H. E. Robbins. Dr. Robbins. Power Slots. Silverthorne Publications, Inc.

Transcription

1 H. E. Robbins Dr. Robbins Power Slots Silverthorne Publications, Inc.

2 Dr. Robbins Power Slots 2010 Dr. H. E. Robbins. All Rights Reserved All rights reserved. Except for brief passages used in legitimate reviews, no parts of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Address all inquiries to the publisher: Silverthorne Publications, Inc. 848 N. Rainbow Blvd., Suite 601 Las Vegas, Nevada United States of America The material contained in this book is intended to inform and educate the reader and in no way represents an inducement to gamble legally or illegally. This publication is designed to provide an independent viewpoint and analysis of the subject matter. The publisher and the author disclaim all legal responsibility for any personal loss or liability caused by the use of any of the information contained herein. Questions about this publication may be addressed to: Published in the United States of America 2

3 Gambling and Slots 1 Should You Play Slots? This book is about slot machines. We'll take an in depth look at what slot machines are all about, about where they come from, how they work, where the best ones are found and some other basic knowledge. Then we'll get into the real meat of playing, and hopefully beating, the aptly named one-armed bandits. It's called money management. Most of you have never heard the term money management. But in gambling money management is absolutely critical. It makes the whole difference between whether you lose or win. It separates the winners from the losers. We will talk a lot about money management in this book. By the time you finish reading this, you will know enough to play intelligently and successfully on any slot machines you choose. There is no doubt about the attractiveness of slot machines. Probably 90% of the people who enter a casino at least try the slot machines. And about 90% of these people end up losing money. It is no joke that the slot machines pay for the new towers the casinos are constantly adding. Slot winnings are now over 60% of the total casino winnings and may hit 80% in the next four or five years. When I first entered the world of casino gambling, playing slot machines was considered kind of disgraceful. A slot player was usually either a degenerate gambler, who didn't have enough money to play the table games, or the wife or girl friend of a table game player sent off to play the slots to keep the "little lady" out of trouble. 3

4 Boy, have the times changed! The majority of casino ads seem to feature slot machines. Smiling people look like they are almost delirious from their slot play. Beautiful women pose on the arms of stylish, suave men, confidently yanking on the machine handles. Now you can get rich playing slots (or haven't you heard). You can win at Black Gold! Or how about Neptune's Treasure! Or plan your retirement from your phenominal winnings from The Fabulous Fifties! You can walk out millions richer from the huge payoffs of the Megabucks game. Or buy your next mansion from the hundreds of thousands showered on you by Nevada Nickels. Or plan your next round the world cruise on your yearly earnings from Quartermania. There is no doubt that the lowly slot machine has become the glamour child of the casino industry. The slot player is now the preferred casino player. Slot clubs are mandatory for any casino that wants to compete. Prizes (we used to call 'em comps, as in complimentary) are offered to slot players as rewards for their slots play, now tracked to the penney by slot machines linked to central casino computers. There is no question that the casinos have learned to milk the slot machine trade for all it is worth. But has the average slot player gotten any smarter? I doubt it. Slot players usually grab whatever money they have and then continue to play on a machine, or several machines, until this money plus a $500 credit card advance, plus $50 mooched from their spouse and the three bucks they got for their shirt are all spent. I admit that I like to play slots. But I hate to lose money. Most people do; they just don't admit it. You are going to hear a lot more about managing your money as we go through this book. I am going to do my best to show you how to turn from a slot loser into a slots winner. To do this, you are going to learn about managing your money. We will talk about setting loss limits. This concept is very simple. No matter how badly your play on a slot machine goes, you will never lose all of your money. Guaranteed. Read on, and I'll show you what I mean. You will learn how to set and reach Win Goals. Can you imagine actually planning on a daily profit from playing slots? I do it. And I'll show you exactly how I do it. Do you know anything about the machines themselves? Some machines are great and others are just awful. Do you know how to find the good ones? I'll show you in a few chapters down the road. And finally, I want to ask you the million dollar question. Should you play slots? 4

5 I admit I don't have an answer for this one. Play slots if you want to; you sure don't need my permission. But I ask one thing of you. Set your sights on playing to win. I want you to start thinking about how good it will feel to walk into a casino and in a couple of hours walking out with casino money stuffing your pockets. Is this possible? Sure it is. And you can do it playing the slot machines. But I want to plant one more concept in your mind. Gambling is not about winning millions. It is about grabbing smaller wins, locking them up and walking out a winner. And doing this over and over. Gambling is not about getting lucky. It is about controlling your losses so that you are never wiped out. And successful gamblers learn how to accept smaller wins and cut their losses to the bone. There is no way that you are going to win on every slot machine or even on every slot session. You are going to have days where machine after machine takes your money. But I am going to share with you several tricks. You will never walk out broke and beaten by the slots. You will always have enough money to hit the casinos again and hopefully do better. And when you do win. I'll tell you exactly when to run, not walk for the door. Should you play slots? Yeah, play all you want. But listen to what I have to say first. Learn how to manage your money, and you'll start walking out a winner! 5

