Ask the Slot Expert: Dissed by my favorite Quick Hit Blitz machine

I was finally able to play my favorite Quick Hit Blitz (QHB) machine after a break of over a month. My usual itinerary in this casino begins with a stop at video poker, then a tour of the various Quick Hit machines on the floor. For the past few weeks, someone was playing my QHB when I was finished with video poker.

I realized that there was rarely anyone playing my preferred video poker machine after I had finished with it and, even if there was, the slot floor has a few other identical machines. QHB is the scarcer resource. Maybe I should start with QHB and then go to video poker.

I went to my QHB machine first thing on my last visit. No one was playing it. Yippee! I sat down, said "Hello, old friend," and gave it the ol' one-two -- card in the card reader, money in the bill acceptor. I looked forward to resuming my fun and profitable relationship with the machine.

As Mick said, "You can't always get what you want." And as Meat Loaf didn't say, "One of two ain't bad."

The machine wasn't as happy to see me again as I was to be able to play it again. I guess it was mad at me for not having played it for so long. If I was going to ghost it, maybe it figured that it would ghost me on bonus rounds.

I played 400 spins. (My goal is to hit one of the premium Quick Hit progressives, like 9 or 10, before the machine disappears.) In past session, I would typically get three or more bonus rounds in that number of spins. Heck, I once sat next to a lady who got three bonus rounds in under 100 spins.

In that block of spins, the machine gave me one -- count 'em, one -- bonus round. And it was a pretty meager bonus round at that, only $19.49. I won about $26 on each of the two times I hit six Quick Hit symbols.

Maybe my video poker machine will come through for me.

Nope. No love there either. I hit my loss limit for the day before I reached the number of points I wanted to play. I'm getting a bit nervous about re-qualifying for an upper tier in this casino's slot club. There's not much year left.

I got a much warmer welcome when I went back to the casino I wrote about last week. My usual multi-hand machine gave me a nice profit. The NSU machine I played next took back a little of that profit. The Frankenstein-themed machine I sometimes play took back a bit more of my initial profit. That didn't surprise me, though, because I know it's a volatile machine. You don't hit much on the base game. You get your profit from the bonus rounds and I had only one, very poor bonus round.

This casino also had Silver Strike machines again. I haven't seen one of these machines in a decade or more. These are machines on which you can win collector tokens. I'm a sucker for these machines, so I played 100 spins on one. I won three tokens and just missed breaking even on the machine when you consider that the tokens can be redeemed for $10 at the cage.

Now that's the way to welcome me back to a casino.

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