When it rains, it pours

Would you do the following?

You go to your favorite machine or table game and start playing in your normal fashion. But slowly you begin to see that you are being whittled away. After about two hours of play, you have lost the money you figured you'd use to play this particular session. So now you have a choice: Do you get more money by taking out another marker (or going to your room and opening the safe) or do you call it a session and do something else?

You decide to give it one more shot and you take a little more money to play with than you brought to the game previously. And you play. Your luck is terrible; you can't seem to win two decisions in a row. It is very frustrating. In an hour you have lost all the money again because this time you started to up your bets at the end and all of these bigger bets seemed to lose.

Now you are really frustrated. Should you give it another shot? After all, you have to win sooner or later, right?

You take even more money this time than the last two times and you doggedly keep playing. Nothing has changed, except you are betting far more than you normally do and you are getting your backside kicked swiftly and hard. In 45 minutes you have lost your third stake.

Do you keep playing? Yes! You know you have to win; you have to win! You take twice as much money to play with this time than the last time because you figure you are going to let it all hang out with massive bets. And you lose every penny of your stake once again.

The above follows the law of nature that states "when it rains, it pours," and you are the one getting poured upon in this scenario. Let us say that in the divine scheme of things, you were destined to lose four session stakes in a row. Was there a way to lessen the damage?

Yes. Once you lost that first session stake, quit play for a while and do something else.

Now you come back for a second session and you do not increase your bets after you start losing and you bring the exact same session stake as you did the first time. You play through the money you brought and if you lose it, you take a break.

You come back for your third try, preferably on a different day, and you bring your normal amount to play with. You do not increase your session stake or your bets. And you lose everything again.

Finally, you give it a fourth try and still get beaten to a pulp. Again you only lose your normal session stake. Certainly you feel crummy; losing is no fun, but your losses are contained to your normal playing amount.

Going on tilt, which this column shows, is the worst way to play any casino game. You understand that sometimes it will rain on your playing parade but you want to keep it from pouring. By never increasing your bets in losing situations you certainly do contain your losses to a degree -- that degree is important because you are not going to make up your big bets if it continues to rain and sooner or later you are going to run out of gambling money.

So when it rains, just let it rain, but try to avoid the pouring.