6 2 Bankroll If you want to play the game, you've gotta have bread. Mullah. Bucks. Your bankroll is the amount of money you bring with you for gambling. Notice I said the amount of money for gambling. It is not the total amount of money in your kitty. You've got to have some money for cabfares, tips and so on. Your gambling bankroll is only the amount brought especially for gambling. And, you will never lose all of this bankroll no matter how badly your excursion into casinoland goes. The size of your bankroll governs how you will play. If you have a $100 bankroll, you are not going to play on $1 or $5 slots. With this bankroll, you are limited to nickel and quarter slots. With a $500 bankroll, you may want to play some dollar slots, but you are better off sticking with the quarter slots. But you won't need to play nickel slots. With a $1,000 bankroll, you can play quarter or dollar slots, but you may be pushing it to play five dollar slots. If you are willing to bring a $2,000 bankroll, you may want to play only dollar and five dollar slots. The amount of money you bring with you strictly for gambling is your bankroll. Now I am going to share some hard facts with you. If you have only fifty bucks, you are less likely to win $500. If you have $1,000, you have a better chance of winning $500. But you knew that, didn't you? Another one of life's little injustices just reared its ugly head. 6

7 It takes money to make money. The rich get richer and the poor get children. This statement has been made a hundred ways (I'll only recite two of them so you'll get the idea). The size of your bankroll determines which machines you can play on. If you have a midget bankroll of say $100, you would be foolish to play on dollar machines. If you do, and thirty minutes after arriving you have lost $50, you will be sweating bullets wondering what you are going to do with the remaining six hours you planned on staying. The gambler who plays on dollar machines with only a hundred dollar poke is just asking for trouble. So your bankroll is going to determine which machines you can play on. It will also determine the size of your winnings. If you want to win big, you've got to bring more bucks. If you want to play the dollar machines, you've got to bring more bucks. If you want to take a shot at more machines, you've got to bring more bucks. I mentioned earlier that if you learn my methods of gambling, you will never go home broke. And, you will have one heck of a shot at winning some of the casino's cash hoard. The first thing you are going to do before you hit the slot machines is to divide your gambling bankroll into smaller bankrolls. These are called Session Bankrolls. The idea behind a session bankroll is similar to dividing an army into various components with some divisions always held in reserve. You want to hit the enemy as effectively as possible, but you can't afford to risk losing all of your men and materials in one massive strike where something goes wrong. Being a prudent commander means always considering all the things that can go wrong before ever beginning to envision the fruits of victory. Casino gambling is very similar. The more I think about this comparison, the more I like it. A casino gambler is a lot like an army commander going into battle. He must decide exactly how to position his troops and always be prepared for the mishap, the upset, the plan gone awry. Likewise, you must never assume that Dame Luck is on your side and plunge in with all your army. You must always keep adequate reserves. You must be prepared to lose skirmishes with the casino with the larger goal in mind of emerging a victor. The casino has many advantages over you the player. It has an almost unlimited amount of money compared to the amount you bring. It has infinite patience. And it has probability on its side because every casino game favors the casino is some way. 7

8 You have to muster your advantages in your battle to take the casino's money. And one of your most important weapons is to divide your bankroll into smaller stakes, and only offer the casino a shot at one of your smaller stakes in any given session. Here's the logic behind this. When you are playing slot machines you will be looking for a hot trend. You will be looking for that time when a machine starts spitting coins out at you at such a furious rate that your heart is pumping ninety miles an hour, and your adrenaline level is off the chart. But you know that this doesn't happen all the time. It happens once in a while and doesn't last forever. When it does, you temporarily have the advantage over the casino. But you have got to last long enough to be there when the coins start rushing out. Dividing your gambling bankroll into five or ten or even twenty, little bankrolls gives you more shots at the casino's stash. And more important, it limits your downsize in any single contest against the casino. If you have a bankroll of $1,000, and you divide it into twenty session bankrolls of $50 each, there is simply no way that the casino can beat you in a single session. But you have twenty shots at the casino's bankroll. And like the wise general who keeps reserves, you will always have your reserves of cash. 8

9 3 Win Goals We're going to talk about Win Goals. What the heck is a Win Goal you ask? Maybe something like a football goal post. Naw, it must have something to do with hockey. Or that fancy English game played on horses, what-cha-callit. Nope, wrong on all counts. It's about gambling. It's about figuring out a reasonable amount of winnings for a gambling trip. Oh, now you see. Since we're just dreaming here, you decide that a million bucks is your win goal. I see a smile starting to appear. You just got the joke. Now you suppose I will tell you which psychic line to call to find out when you will win. Except I am dead serious. I am talking about setting up a goal that you can reasonably expect to win, then bringing out this amount of money in your very own pocket or purse or stuffed in your boot or where ever you keep your casino winnings. Casino winnings? You never had that problem did you? Well, I don't intend to create problems for you, if winnings are a problem. "No problema" you say. You can handle winnings. Just show me how to win that million bucks. I am going to start out disappointing you with some bad news. Neither I, nor the psychic, nor slot mechanics, nor slot attendants, nor your lucky charm will help you win a million bucks. Winning a million bucks, or even a ten thousand dollar jackpot, is mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When we discuss playing jackpot machines a few chapters down the road, I will lay out exactly how to play the jackpot machines. But I can't guarantee your million or even your ten grand. 9

