Money management at slots

29 October 2019

By Frank Scoblete

Does this sound right? The bartender pours your favorite drink. You sip it in a leisurely fashion. You are adult and cool, calm and considered, as you imbibe slowly. In fact, you are feeling somewhat philosophical as you nurse your drink. Other folks are at this trendy bar as well. It is a truly nice atmosphere for a mature and calm adult such as you to do some serious thinking.

After a while, you order your second drink. You can feel the warmth of the first one starting to go through your body. It feels good, a slight buzz, almost undetectable. You drink this second drink down just slightly faster than the first one. Ah, the buzz is feeling stronger.

You order your third drink. This you drink slightly faster than your second drink, which was slightly faster than your first drink. Your sense of humor is rising as you start to finish that third drink. You make some witticisms. There are some slight smiles from the others at the bar.

Now you order a fourth drink, take four or five gulps, and the drink is finished. You immediately go for the fifth drink which you swallow down in three breaths. Now a sixth, now a seventh….
You slap the guy sitting next to you at the bar after he said something that you really didn’t quite hear. “Hey, mahn,” you blurt, “you are one fununnee guy! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

The guy sitting next to you becomes livid as he tells you that he isn’t a guy but a woman and what is so funny about how her husband died? You slap her on the back again and laugh uproariously, allowing spit to fly into the air and into the drink of the guy sitting next to her.

On your eighth drink, this woman storms off, saying you are the most disgusting human being she has ever encountered. You chortle as a booger goes in and out of your nose. You are socking those drinks down so fast the bartender can barely keep up. You scream out that you will treat everyone in the bar to a drink as you fumble with your wallet. Everyone takes you up on it. And then….

The next morning you wake up in the alley wondering what the hell happened the night before.
Here’s what happened – you are the typical slot player.

Even when most slot players think they are going to play in a leisurely fashion, the longer they stay at the machine, the faster they play. It’s just like the drinking. The first drink is sipped; the last one is chugged.

With such high house edges, the last thing you want to do is play the slot machines as fast you can. Note that when I set up the slot tables, I used 13 decisions a minute as our benchmark. And that is not a ridiculous speed – it’s a totally reachable speed, and one that will kill a slot player’s bankroll, as was evidenced by those total expected losses.

So the first rule of money management at slots is to slow the pace by not allowing the natural tendency to play faster to overcome your good sense. You must think your way through your playing sessions. A slot player who just goes on instinct is a slot player looking to get hammered and one who will get hammered.

How many decisions a minute should you strive for? No more than six; one decision every 10 seconds. Even if it means counting to ten – and I mean using the one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three method – you have to make sure your pace is a reasonable one.

Do not give yourself unlimited funds to play a given session of slots. For every session you intend to play, give yourself enough money to handle a loss on every spin! That’s right; if you are playing six decisions a minute, you will be playing 360 decisions in an hour. You should be able to lose all 360 decisions. On a one-dollar machine, you’d bring $360 – since you are only going to bet one dollar per spin. On a 25-cent machine, you would bring $90 since you are only betting one quarter per spin.

If you are going to the casino for a vacation of several days, then divide up your bankroll into the number of sessions you intend to play and make sure you have enough to play all those sessions even if every one of them winds up being a disaster.

If you intend to play four sessions of one hour each on every day of a three-day trip, you are looking at 12 sessions of play – 12 hours – so the one-dollar player should have $4,320 as a bankroll; the quarter player should have $1,080. Obviously, short of a murderous losing streak that sees you lose every single spin in three day’s time, you cannot lose all those session dollars.

Will it take discipline to play as I suggest? Absolutely. But money management at slots is the key ingredient for giving you a chance to win and also the benefit of not going home broke and embarrassed.

I wrote about this before but it is absolutely important to set up a 401G account, preferably a money market account that gives you interest. The “G” in the 401G stands for gambling. This is money you have put aside strictly for gambling purposes.

On slot machines, the longer you play them, the better chance you will be a loser, so you are going to have to feed your 401G with money on a regular basis. Take some money from every paycheck or some money from the profits of your business, or some small percentage from your retirement income and keep socking it into the 401G. Always do this on a regular basis. If you have a nice, healthy 401G, you can do your playing sessions as I recommend and never worry about losses, because any losses are covered by your total gambling bankroll.

Do not use household money to gamble – because you can get yourself into trouble and some of you might be the type to overdo it in the heat of the moment, even if you aren’t a problem gambler.

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Visit Frank's website at www.frankscoblete.com.