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Ask the Slot Expert: An unexpected benefit of Cashless Gaming

10 May 2023

I worked for a market research firm in the last half of the 1990s. One of the products the company produced was radio ratings. Listenership was calculated using diaries kept by the participants. Participants made errors in their diaries. The company had a team that tried to make sense of the diaries.

How difficult can it be to keep an accurate diary?

I found out when I started keeping records of my play as a business. An Excel spreadsheet was sufficient to track profit/loss. I realized I could get a lot more information from the data I was gathering, so I set up a database to track mileage; money won in drawings and tournaments; and, of course, the results of my playing sessions.

One problem I encountered right away was my lousy handwriting. I quickly learned that if I left my pad and pen in the car, I could scrounge some paper and borrow a pencil at the sportsbook. But nothing could help me decipher what I had written.

A Notes app, first Samsung and then Google, on my phone solved my legibility problem. I enter all of my session data and comments onto a Notes page. Now my only problem was typos.

Well, typos and readability. Even though every number and letter was legible, I sometimes can't figure out what I meant.

Double Entry Accounting is one of the most amazing things ever devised. Entering transactions in two accounts provides a check and balance for each transaction and helps ensure accuracy.

I used to cash in my tickets at the end of each visit. I tracked how much money I had in my gambling wallet when I left the house and how much I had when I got back and used the difference to verify the win/loss from my session data. This system worked to detect when I had made an error in the session data, but it didn't help to pinpoint and correct the error on a day with multiple sessions.

I learned that Jean Scott and other frequent players don't redeem their tickets at the end of a visit. Getting the cash usually isn't a problem, but getting bills that finicky bill acceptors won't accept is. Why go through the hassle? Just keep the ticket.

Holding onto tickets solves part of the accuracy problem. I could now compare win/loss data and change in ticket value by casino to determine if an error exists in a casino's session data. That's good enough for the IRS. I care about how much money I've won playing video poker versus slots, but the IRS doesn't. An accurate number for the day is good enough for it.

This system worked well until last year. I hadn't been playing as much as in prior years. With only a handful of sessions per month, I procrastinated. I could always enter the data the next day, I thought. Days turned into weeks turned into months. Before I knew it, it was December and I had to enter almost a year's worth of play.

Fortunately, I didn't have a large number of sessions to enter. Typos and other mistakes, however, were still a problem. If I sometimes found it difficult to validate my entries when I entered the data at the end of day, it was nearly impossible to validate them weeks and months after the fact.

Tickets still helped somewhat. If my session notes showed that I cashed out of an NSU machine with a $240 ticket and then put $250 into my favorite Quick Hit Blitz machine that same day or another NSU machine on a later day, I knew that one of the numbers was wrong. Which one? No way to tell.

Since I retired, knowing today's date has become much less important. I sometimes have to check the date on my phone to know what date to use on my session data. One time I entered data for one day and then forgot to enter the date. The best I could do was interpolate the date between the dated entries above and below this entry on my Google Note.

This year I decided to accurately track the values of my STN Cash and Boyd Pay wallets in Quicken. I finally got around to tackling the project at the beginning of April. I could have just started with the second quarter, but starting from January 1 would have been better. I used the apps on my phone to see if there was enough data to figure out how much was in each account at the beginning of the year.

As it turns out, both apps reported all of the transactions on my accounts all the way back to Day 0. When I used Cashless Gaming at a machine, I was able to match the casino wallet transactions with my session data and correct any mistakes I made. I was able to fix mistakes in dates and mistakes in the amounts I put in or took out of machines.

This is the unexpected benefit of Cashless Gaming that I said I would write about this week. My Cashless Gaming accounts help me keep more accurate records of my play. I can use my Cashless Gaming transactions to verify my session notes.


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John Robison

John Robison is an expert on slot machines and how to play them. John is a slot and video poker columnist and has written for many of gaming’s leading publications. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology.

You may hear John give his slot and video poker tips live on The Good Times Show, hosted by Rudi Schiffer and Mike Schiffer, which is broadcast from Memphis on KXIQ 1180AM Friday afternoon from from 2PM to 5PM Central Time. John is on the show from 4:30 to 5. You can listen to archives of the show on the web anytime.

Books by John Robison:

The Slot Expert's Guide to Playing Slots
John Robison
John Robison is an expert on slot machines and how to play them. John is a slot and video poker columnist and has written for many of gaming’s leading publications. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology.

You may hear John give his slot and video poker tips live on The Good Times Show, hosted by Rudi Schiffer and Mike Schiffer, which is broadcast from Memphis on KXIQ 1180AM Friday afternoon from from 2PM to 5PM Central Time. John is on the show from 4:30 to 5. You can listen to archives of the show on the web anytime.

Books by John Robison:

The Slot Expert's Guide to Playing Slots