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Ask the Slot Expert: The Cash Out-Fake-Out30 December 2020
Have you ever been fooled by the Cash Out-Fake Out? There's someone's playing a machine and, for whatever reason, you really wish they weren't. Maybe you want to play that machine. Maybe they have a behavior that annoys you. I can't think of anything a slot player has done that annoyed me, but there are some things video poker players have done that I have found irksome. Hitting Bet Max instead of Deal, for instance. Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. Hitting Bet Max is not as bad as hitting Bet One repeatedly. Bet Max at least has a consistent cadence. You're at the mercy of the player's sense of rhythm with Bet One. And you never know when the phrase will stop. Dee-dee pause dee-dee-dee. Dee pause dee-dee pause dee-dee. Dee pause dee. Dee-dee. Dee-dee-dee. So, you're hoping that someone will stop playing a machine. They cash out. You think that you'll finally be able to get on that machine or that they're going to take their annoying behaviors to vex someone else. Happiness is imminent -- But no. They don't take the ticket and leave the machine. They take the ticket and feed it right back into the machine. Sometimes they even pull our their cards and put them right back in again. The fakers aren't leaving. They might even still be playing their machines after you leave. That's the Original Recipe version of the Cash Out-Fake Out. There's an Extra Crispy version that requires a confederate. In the Extra Crispy version, after one person cashes out, they redeem the ticket for cash, and then return to feed the cash back into the machine. The other person holds their machine while they're uselessly converting to the ticket to cash. I've learned who are the Cash Out-Fakers among the regulars at the casinos I visit, so I'm no longer surprised when they stay at their machines after cashing out. I know they're not done until that cash out, pull their cards, and get up. In case you're concerned about how I deal with the annoying video poker behaviors I described earlier, the dee-dee-dee from the Bet Maxers and the Bet Oners disappears into the background noise in the casino for me after I utter an initial "Ugh". (How accommodating of me!) Here are the latest figures from https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases. Click here for the latest Covid data. Two big headlines as I write these comments. First, the first known case of the UK variant of the coronavirus was detected in Colorado. Well, duh! Did you really think that the variant wouldn't get here? Viruses don't need passports. I italicized "known" because the United States lags far behind other countries in the percentage of tests we genetically sequence: Australia (58.6%), New Zealand (48.6%), Britain (7.4%), Japan (4.6%), United States (0.3%). (U.S. ranks 43rd worldwide in sequencing to check for coronavirus variants like the one found in the U.K.) Most infectious disease experts said that the variant was already here when it was first discovered in the U.K. Our pathetic level of genomic sequencing just meant that it took us a long time to find what was already here. The other headline is that we are far behind the goal to administer 20 million vaccinations by the end of the month. According to the vaccinations page on the CDC's Covid data tracker website, 11,445,175 doses have been distributed and only 2,127,143 doses have been administered. We won't even have shipped 20 million doses by the end of the year, let alone put them into arms. States are responsible for administering the vaccine. The talking heads I've seen on TV have said that part of the problem is a lack of guidance from the Trump Administration.
Take a look at this Operation Warp Speed graphic entitled Vaccine Distribution Process. There are no details after UPS and FedEx get the vaccines. Maybe there's another document that shows how vaccines go through UPS's and FedEx's networks and finally arrive at the actual locations where the vaccine is administered. Maybe there are documents that give best practices for running vaccination centers. The last mile is always the hardest part.
Twenty million was an aggressive and optimistic goal, granted, but why did we get only one-tenth of the way there? A few months ago I developed a system that determined when drug samples should be shipped to doctors based on the day(s) the doctors said they preferred to receive shipments. It was crucial to schedule the shipments to arrive on the proper day because the samples had to be kept cold -- not Pfizer vaccine cold, just Omaha Steaks cold. The samples were shipped next-day delivery. The programmers were having difficulty programming the process. The process they were developing would start with a doctor's delivery days and try to find the first shipping date that would deliver on an allowed day. I turned that around. Instead of starting with the delivery days and looking for a shipping day, I started with a shipping day and looked for requests that would accept deliveries on the next day. If today is Wednesday, the first available shipping day is Thursday. My process looked for outstanding requests that had Friday as a delivery day. Very simple and straightforward. Looking at the weekly increases in the data above, we can see the surge in the number of new cases two to three weeks after Thanksgiving. The Christmas surge is not far off. While cases are surging and vaccinations are far below the goal, Trump is golfing (How many times has President Donald Trump played golf while in office?) and Pence is skiing (Mike Pence slammed for ‘breaking his Covid team’s travel rules’ on ski trip ‘as millions lose unemployment benefits). There may not be much Trump and Pence can personally do at this time. They're not going to load containers on jets. In a similar situation, though, Condoleezza Rice eventually regretted going to see Spamalot while Hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans and then shopping for shoes at Ferragamo the day after (Condoleezza Rice Shops for Shoes). It's a fiddling while Rome burns kind of thing. 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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