Take Control of Your Slot-Playing Life! By Frank Scoblete

Fast cars, fast women, fast food.

At first these things might sound intriguing and our society sells them as such. Certainly, the commercials for all those cars zooming down the highways of commercialville, taking hairpin turns at lightning speeds, music blaring in the background, cool-looking, sun-glassed dude at the wheel, might give you the desire to imitate them. And today’s movie stars are not known for their virtuous natures and would, in another era, be considered fast women. Certainly many modern day young women might want to emulate such stars in their dress (or undress), and in the pieces of metal they hammer into eyebrow, nose, lip, tongue, tummy and reproductive parts. Today’s young woman might also want to emulate the modern movie star’s moral sensitivities as well.

And teenagers just love fast food. So do adults. And so do the doctors who will get to treat all those future, fat, fatigued, and flustered heart patients who made a steady diet of artery-clogging fast-food "meat" – if that is what the greasy brown thing is between those buns.

Here’s a truth: In most cases, fast is bad! Fast cars don’t have fender bender accidents when they’re revving down the winding roads; they have body breakers. You die in them; you don’t just get bruised. They don’t show that truth in the commercials. It wouldn’t look good, seeing that handsome young actor in sunglasses splattered all over I-95. That’s why the commercials about fast cars always have a teeny-tiny disclaimer at the bottom saying that normal humans shouldn’t try driving this way, this is only professionals (which is really scary because the death rate for professional drivers is greater than the death rate for amateurs!). Of course, driving fast can be thrilling until you hit the wall, or the tree, or the other car filled with an innocent family tooling along to grandma’s house.

Fast women are the first, favorite and fastest to get various sexually transmitted diseases (especially the new, improved and lethal ones), given to them by fast, fistula-packing men; and such ladies are the first to get pregnant and have to decide between an abortion or a baby they can ill afford to raise. Nice choice. Fast is bad for women. Yes, some fast times can be fun until you hit the clinic because some disease, condition or fist just hit you. In truth, there is no upside to fast living – it just quickens despair and, perhaps, death. Neither is much fun, I’m told.

And all this holds true for less important things than life and death, like slot machines.

Last issue I showed clearly how a slot player, pumping through three one-dollar coins per five seconds, could lose ten times as much per hour as a basic strategy blackjack player playing $25 a hand. This isn’t something slot players are generally aware of, the incredible impact of house edges that range from 5 to 15 percent on their small investments.

Just as someone can slow down the speed of a car, despite the car commercial’s insistence that this car was "built for speed," so too can a slot player slow down the speed at which he plays, and loses, his money. Doing so will not decrease your pleasure at being in the casino and taking your chance with Lady Luck, unless your pleasure is to actually lose ten times more money than a $25 blackjack player.

Here’s how to go slow at the slots:

You must choose the right machines to play. Avoid all machines that come in with high house edges. But which are those? Any machine that is linked to other machines will tend to be tighter than machines that stand alone. Is this always true? No. It just almost always true.

Look to play a single dollar in the machines, even machines that give you a bit of a reward on the big jackpot line for playing full coin. The difference between full coin and one coin in most slot machines is, at best, a half percent or less. You are betting three times as much money to get a half percent less edge. Watch how that works:

Say you have a stand-alone, one-dollar machine that pays back 95 percent of all the money put through it if you play three coins, but this same machine will only return 94.5 percent of all the money put through it if you play one coin.

Playing three coins, you’ll put through $2160 per hour (12 spins per minute) and your expected loss will be (in the long run) $108. If you play one coin, you’ll put through $720 per hour and your expected loss is $39.60. Yes, if you hit the jackpot, you’d make a better score but those few and far between jackpots just aren’t worth the tiny, extra percentage that the house gives you for playing full coin.

Next, why play at such a fast clip? Reduce the number of spins from 12 a minute down to 6 a minute. Everything gets reduced in half by doing so. The way to reduce the number of decisions in half is simply to take a deep breath and never press the spin button until you count to five – one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five. The tendency for most slot players is to start off at a moderate pace and then, as their adrenaline is pumping, to pick up the pace. You don’t want to fall into that trap because you want to be able to return to the casinos time and time again for your slot-playing thrills.

And in the world of slot play, slot will be, in the long run, the most thrilling way to metaphorically drive that car. And low men and women will keep their bankrolls healthy. And then when you get those comps to the buffet or café, eat a salad. To heck with fast cars, fast women, fast food – and fast play on slot machines.

Frank Scoblete is the #1 best-selling gaming author. His books and tapes have sold over a million copies. He is executive director of Golden Touch™ Craps dice-control seminars. His websites are www.scoblete.com and www.goldentouchcraps.com . For a free brochure or more information call: 1-800-944-0406 or write to: Paone Press, Box 610, Lynbrook, NY 11563.