribe, nobody can quite keep up. (The wildly successful San Manuel casino in southern California changed its name to Yaamava awhile back, just to give the marketing team a challenge.)

Actually, Palms technically owned and operated by the San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority. The tribe didn’t want to have its entire leadership scrutinized by gaming regulators, so this “affiliate” of the tribe helped move things along.

San Manuel was the first tribe to own a Las Vegas casino. The Seminoles operate the now-closed Mirage (Vici Properties owns it), and will turn it into Hard Rock Las Vegas. The Mohegan tribe operates the casino at Virgin, but they’re being shown the door.

The tale of this incredible win at Palms is a reminder that all you need in Las Vegas is a few bucks and eternal optimism to make your dreams come true. Google Maps directions to the Chicken Ranch wouldn’t hurt, but mostly those other things!