Thanks! Much appreciated.
There is a TV show currently called Hustlers Gamblers and Crooks on the Discovery Channel. Each story is told by the actual people. What a wreck. The one I watched last week featured two guys who were broke but had an idea to ferry people to the Bahamas and (I think) teach them how to gamble. Somehow they attracted a partner (sucker) who managed to get them a $20,000 line of credit at American Express. They withdrew $10,000 and flew to the Bahamas and spent enough to start getting comps. So they were living it up on borrowed money and getting free food and lodging.
They blew the $10,000 and American Express did not want to extend another $10,000. They concocted a scam about needing an emergency operation including a doctor to vouch for them and they got the advance. Here is their strategy. They know the dealer advantage on blackjack is “only” like 4% so they reason, yeah, we can beat that easily. Stop right there and think about that. They freaking know full well the house always wins. They played for like 3 or 4 days. Up, down, up, down. Somehow they managed to pull it off, pay back the 20 grand and have a couple hundred left.
American Express banned them for 10 years anyway. And even though the goy shook his head and admitted they got lucky, he still thinks they could do it again.
I’ve never lived in Las Vegas (visited though), and I haven’t either. But it seems accurate.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a horseplayer, and at least once a week, I’m at my local horse race book, which has about three dozen slot machines. Horseplayers tend to be fairly gregarious sorts—everybody has an opinion on the next race, and they’re willing to share it; or we’ll talk about upcoming stakes races; or we’re wondering why and how the longest shot in the field won the last race. Thing is, we’re all talking, laughing, joking, and otherwise having fun—sometimes, I wonder if I go to the race book to bet or to socialize. Probably both, to be honest.
Then, there are the slot players. Most are emotionless, almost automatically pressing buttons. They don’t seem to be having any fun, and if they talk with anybody, it’s the person they came in with. A big payout may result in a “woohoo!”, but then they’re back to automatically pressing buttons. They’re much like Sam described, really.
We seem to be two different sorts of people, who just happen to be in the same room at the same time, and never mix.
I’m not a player. I get no enjoyment from games when there are better things to do.
When I lived in Philadelphia, I drove to Atlantic City to see what it was like (once was enough). While walking around on the boardwalk, I entered a casino and put a quarter in a slot machine. I won, ~$30.
It was a pain in the ass dealing with the quarters, putting them in a bucket, and converting them to paper currency. After doing that I left the casino, my gambling done.
Oh yeah …
When I lived in Vegas I gambled a little bit, mostly craps and a smidgen of not-real-skilled blackjack. Ever since, so ~30 years worth, I’ve enjoyed walking through various casinos wherever I happen to be, just to compare and contrast. Sort of “professional curiosity” from a non-professional. And once in awhile to eat with the jingling jangling noise in the background for nostalgia’s sake.
Casinos everywhere have a lot more animated computer screens and are brighter, noisier, and visually busier than way back then. But non-Vegas casinos all are tawdry, some far tawdrier than others. And a lot of Vegas is pretty shopworn these days too.
I’m very far from a blue-nose about almost everything. But I think we could accurately describe most commercial casinos and their results as
The wages of sin are degradation of the soul.
And there are the people who are so obsessed, they don’t even get up to go to the bathroom. Some prepare for this; most don’t.
I was telling this story to someone the other day and I might have mentioned somewhere here as well, but:
Years ago I was visiting a friend in AZ and one day she was busy and couldn’t hang out until the evening. So she handed me a dixie cup full of quarters that she had been accumulating from spare change and told me to take it up to the nearby Indian casino and play the slot machines. I shrugged and did so and when I got there I started randomly hitting just a bit. This is literally the only time I have ever played a slot machine in my life. I was quickly up, I dunno, maybe $20-30 in quarters and just as quickly bored. I wandered back to her place and later that evening I tried to hand over the winnings. She was baffled. “What the hell - you’re supposed to play until you run out of quarters then have lunch at the buffet and come home. You’re not supposed to win anything.”
To this day I can’t quite get what fun there is in that ritual. But she and her sister used to make an afternoon of it that way from time to time when they had accumulated enough useless change. Didn’t hurt her financially, really. So, whatever. But I found it weird.