10 Most slot players tend to think about the huge payoffs possible and then blow their bankrolls and walk out broke. If you are in this camp, I am going to try to change your attitude. I am going to share with you a great secret of how to win at gambling. (You might want to pull the shades so that your deadbeat brother-in-law doesn't find out too and become even more intolerable than he is.) Are you ready? The secret of winning is to set lower win goals and then learn to accept them. Another way of saying this is that the amount you are likely to win is directly related to the amount you bring with you for gambling, your gambling bankroll. If you bring $1,000 as your bankroll, you may easily win $100 or even $300. If you bring $5,000 to play slots, you might want to shoot for a $500 or even a $1,000 win. If you are like most slots players and bring $300 to $500, you can't expect to win the same amounts as someone who puts more money into play. Notice I didn't say won't win the same amount. Anything can happen once in a while. These long shot wins are the stories the casinos like to play up. We have all read about the player who put three bucks in a jackpot machine and won two million smackers. These things do happen. People win lotteries. Or find oil in their backyards. Or are left millions by long forgotten rich uncles. When you look at millions of people and then focus on the events that happen to a mere handful, the improbable seems probable. But we want to deal with the probable. The methods I am going to show you will not prevent you from becoming one of the fortunate handful who win millions. In fact, I am going to show you how to play slot machines in such a way that you will have a chance at making more pulls, on more machines than you have before. And that may increase your chance of hitting a jackpot, simply because you will be in the game longer. But I am getting ahead of myself. We want to deal with the probable. With what is likely to happen nearly every time you play. And you know that you are not going to win a million bucks every time you plunk your lousy three bucks in the nearest slot machine. What you want to do is set a reasonable Win Goal related to the amount of bankroll you bring. A reasonable Win Goal is an amount such as 30%, 40% or 50% of your bankroll. Before you sneer at amounts as low as 30%, I want you to remember that the lower the Win Goal, the easier it is to hit it! A 30% Win Goal is easier to win than a 40% goal or a 50% goal. And we want to deal with the probable, that is, real world stuff. 10

11 Let's say you decide on a Win Goal of 50%. Fine. Now look at your bankroll, and you can see how your Win Goal of 50% might work out. If you bring a bankroll of $500, then you will be looking for a win of $250. If your bankroll is $1,000, your Win Goal is $500. And, if you bring only $100, and your Win Goal is 50%, then you have to be satisfied with a win of $50. What, a lousy fifty bucks? What about ten thousand, or at least a grand? Patience my friend, patience. A Win Goal of a lesser amount will not deprive you of the chance to win larger amounts. Wait a little longer, and I will show you how you can still win much, much more even with a 50% Win Goal. Your Win Goal is not an absolute upper limit on your winnings. Instead, it acts as a special signal telling you that it is time to start locking up profits. Here's one way you can use this Win Goal. You have just finished a round of play on a slot machine. A round of play consists simply of inserting all of the coins you have set aside for insertion into the machine for only one set of plays. You count your coins and discover that you are now up 50%. Now what do you do. Quit? Jump up and down? Do your famous victory dance? No. What I will ask you to do is to set aside all of your original session bankroll and at least half of your winnings. You can continue to play, but only with the Excess Winnings. Let's put some numbers to this approach. You just ran fifty bucks through a dollar slot, and after this round (consisting of inserting the fifty coins one time), you count the coins and come up with 79 coins. Since you always plan ahead, you know that your Win Goal for this fifty coin session was twenty five coins, and you now have 29 coins more than when you started. A light bulb goes off. Son of a gun, you now have met (and exceeded) your Win Goal. Now quickly, what's next? Right, we take half the winning coins let's see, how much is half of 29 and place these coins with your original session bankroll of 50. Quick, what's the answer? Okay, I made it tricky with a win of 29. Slot machines don't deal in half coins. Just take 14 coins from your winnings, add the 50 coins you started out with and place all 64 coins in a different slot bucket. You now have two slot buckets. One has 64 coins in it and the other has 15 coins in it. The 64 coin bucket is your Lockup for this round. You will not touch these coins again. You can add more coins to this bucket more on this later but you will never take any of these coins out. 11

