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Ask the Slot Expert: How do you hold on to your slot winnings?31 March 2021
Answer: Thanks for the kind words. Congratulations on catching lightning in a bottle on that slot. And commiserations that your good luck did not repeat. We'll come back to that in a moment. Let's start with your first question. You said that I should not say, "Just walk out." Sorry, but you're going to have to put on your big boy pants and take responsibility for and control of your actions. I know it's not easy. The casino environment is designed to entice you to play. The random reward aspect of the games also leads you to make just one more bet. The next spin has just a good a chance of hitting the jackpot as the one right before it. Last week I wrote about how I started writing about gambling for John Patrick's newsletter. John Patrick was a gambling personality in New Jersey. He published many books and tapes and had a call-in show on a local access channel on cable where I lived. Prior to getting my elementary education in gambling from John, my only experiences with casinos were the day trips we would make each summer when my college friends would stay for a few days at one friend's beach house in Ocean City. No one had a bankroll to speak of -- or knowledge of table games -- so we would get a couple of rolls of quarters and try our luck at the slots. One of my friends thought he had discovered a way to win at table games. His plan was to keep doubling his bet until he won. This came up somehow in one of our math classes. The professor said it was called The Martingale System and explained why it doesn't work. Around this time my cousin had a boyfriend who enjoyed going to Atlantic City. Too much, but that's another story. We were talking about playing slots. I had just finished one of John's books about playing slots and I said that it seemed complicated to play slots the right way using two buckets. He looked at me like I had just grown another head. Two buckets? I bet he was wondering what could be so complicated. Put in money. Pull handle. Pray. Repeat. John Patrick's slot play method used two coin buckets. (This was a long time ago.) One bucket was used for your playing money. The other was your guarantee. No matter what happened with the coins in your playing bucket, you were supposed to leave with the coins in your guarantee bucket. To start, you buy a couple of rolls of coins from the person pushing the change trolley around on the slot floor (I said this was a long time ago!) and put them in your playing bucket. You take coins out of your playing bucket to fund a spin. If you win on the spin, you split the coins dropped into the coin tray between the two buckets. You could split your winnings 50/50, put one coin in guarantee and the rest in play, vice versa -- it's up to you how you split the coins, but you had to put something in the guarantee every time you won. And you could never play the money in the guarantee. You had to leave the casino with it. Credit play made this method obsolete. (Believe it or not, kids, there once was a time when we had to put coins into a slot machine. A big innovation was having a machine keep a running tab of our winnings on a credit meter instead of dropping coins into the coin tray each time we won. And we had to remember to press a button to switch a machine to credit play. And we had to make phone calls from tiny booths on street corners.) I assume you can afford to lose the money you bring to the casino. You won't enjoy losing it all, but you're still going to able to pay the rent and put food on the table. Furthermore, you won't be a psychological wreck and cut up your players cards when you lose, as my cousin's boyfriend did whenever he had a big loss -- but that's another story. If you want to ensure you don't lose your entire bankroll, you can bring a little extra money with you and keep it in your shoe. I don't recommend this because the amount you lose on a run of bad luck is usually very close to the amount of money you brought to the casino, even when you say you're not going to play some of it. Those reserve funds always seem to find a way into a machine. In the old coin days, some writers recommended playing a method called Once Through. You take the coins in your bankroll and play them through a machine once. You leave with whatever you win and repeat the process on another machine. Today you have to track the points earned on a machine to know when you've played your session stake through once. Credit play and tickets make it more challenging to hold on to winnings today. We're not betting money, we're betting credits. We're not putting money into a machine, we're putting a ticket in. We always have to remember that credits and tickets are real money. Here are some suggestions to help you leave with more of your winnings:
These are some ideas I have and techniques I've used to leave with some of my winnings. All of these techniques have one thing in common: They require discipline, which is one of John Patrick's pillars of being a successful gambler. You have to take responsibility now for holding on to your winnings. Readers, please share the methods you use to leave with your winnings. Moving on to your change in fortune on that machine, let me ask you some questions. Did the person who played the machine before you win? How about the player after you? How about all of the players the day before and the day after? Your first experience with the machine is an incredibly small piece of the entire picture of the machine's performance. Some people win. Some people lose. You were lucky the first time and not so lucky the second. The machine is just performing as any slot machine does. There was nothing wrong with the machine. It wasn't paying out too much. It is frustrating to get a chintzy bonus. I like to play Bally games that give you a spin on various Blazing 7s-related games when you land three or more of their corresponding symbols. The bonus round on the version I like best doesn't end until you win something on at least one of the games. On other versions, the bonus ends even if you won nothing. Savor the big bonuses and accept the small ones as a consequence of the randomness of outcomes on a slot machine. Here are the latest figures from https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases. Click here for the latest Covid data. Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.
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