Eh, I see it as the “adult” equivalent of my mom in the 80s giving me and my brother a twenty and dropping us off at the mall on a weekend when I was a mid teen and my brother a tween. We were expected to see a movie, and use the other half to get snacks at the theater OR (our choice) the adjacent arcade. And my mom would get 4-5 hours of the two of us out of her hair.
Pouring quaters into a slot machine, IF it enterains you, as opposed to pouring quarters into an arcade machine (see also our thread on the stigma of wasting time on video games) isn’t all that different if you aren’t an addict who is spending money they can’t afford.
It’s where I get hung up, I guess. To me the “fun” in slot machines would seem to be in the potential of winning money, but I suppose the dopamine payoff for some is merely the occasional tinkle of coins being released when you “win” (as opposed to hearing ‘finish him!’ playing Mortal Combat in an arcade).
A friend had a small pachinko machine when I was quite young. I found its appeal just as baffling as a little kid.
I personally agree, I’ve been to Vegas twice in total, and each time I spent less than twenty minutes and certainly under $20 at the slots. Mostly to cadge a free drink or three and to see if I could figure out the appeal.
Personally, if I’m going to gamble, it needs to be on something where the dream of winning alone is worth the price. So, maybe twice a year I’ll throw $2 at a lottery ticket when it’s life changing money and consider it well spent. But oooh, win $50/100 when playing at low stakes slots? Not for me.
Still, if for the individual it qualifies as a few hours entertainment for $20, how is it different from me blowing $20 to see a movie in a theater these days? Not that I’m willing to do that much anymore either.
If you play a quarter slot with one quarter and spin 400 times per hour, and the house has an edge of 8%, it will cost you $8/hr to play, but could be ten times that one way or another due to variance. If you can handle the variance, it’s not horrigically expensive, especially if you can get a comped drink here and there. But still expensive.
If you want better odds, you have to play the dollar slots. If you want the best odds, you have to play 5 coins at a fime to get the bonus. So now you are betting $5 per spin. At 400 spins per hour, that’s $2,000 in action. If the house takes 2%, that’s $40/hr, but you could be up or down as much as $1,000 in that hour.
If 400 spins an hour sounds like a lot, I’m actually being conservative. Slot players can spin 600 times per hour. Video poker, as much as 1,200.
The way to play slots is to walk by and put in an occassional coin for fun. If you are sitting there robotically mashing the spin button, you are losing money fast.
Actually the best way to play the slots is to walk by, notice that they are a giant money sink, and keep walking.
Compare to blackjack. Even with just basic strategy (the house will give you a basic strategy reference if you ask in most places), the house edge in blackjack is typically under 1%. If you play at a $5 table, you’ll probably get about 60 hands per hour. This game costs you $3/hr. At tables with the best rules, about $1.50 per hour, with hourly variance about 20 times that. And if you can learn a simple count, it’s breakeven at worst, and slightly profitable at best.
If you hope to come home a winner from Vegas, variance needs to be your friend. So play high variance games, but don’t play too many plays. Variance goes down with the number of plays, and your winnings/losses will begin to converge on the house advantage. Your best chance to win in Vegas is to put your entire bankroll down on one 50/50 bet with the lowest house edge you can find. Win or lose, you go home. You have almost a 50% chance of going home a winner.
Of course, you are there to have fun as well, so this strategy sucks. Instead, you want to plan out your gambling bankroll to last the vacation. But it would still be nice to go home a winner. Slower games with less house edge give you the best chance of going home a winner after a few days’ play. Slots? Not likely.
I don’t know which slots your friend plays, but many of them have potential for huge hits. What she’s thinking might be I’ll play this small change until the potential for a large jackpot has disappeared. Prusably if she hit $10000 she wouldn’t spend all day and all night trying to put it back in.
I have worked in two online casinos. My arguement is that the wages of sin are total boredom.
I liked the job, but testing the fucking things was utterly mind numbingly boring.
The backend stuff, was great. Learnt plenty about security, speed, reliability etc. Porn is just ahead of online casinos when it comes to internet innovation, so that part was fun.
But not the slots themselves.