12 Your second bucket with 15 coins is your Excess. These coins you will use to continue to play the slot machine. At the worst, if you lose all of the Excess coins, you will have a win of 14 coins, locked up with your original session bankroll. But you might keep on winning. Let's say your next round produces a ten coin win. There are a several moves you can make now. You could place all ten coins in your Lockup bucket, bringing it up to 74 coins. You could place half of your ten coin win with your Lockup. Or, you could call it quits and leave with a total win of 39 coins, representing a win of 39/50 or 78% of your session bankroll. We will discuss several more options after you have mastered all the principles of this style of gambling. My point here is that a Win Goal will do two things. With a Win Goal, you have an automatic trigger to tell you when it is time to start locking up all or part of your win. In addition, your Win Goal will not prevent you from continuing to win. Using a Win Goal gives you the best of all worlds. It will allow you to lock up and ultimately walk out with a win. And, it does not prevent you from staying and winning a ton more. Neat huh? But there is another side to this coin. Every slot machine doesn't just spit out wins. The darned things also take our coins and cause losses. The next section will tell you what to do to keep your losses down. 12

13 4 Loss Control This section may be the most important in this book. After reading the title, it may also be the one you are most likely to skip. Who wants to hear about losses. I'll bet this is one part of gambling that you've got down cold. Losses are the one thing most slot players have a lot of knowledge about. And what do I mean by Loss Control? Have I got some special way of communicating with the slot machine and telling it to "lay off, you've already done enough damage here." Thought you got me there, didn't you. No, I can't communicate with the machine, but it's not the machine causing the losses. It's the human on the other end. What, moi? Not that nasty old machine the casinos program to take all my money? You got it. It's you who is responsible for the losses. Not the casino. Not the slot machine. Not your bad luck or your nagging wife. Gambling is all about controlling money. It comes under the general heading of "money management." You may recall earlier that I promised you will never lose all of your bankroll playing slots. Do you remember that? Here's how you will accomplish this. Whenever you gamble, you will set a loss limit to any session bankroll you are using. Remember Win Goals from the last section? Well, this is the other side of the coin. With a Loss Limit, you will set the downside to any slots session. Once you hit this limit, the session is over. Kaput. Done. 13

14 There are a couple of more reasons why you want to set limits on losses. Besides money management, gambling is all about psychology. A lot of gamblers bounce back and forth from greed to despair. Greed comes from expecting too much and never setting reasonable limits. Like the player with the $100 bankroll who won't be satisfied with anything less than ten thousand. With greed in action, there is never a limit or a trigger (remember that word?) to tell the gambler it is time to back off, to start locking up (another key word) a win. Here's how greed works with a lot of slot players. You get ahead while playing. Did I say you? Excuse me. That other fellow over there got ahead. I'll keep from being personal this one time. That other player over there who only brought $100 and has been playing dollar slots just hit a $300 payoff. He's now ahead over 500 bucks. Is he happy? Not exactly. Manic or overbearing or overheated may describe him, but not happy. He's now thinking how good it would feel to win a thousand big ones. We'll take a break from watching our friend over there. Besides, we don't have to stand too close. We can hear him hollering and yelping way over here. We'll just stand here quietly for a few more minutes. Sort of take in the casino ambience and "people watch" for a while. Did you notice something. It's getting kind of quiet over in that corner where our winning friend is. If fact, I just heard a curse. Let's sneak in a little closer and see what's happening. My goodness. What happened to all of his coins? It looks like he's down to less than fifteen or twenty coins now. And look at that expression on his face. I'd sure hate to be standing closer than three feet to this character. I am not an expert in these matters, but he seems to have a look of despair. Maybe this does sound a little bit like you. You get ahead, and feel pretty good. In fact, this may be the day you walk out with the casino keys in your pocket. Your greed makes you completely forget the reality of gambling. That winning ain't automatic. That trends reverse. You don't remember these things until the losses start piling up. Until all your winnings disappear and turn into a loss. Let's check up on our friend. It looks like he just plunked his last coin into the slot machine. He looks around and starts walking toward that credit card advance machine over in the corner. Uh oh. Bet he's going to go for the big loss this time. 14

15 By bouncing back and forth from greed to despair, our friend has put himself in the corner. When he is winning, he won't stop or at least set aside some winnings. And when he is losing, he will never set a downside limit. You probably have an idea about what a professional gambler is like. This colorful character will risk all on the turn of a card, the roll of the dice, the pull of a lever. Right? Not me or the other pros I have met. This is a game of caution. Most of the time the casinos have some kind of advantage over you. The house vig. Their unlimited bankrolls. The atmosphere they create. The professional gambler has several tools he can use. But betting it all in one desperate bid to win sure ain't one of them. The pros I know are very conservative. They have to be. Maybe you can afford to lose all of your bankroll because to you gambling is just a game. An excursion. Entertainment. For a pro, it's his livelihood. And he (or she) is not about to risk all to chance. The pro knows that trends can run both for and against him and that when things are going bad, it is time to walk. This is what the twin triggers of Win Goals and Loss Limits are all about. They act as signals so that you don't have to rely on your own frazzled nerves to tell you what to do. Before you start to play, you will set up both Win Goals and Loss Limits. To keep it simple, let's say you use 50% for each. Now you've got a trigger for results in either direction. Say your session stake is $20. Your Loss Limit is $10. Your Win Goal is $10. You know what to do when you hit your Win Goal, right? Set aside part of your winnings and all of your session bankroll and only play with the excess. What do you do when you hit your loss limit? You quit playing. Walk to the door. Head to your room. Take a walk. Go for a swim. Drink a cup of coffee. Go shopping. Change games. Let's see if you got this down. With winnings exceeding your goal, you start locking up profits. When losses hit your limit, you walk. Got it? Acting this way serves a couple of purposes. First it counters the human impulses of greed and despair. You don't have to let your highly charged emotions tell you what to do. You follow the guidelines set by Win Goals and Loss Limits. But there's another aspect. Slot machines run in trends. In order to win, you need to bet when the trend is running your way and pull off when the trend goes against you. With Win Goals and Loss Limits, you can do both. 15

