What money management can and can't do

My next door neighbor loves to use coupons in the stores. She makes a list of what she wants or needs to buy, looks for coupons for these things, and then goes shopping. What she is practicing is money management. Instead of paying $100 for her list without the coupons, she only pays $95 with the coupons. That's a nice savings.

Because she practices money management, she winds up with more money. The formula is simple: Spend less = Have more. She doesn't make more money per week or month or year, but because she spends wisely she has more money to actually spend.

In slot play one can practice money management too.

Before we get into what money management can do for you at the slots, let's take a look at what money management can't do. It can't make the slots looser; it can't make the slots tighter. It can't guarantee that you will win. It can't prevent the house edge from working on your money. Like my neighbor's shopping, you've got to pay some price, with coupons or without.

Money management can't make you a movie star or rock singer or astronaut.

What money management at slots can do for you is what coupons do for my neighbor -- make you spend less to get what you want.

The first thing you must ask yourself is this: Do you judge your playing of slots based on a certain amount of time? When you go to the casinos, do you judge your fun by saying something such as, "I played for eight hours straight! It was so much fun!"

It is rare that someone will say, "I played seven thousand spins of the reels while I was at the casinos! It was so much fun!" Most gamblers judge their gambling by time spent and/or by money won and/or by money lost and/or by how loud your spouse yells at you, "You did what?"

So if time and/or money won/lost are your criteria for successful play, then money management can help you reduce the attack on your bankroll by the casino's edge. It's no arcane secret that the house edge must whittle down almost every single slot player's bankroll over time.

Except for those rare mega-jackpot winners, the economic state of slot players is usually bleak, broken by occasional winning flashes. Since slots have such high house edges, that whittling of the slot players' bankrolls takes place in a shorter amount of time than the whittling of a bankroll for a $5 blackjack or craps player.

So the first money management tool is simply to play fewer spins during your eight-hour sojourn at the machines. You can do this by:

• playing one coin in non-linked non-progressive machines
• avoiding machines that reward extra coins
• cutting down the speed of play
• avoiding those penny and nickel machines that suck up dollars worth of coins on every spin and return a pittance to the players

How do you cut down the speed of play? Count to six before you allow the reels to spin or the little animated figures to do their things. You should now be playing about seven or eight spins a minute as opposed to the usual 10 to 12 spins. Those six seconds plus the two seconds for the machine to give you a result will save you a lot of spins -- and a lot of money. Those saved spins are your equivalent of my neighbor's coupons.

The second principle of money management is to get more comps (cash back, coupons and free credits) for the same amount of play you always give. How do you do this? Find out how much money you have to put into the machine to get the comp you want -- but put in no more than that. Then walk.

With your leftover money, go to another casino and play there. In this way you are building up more comps but playing the same amount of money in a given period of time but at two different casinos. You aren't putting less in the machine (necessarily) but you are getting more back because of the extra comps you are receiving. Some of those comps will actually be coupons!

The third principle of money management is to control the amount you drink while playing the machines. Booze makes you play faster and get more daring (daring here actually means stupid). If you like to drink, set aside time to drink after you have finished playing. In a casino, the booze is always there; it's like sand in a desert or water in an ocean. You won't have a hard time finding the alcohol once you finish your playing session.

Getting soused when you play usually makes you forget that you played. The next morning you wake up with your head throbbing and your tongue feeling like spider webbing with very little memory of what you did the night before. So what's the point of playing if you can't even remember that you were playing? Only a ploppy would do that.

The final principle is another tough one. Only bring a certain fraction of your gambling bankroll to a slot-playing session. You lose that money -- you stop playing until the next session. Now, don't make that next session five minutes from the last one. Give yourself several hours before you play again. Trying to recover lost money fast is a prescription for disaster.

I like to recommend structured play based on four sessions a day: morning, late morning or early afternoon, late afternoon and night.

Okay, those are my coupons for slot play. Good luck.