Please, no! It's not right!

In baseball there are many "unwritten codes" that are supposed to be followed by the ballplayers. For example, if your team is destroying the other team, your base runners are not to steal bases. Don't rub the area of your body where you were hit by a pitch; doing so shows you are not manly. Pitchers are not to scold their fielders if those fielders make mistakes, even if those mistakes cost the team runs. Fielders are also not to scold pitchers for making mistakes that cost the team runs. Players are not to walk across the other team's pitching mound as that shows complete disrespect for the other team's pitcher.

In the world of slot machines there are also "unwritten codes" at work and, indeed, some actual laws on the books as well.

If someone is playing a machine, it is the height of discourtesy to ask, "Are you almost finished playing that machine? I want to play it now. You've been playing it for a really long time now. Can't you give someone else a turn?"

Never ask a stranger, "Are you winning money? Yeah, really? How much?" That is uncouth. Speaking of winning money, it is also totally uncalled for to say to someone who just took over the machine you left and suddenly hit a big score, "You just stole my jackpot! You just stole my jackpot!" That is considered infantile and also dumb since no one can steal anyone's jackpot owing to the speed of the RNG in a machine's programming.

What if a sign is on a machine that says reserved, perhaps for someone who has gone to the bathroom after seemingly endless hours of play? Is it your right to demand to be able to play the machine? Yes, it is. Still, such a move is considered really bad manners. Players should honor other slot players' reserved machines because someday such players might want to go to the bathroom too.

If you see someone walk away from a machine and inadvertently not cash out his or her credits, what is your responsibility? Simple: you are morally obligated to let that person know such an oversight has just taken place. "Sir or Madam, you still have credits in that machine." You are not to play those person's credits. That is stealing.

Interestingly enough, the law comes into play here too but in an unusual way. If there are unclaimed credits on a machine and no one to claim them, the credits belong to the casino -- not the person who noticed those credits residing in the machines.

What if the person who played that machine realizes the mistake a few minutes later -- being far away from that particular machine now -- and he comes back to claim them? That will trigger an investigation and, believe it or not, the results of that investigation might not always be what you would expect! In short, how long does it take for the credits to be considered the casino's credits and not the player's credits?

What if you were to find a slot machine pay slip on the floor? Is that like finding coins on the sidewalk? Can you consider that slot machine pay slip as now belonging to you? No, sorry, those pay slips also belong to the casino. In fact, all unclaimed money such as credits in machines, such as pay slips on the floor, such as real coin in the coin trays belong to the casino.

In the good old days (it is startling that I can now refer to time periods I lived through as the "old days") when slot machines actually used the coin of the realm, including silver dollars in the dollar machines, there were people called "silver miners" who would go from machine to machine looking for leftover coins. Many of these miners would not just go from machine to machine but from casino to casino. There were optimum hours to do such mining as well.

One silver miner I met in the dim and distant past, known as "Fuzzy," would go between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. and then again at 5 a.m. to scour the casino's machines for coins. The 6/7 p.m. time period would see machines suddenly free due to people rushing off to dinner or to get ready for dinner. Coins would often be left in the trays because the players did not do a good job of scooping them all up.

At 5 a.m. the players, often staggeringly drunk, would wobble off into the night, leaving whole trays of coins available for mining operations. The silver miners could make a killing with just a few such oversights.

Yes, silver mining was considered stealing and the casinos were on the lookout for such people, but where there was money to be made ("stolen") the opportunists were willing to take their chances. Those days of silver mining are now dead; although the new breed called "credit crunchers" have taken their place.

The smartest credit crunchers don't just cash out the credits, which looks quite obvious to security scanning the slot aisles. Instead, the crunchers put a few dollars into the machine, play some spins and then cash out. They try to look as if they are gambling. It tends to work -- until they get caught.

Every sport, every world of man's activity, we do have rules, codes and laws. It is best to obey them. It usually doesn't hurt to go along with the crowd in such matters.