16 And with a Loss Limit, you will never go home broke. After you hit your limit of losses, just take the remaining amount of that session and lock it up. Set it aside. It is not to be used for gambling on this trip. If your session bankroll is twenty bucks and you lose ten, take the remaining ten bucks and lock it up. If you do this after any loss hitting your limit, you will never go home broke. And that is the pros' secret. As Kenny would say, "You've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em." 16

17 5 Trends Trends are a dominant factor in gambling. Blackjack tables run in streaks. Sometimes the dealer wins every hand; other times the dealer will have long streaks of busting. When a shooter is making point after point, the noise from the craps table fills the whole casino. When shooter after shooter fails to make a point, the silence from the table can be equally deafening. Trends can cut both ways for players. Losing trends can seem to last forever, winning trends make the player feel that he can do no wrong. One of the safest ways to approach casino gambling is to follow the trends. Catching a winning trend, even a short one, can make up for prior losing sessions in a hurry. On the other hand, losing bet after bet in a prolonged losing trend can turn a nice win into a sizable loss in short order. By catching favorable trends and exploiting them, trend following becomes one of the most powerful tools a successful gambler can use. On the other side of the coin, avoiding prolonged losing trends can save bundles of cash and prevent a win from turning into a loss. With blackjack, it is fairly easy to determine a winning or losing streak. At blackjack this can be done without even risking a single bet merely by walking around and observing tables before sitting down to play. When you find a table with a large number of dealer busts, it is time to start playing and hope that the dealer continues to bust. Likewise with craps or roulette or baccarat, it is easy to observe or case tables and begin playing when playable trends are occurring. 17

18 With slot machines, a different approach must be used. You may observe another player winning play after play, but that player is not likely to step aside and give you the machine so that you can catch a trend. Also with slot play, it is not possible to skip a play and observe the outcome like it is with the table games. If you don't insert a coin and pull the handle (or push the button) nothing happens with a slot machine. And it is a little awkward to ask some stranger, "Hey buddy, will you throw a couple of coins in this machine. I need to sit out a couple of pulls and wait for a trend." But trends happen all the time with slot machines. And catching a winning trend is one of the slot player's chief weapons in overcoming the built-in house advantage enjoyed by all slot machines. The concept of using slot machine trends to your advantage is basic. You have to avoid long losing streaks, and when you get a strong winning trend, you have got to ride it for all it is worth. The easiest way to avoid slot losing trends is to set limits on the amount of losses you will accept from any slot machine and even set the maximum number of pulls without a payoff. You can also vary the number of coins inserted per play. You may want to reduce your play to only one coin when a machine is cold and increase your wager to the maximum number of coins it will accept when the payoffs start coming. A large part of this book deals with how to find and profit from trends and how to avoid large losses. Most players seem to become chained to a particular machine at some point in their play. This may be fine when the machine is a winning one, but could spell disaster when the enviable long losing streak hits. Many slot players fail to recognize a couple of basic principles of slots play. First, any machine can be a winner or a loser for a limited number of plays. If you give a machine a reasonable chance to provide winnings and it doesn't, there is no law saying that you have to keep playing that machine. Perhaps the most treacherous aspect of slot play is knowing when to pull off a machine which has been a good payer, but now has turned stingy. Most slot players will not recognize that a winning trend has come to an end and continue to play too long. Once a win turns into a loss, many players let their emotions take over and continue to play the same machine in some kind of contest between man and machine. The greatest single hurdle to becoming a successful winning slots player is overcoming the emotional aspects (remember greed and despair) of gambling. And, 18

19 following successful winning trends and leaving unsuccessful losing trends is a powerful tool in the contest with the casinos! 19

