I feel before I write this blog, I need to warn you: I very seldom win at Slot Machines. Before you decide to skip reading this, I need to tell you: I don't really try. When I visit the casinos I take as much money as I can afford to lose and then set about making that happen. Nothing will stand in my way of reaching my goal of losing all my money. If I have a "big win" on a machine, I will continue to play that machine until the "big win" becomes a "miniscule remnant". I really only play for fun and there is nothing more fun than watching little cartoon "wheels" spin around and around in a spacious smoke-filled room surrounded by seventeen nursing homes worth of geriatrics. It is the perfect place to go when you're someone like me - someone that likes to emerge themselves in the harsh cess pools of noise. After all, I hate to think and a casino is one place you will not be able to process one thought. If you have never been to a casino, try this. Take any chirpy, slurpy commercial for any toy, happy meal or even the opening credits of any given cartoon show. Now, loop that noise over and over every few seconds. Now add to it twenty five more looped cartoon show themes or childrens' commercials. This will give you an idea of what the average casino sounds like. In fact, I believe that the reason casinos are so popular is that most slot machines sound and look just about like all the cartoon shows I grew up watching. You might wonder why I don't explore the fun of actually winning at slots once in a while myself. The answer is simple: I consume so much free coffee while I am there, I feel like the casino and I have broken even. They keep forty bucks of mine, I slosh home with a bladder full of hot black coffee.
Now, the tips I am going to share are ones that I have observed by actual slot machine players that claim they have won a lot of money. I have not verified if they have, in fact, won anything. If you have ever spent time talking to anyone that frequents a casino you know that slot machine players generally only pay attention to the money they win, not to the money they feed into the machine. You might criticize them for poor math skills or being dishonest with themselves. I credit them for imaginative bookkeeping and optimism. Besides, near as I can figure this is how the United States is run. The government is not that interested in the money going out, only what is coming in. The national debt is now so high no one can calculate it anymore, so it has ceased to exist in their minds. So, before you go criticizing slot machine players, you need to understand you're also criticizing the patriots of the greatest country in the world, you flag burning scum.
Here, then, are the tips:
Tickling the chrome: It is a scientific fact, discovered by Ethan Zeiffenblaser in 1908 that Chromium is actually sensitive to the human touch. Not only that, but it likes to be touched. Zeiffenblaser took a large sheet of chome, propped it up in his lab and began to grin at it and tickle it. He looked closely and found that the chrome plate displayed a face like his own, with a large grin on it. Every experiment done by Zeiffenblaser produced the same resutls: if you touch chome it will imitate your image. Only one man challenged Ethan and that was his arch-enemy Heinrich Dusselmeiser. In 1909 with a grimace he tickled a piece of chome and watched as it grimaced back. Zeiffenblaser did some more research and found that Dusselmeiser was a horrible pain in the butt and no one really liked being around him anyway, so there was no reason to expect the chrome to smile at him. Therefore, if you do not tickle the chrome on your slot machine, do not be surprised if it is indifferent about your winning or not.
Yelling at the Slot Machine: As we all know, the modern slot machine is run by a computer and you might think that yelling at the slot machine would do a lick of sense. But, ask yourself this: who is running the computer? There are actually little people inside every slot machine telling the computer what to do. If you are not yelling, the little man might not know you really mean business. After all, you could be someone like me, someone that is just content to play and would never think of winning.
Poking at the Screen: This one took me a while to understand. I would see people sitting at the machines, jabbing their fingers at the screens as the images went by. I've seen people knocking on the screens, grabbing at the images, rubbing their fingers all over and so on. What they are doing will not necessarily help them win, but it will help disguise their losses. Sitting next to someone like this you can hear them as they occasionally rack up some points. But, with their screen so smudged up with the oils from their hands, you can't see how much they've won. And since most slots do not make noise when you have had an unsuccessful spin, there is no telling what they are losing.
The Angry-Hover Method: This is one that is often observed between 1:30 and 4am. You will notice inebriated persons drifting from one machine to another, hovering over them (usually with an average of 2.3 cigarettes in their mouths) and punching buttons. After nothing happens their drunken half-sleeping mind will pick up a dim memory of once putting money into a slot machine and they will do so. Then they will angrily huff smoke all over as they punch a few bottons and then stomp off. This method does not work at all in actually winning slot games, but that is not the point. The point is if you are so obnoxious that you make other guests feel intimidated, irritated or otherwise uncomfortable, the security guards may ask you to leave. And it is customary to hand over large wads fo cash to people like this, just to make them go away.
Cash Out and Immediately put the money back in: I have been told that this is to fool the machine into thinking you are a new and different person sitting down fresh and new with no history with this machine. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "but what if I cash out with $63.79 and then put that $63.79 back in, won't the machine get suspicous? What are the odds that the next person to sit down would be insert the exact same amount of money?" Looking at it from a purely statistical vantage point, it seems unlikely. But, let's remember that no one in their right minds would expect this trick to actually work, so the machines are told that it will never ever happen and everyone that sits down is to be treated as a brand new customer. This is a prime example of Yakman's Law in action: if something seems too dumb for a human to attempt, some human will attempt it; often in large numbers. Yakman's Law applies to this just as much as it applies to running the Boston Marathon, joining a pyramid scheme and playing slot machines.
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