20 6 Money Management Money management is all about control. It's about controlling the amount of money used for gambling. It's about reducing losses. It's about controlling the amount of money used for any single session of play. And ultimately, it's about walking out the door a winner. Slot players are a lot like fishermen. They like to talk about the one that got away. How many times have you been up playing slots and ended up giving it all back? When you left the casino, you had fewer dollars in your stash than when you started. In my book, the amount you leave with is all that matters. Anything else is just another fishing story. It is no great feat to get ahead playing slots. Probably 75% of all slot players get ahead sometime in their play. But do they walk out the door a winner? No. Sadly, probably close to 90% of slot players end up losing money. You probably won't realize that the loss rate is this high talking to other slot players. Most slot players won't admit what their losses really are. Here are some typical statements made by slot players, followed by the correct interpretation. "I am up a little bit." Translation: I lost over $500 in the last two hours, but I just won a twenty dollar payoff. "I am about even." (I really like this one). Translation: I haven't had a single hit in over twenty minutes, but I will stay with this damned machine if it kills me. "I am down a little bit." Translation: I just completed my second cash advance on my credit card, but now I feel lucky. "I lost a little, but I just play for the entertainment." Translation: I just lost the rent money, and now I am working on losing everything else. 20

21 "I lost some on the machine, but I expect that the slot host will comp my lunch." Translation: I just bought a thousand dollar lunch. Gambling is all about controlling yourself. It is about accepting responsibility for your own actions. You don't win because you are lucky, and you don't lose because you get a string of bad luck. You create your own luck. If you think about the times you were ahead and then ended up giving it all back plus whatever additional cash you scrounged, who is to blame? The casino? The slot machine? Don't get mad at me for pointing this out. What is wrong with setting aside your winnings when you are ahead? And what is wrong with limiting your losses when you hit a losing streak? And what is wrong with leaving a slot machine that doesn't pay? I hope you answered "nothing." Doing these things all require self control. They are easy to do, but like just about everything else in life, they require a little self control and some practice so that they become habits. Trust me, winning is habit forming. Losing nearly always leaves a bad taste in your mouth or a knot in your stomach. Psychologists tell me that many people feel guilty when they win. Like they have some ill begotten gain stuffed in their pocket. I don't understand this completely. I think it might have something to do with the work ethic so many of us grew up with. Some sort of variation of "a penny saved is a penny earned." Except that with gambling winnings, the penny won doesn't seem like it was earned. Or it may just be a variation of the old greed and despair cycle. Whatever causes it, many people, at least subconsciously, don't feel right walking out of a casino with more money than they came in with. My job is to change this thinking. Once you start walking out with winnings, you will like it. Trust me. Money management is all about using crutches to help us leave with more money than we started or at least leaving with some of the money we came in with. It is all about developing a plan for our gambling and then following it. Gamblers never cease to amaze me. Gambling falls into some special category of human behavior that escapes the normal rules we usually live by. People change their behavior dramatically in casinos. Consummate misers can't wait to throw their money away in casinos. People who clip coupons every week to save ten bucks on groceries think nothing of dropping a hundred bucks in fifteen minutes on some miserable tight slot machine. 21

22 Money management is all about controlling our emotions. It is about developing a plan for slot play and then sticking to it. I am not going to ask you to do anything risque, dangerous, or even slightly off-beat in learning how to correctly play the slot machines. I am just asking you to change your behavior slightly. Once you do, you will learn how good it feels to walk out a winner. And once you try this a few times, you will become just as hooked on winning as you were on losing. Let's recap what we've talked about so far. You have learned to grab smaller wins and then lock them up. This goes against the grain of most slot players who will never be satisfied with any amount of winnings. One of my former business associates always lost at gambling. Every time he played he lost. And most of the time he was up at some point in his play. His playing pattern never varied. When he was up he increased his bets, always trying to win more and more. There was never a stopping point, because he was unwilling to set a reasonable goal for his winning. I have seen this guy win $25,000 in thirty minutes at craps and then lose it all back in the next ten minutes. His loses following wins were especially breath taking. As a winning streak came to an end (they always do), and he started losing, he would increase his bets even more so that he could get back to where he was even more quickly. He never set any goals for how much he wanted to win. If he was up $25,000, he figured he might as well go for fifty grand. If he was up fifty grand, he was rooting for one hundred big ones. Don't get me wrong. The style of play I am advocating will not prevent you from having big wins. I am simply suggesting that you always set aside some of your winnings plus your original session bankroll once you hit a Win Goal. With this strategy, you can win all night. All that you give up with this plan is the opportunity to board the gambler's roller coaster. On this roller coaster every peak is followed by a steep valley. The ride ultimately ends when the whole contraption comes to a dead stop and the passenger is broke. To use my philosophy of gambling, you need to recognize that the amount of money you can expect to win is directly related to your bankroll. Remember your bankroll? It's the amount of money set aside for gambling only. Hopefully, it's money that you can afford to lose. It's not the money needed for the mortgage payment or for the baby's new clothes. Once you have your bankroll put together, it's going to govern everything you do. The size of your bankroll determines whether you play dollar slots or are strictly a quarter slot player. 22

23 You will divide your bankroll into smaller bankrolls, called session bankrolls. Now you have limited your loss exposure to only a portion of your total bankroll. But you are going to add another layer of protection. You are never going to lose all of a single session bankroll. Not even one. You will use a loss limit with every single session bankroll. If your session bankroll is $50 and your loss limit is 50%, then the most you can lose in any single session is 50% of $50, or $25. When you hit your loss limit, the session is over. And the remainder of your session bankroll is locked up. Think what this means. If your bankroll is $500, divided into ten $50 session bankrolls, and you lose every single session, your total loss will be $250. On a happier note, what if you lose seven session bankrolls, for a total of $175, and then hit a $500 jackpot? You'll be ahead, won't you? Using Loss Limits has another big benefit. It will force you to change machines when the machine is a loser. Winning at gambling is all about catching favorable trends. Too many slot players forget this and act like they are chained to a single machine. Once again, human emotions are coming into play. Greed and despair again. If you will learn my style of play, you will never lose all of your bankroll. I haven't mentioned this, but losing all of your money is psychologically devastating for most people. It doesn't matter whether you lose $100 or $1,000,000, whether you can afford the loss, or you just lost your last dollar. Losing every penny you brought with you is just devastating. I have no idea why people will gamble down to their last dollar in a losing session. If you just lost $500, do you really believe that you are going to win it back with three bucks? Yet this is exactly how most people behave when they are gambling. A few years ago, my beautiful wife and I were playing craps at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. We were using one of our controlled systems and had just hit our win goal of about $500 for a short session. We had become intrigued with a player at the opposite end of the table from us. This fellow was up about seventy thousand and was playing with thousand dollar chips. I have no idea what he started with, but I bet it wasn't for more than $2,000. When we left the table, he was starting to lose, but continued to make several bets of a thousand bucks a pop with every shooter. We took a break in the casino lounge, counted our chips, recorded our win and relaxed for a few minutes. After finishing our drinks I suggested that we look in on the seventy grand winner. 23

24 We walked over to the same craps table. The winner was still there, except that he was considerably poorer. He was down to three one-thousand dollar chips, still betting a thousand dollars a wager. We didn't stay to see the sad ending. Think what might have been if he had known about money management. He could have locked up sixty thousand, played with ten grand conservatively, and walked out with at least sixty thousand in winnings. Oh well, another good fishing story about the one that got away. It's time to learn about the slot machines. In the next section we will talk about how the slot machines came about, about their paybacks, the types of slot machines and even where to find the best machines. 24

25 Slot Machines 1 Early Slots The first slot machines appeared on the East Coast in the 1880s and spread rapidly across the country. By 1890, they had reached the rough and tumble city of San Francisco where they were commonly found in saloons and brothels. The first machines accepted one nickel at a time and were mostly poker machines offering payoffs for receiving various poker hands. As they became more popular, they spread from the saloons and brothels to cigar stores, soda fountains, bowling alleys and social clubs. The individual who invented the modern type of slot machine with its spinning reels and cash payouts was Charles August Fey, a German immigrant who settled in San Francisco. In 1899, he created his Liberty Bell slot machine, which had three reels with various symbols, including liberty bells. His machine was very popular among the slot set and become the "standard" for other slot machine manufacturers of the era. By 1905, bell type machines, including Fey's, had spread throughout the country, appearing not only in saloons and houses of ill-repute, but in cigar stores, bowling alleys and barber shops. The "Bell" type machines had three reels, with each reel containing ten symbols. Like modern slot machines, different payoffs were made when certain combinations of symbols were aligned. The top payoff was for a combination of three liberty bells, hence the name, Liberty Bell machine. Many of the early slots were rigged or gaffed to prevent certain payoffs and generally lived up to the name "one-armed bandits." 25

26 By 1906, a backlash had developed against loose living. Voices rang out across the land from a myriad of pulpits, railing against the evils of booze, whores, and of course, slot machines. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which wiped out all of the San Francisco slot machine manufacturers, was seen an omen from God that the God-fearing were on the right track. Many of the reformers redoubled their efforts to eradicate these particularly loathsome brands of sin. Following the earthquake's devastation, most slot machine manufacturers, including Charles Fey, moved out of San Francisco and headed back East. In 1912, the state of Nevada legalized slot machines so long as they did not pay out cash prizes. Thus the era of the "gum machines" began. Banned from paying out coins, they paid out sticks of chewing gum. As long as a player, oops, I mean a patron, was paid in gum (wink, wink), the machines conformed to the Nevada law. Of course the keepers of the faith were not fooled, and they continued their efforts to have these "machines of the devil" permanently banned. Of particular irritation to the righteous was the fact that women, and even children, who could now be seen chewing gum, had obviously played these evil devices. Where else could they have gotten the gum? Now you know why your third grade teacher was so incensed with your gum chewing. She knew, or at least suspected, what you had been up to. In 1917, the forces aligned against evil triumphed with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment, outlawing the manufacturing, sale and use of alcohol, became the law of the land in 1920, being ratified by every state except Connecticut and Rhode Island. However, this did not end the spread of the slot machines. With Prohibition of alcohol in place, the speakeasys spread like wildfire, and most of them offered an assortment of slot machines for their thirsty patrons. During this period, mints started being offered instead of gum, as the mints had a longer shelf life. The war against slot machines continued. By the mid 1930s, the slots were illegal almost everywhere except Nevada, which had legalized gambling in In 1951, Congress passed the Johnson Act, which banned slot machines in all states without legalized gambling. This left Nevada as the only state where slot machines could be legally played. This was the status quo for slot machines for about twenty five years. By the late 1970s, the rest of the country starting awakening to the tremendous growth Nevada had enjoyed, fueled by the legions of persons intent on doing some legal gambling. Atlantic 26

27 City legalized gambling, followed by Indian reservation gambling, riverboat gambling and land based casinos throughout the country. As it now stands, there are few states that don't offer some form of legalized gambling (Utah and Hawaii come to mind). And slot machines offer casino patrons some serious gambling opportunities. Slot machines now accept not only nickels, but quarters, half dollars, dollars, five dollar, and even hundred dollar tokens. Slot play is not limited to one coin at a time, but may be played in multiples of two, three, five, and in some cases, as many as ten coins at a time. In 1980, Bally Manufacturing introduced its first computer controlled slot using a microprocessor. This machine made possible the multi-million dollar jackpots with hundreds, or even thousands, of machines linked, with each machine's play adding to the jackpot until some lucky player walks up, and plunks three coins in and walks out with two million bucks. International Game Technology became Bally's fiercest competitor, specializing in manufacturing the mega-jackpot machines offering lottery like payoffs. What are you up against playing these computer chip controlled "thinking machines?" Let's find out. 27

28 2 Computers Disguised as Slot Machines The early slot machines were strictly mechanical devices with levers activating gears which in turn caused reels to spin and ultimately stop, with the symbols displayed in a window visible to the player. They were easily beaten by persons skilled at pulling the handles in certain ways, by persons inserting small wires into the sides of the machines and by other persons of like ilk. In the 1950s, a group using the "rhythm method" drained thousands from the Nevada slot machines using a special technique for the pulling the handle in such a way that the reel spinning could be influenced, and certain combinations of symbols could be manipulated to appear more often than they would have if the reels had been left to spin naturally. The advantages of such techniques in beating the slot machines are enormous. The original slot machine, the Liberty Bell, had three reels with 10 symbols on each reel. The "jackpot" combination consisted of lining up three bells for a payoff of 22 coins. The odds against hitting this combination were 999 to 1. Because only one bell appeared on each reel, the odds of stopping on a bell were one in ten for each reel. Of course, in order to hit the big payoff, all three reels had to show bells. Since there was only one bell on each reel, three bells would line up once every 1,000 pulls, computed by multiplying the odds of hitting one in ten symbols on each reel of 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 or 1/1000. Thus with one jackpot payoff per 1,000 pulls, the odds against hitting the jackpot were 999 to 1. The rhythm players could change these odds by controlling the rate at which one or more reels would stop with a bell showing. Assume that they could manipulate the third 28

29 reel to show bells half the time. The odds of hitting three bells would become 1/10 x 1/10 x 5/10 or 5/1000, which works out to 199 to 1, considerably better than 999 to 1. The mechanical slots were the only slots on the scene until the 1950s when the electromechanical slots appeared. These slots resemble modern slots with multiple coin play, multiple pay lines, larger jackpots and progressive jackpots. The levers of these machines could not be manipulated to control the spin of the reels as the levers only activated electrical components which caused the reels to spin. However, these electrically controlled slots were only one step up from the old mechanical slots. While they offered flashing lights, and even musical tunes, the mechanical spinning of the reels ultimately determined the payouts to the players. With these machines, not only could the player insert more coins per play, but additional reels were added with some machines sporting five or more reels. The latest generation of slot machines look like the electromechanical slot machines. They have levers or in some cases buttons which seem to activate the reels. They typically offer three, four or five reels which spin around just like the mechanical or electronically controlled machines. Some of these machines display reels as video displays, which is about the only visual clue that these machines are different. The newest slot machines, the ones you will most likely encounter where ever you decide to play slots, are really computers disguised to look like slot machines. These computer controlled slots have brains consisting of microchips and are controlled by sophisticated electronic circuitry. The reels and levers are still there, but they are there for appearance only as the microchips control the payoffs. The only reason slot machines even have levers or reels anymore is to make them appear to be more like the older type slot machines and therefor more familiar to slot players. They could just as easily be activated by insertion of the coins, pressing a button or by installing a small microphone that you could whisper into "Spin you bastard." The reels can be easily replaced by video screens as they are on the video poker machines. They have been left on the computer controlled slots simply because most slot players like to see the reels spin and watch the symbols whirl by. But, I want to let you in on a secret. The reels spinning have nothing to do with the payoffs on these microchip controlled slots. All payoffs are now determined by a specialized computer program which continuously creates random payoffs and then tells the reel when to stop so that the computer determined symbols appear in the window. This program is known in the trade as a random number generator or RNG. The RNG program runs continuously so long as the slot machine is plugged in. It determines thousands of combinations of payoffs every second. When you place your 29