learntoplayslotmachines.com

Do not let other people tell you how to spend your money.  There are two sides to this point that I am making.  The first is the point that you hear most gambling advocates make.  Some states have tried to put a legal limit on how much people wager at casinos every year.  This does not make any sense to me.  If the government legally embraces casino gambling and are willing to take tax dollars from the business, they cannot tell people how much money to spend on a service they support.  Gambling cannot be legal and illegal at the same time.  Certainly, no one wants people to spend their paycheck on slot machines every week, but a person’s money is their own business, for better or worse.

On the other hand, while the government has no business telling people how to spend their money, be sure you are not being told how to spend your money by the casino.  For example, if you play a penny slot machine, it is okay to wager just a penny.  That big old Max Bet button is so easy to hit and in your head you are thinking you have a better chance of winning.  That chance is marginal.  Do not feel pressured to make dollar wagers when you can have just as much fun, only longer with penny wagers.  Your money is your responsibility and yours alone, do not succumb to the influence of other people.  Try to remain informed and make wise decisions with your spending.

The power of suggestion is a very mighty tool in the world of sales.  All an advertiser has to do is way one or, if they are really lucky, two words that a person wants to hear and that person will through all of their savings at them.  It is rather embarrassing to find yourself in that situation, but most people never seem to realize when they have been had.  In the casino industry the newest fad, or at least since the recession began, is the penny slot machine.  Penny slot machines became big again after everyone in the country feel on hard times.  People still wanted to gamble so it was nice to have the option of wagering as low as a penny on a slot machine so that your game could last longer.

The problem with the penny slot machines is that most people never actually wager only a penny.  Wagering a penny only gives you a very small wager on a single line. In other words you have the least possible chance of winning and if you do you will win the least amount of money possible.  Most people will play the penny slot machines and wager the max bet so that they can activate all of the lines in the game and have the most chances of winning.  The problem with that is that they are then wagering a dollar or more for each wager and not actually saving any money by using the penny slots.

I am a guitarist. It took me quite a bit of time to become comfortable calling myself that.  For a long time I was a guy that simply new a few songs on the guitar.  But there came a point where I realized I wanted to know more about this thing that was beginning to take up more and more of my time.  I eventually realized that I did not have to play as well as Clapton or Hendrix in order to call myself a guitarist.  Being a guitarist is a process, not an end result.  As a guitarist you spend a much of our time getting to know an instrument and finding different ways of expressing your ideas with it.  That is not a process that ever ends.  The more time I spend with the instrument the more I know about it and the more I know about the instrument the higher my success rate of expressing the sounds and ideas that I want out of it.

This is a fact that holds true for everything.  If you are spending a lot of time doing something, it makes sense that you should have some desire to learn more about it.  I do not think that anyone should spend most of their time gambling, but I am not one to tell people how to spend their money.  But, if you do spend a lot of time at the slot machines or playing cards, it is your responsibility to learn as much as you can about the game and the statistics involved.  It is bound to make you more successful as a gambler, even if that success means the realization that you should not gamble so much.

Not to sound paranoid, but you are probably better off going with the assumption that everyone is lying to you these days.  I am not talking about in your personal life.  I hope you have people in your life the you can rely on.  However, I am talking about advertisers.  Advertising has really warped the way people process information.  Advertising has gotten to a point where sugary soda water is somehow more refreshing that water.  We all know that is not true but Sprite can pay for better advertisers than old H2O ever could.  This is the reason I rail so hard against too much television viewing.  Television has become nothing but advertising and misinformation.  I do not blame the television, it is a business, and this is how they make money.  As a consumer it is your sole responsibility to remain alert and researched.

Casinos are also a business.  The purpose of any business is to get as much money out of you as possible.  So as long as a casinos can justify any of their advertising tactics as somewhat true it is fair game.  Casinos have found a gold mine in the penny slot machine.  The name alone allows people to believe they can save money while gambling, but the fact is that penny slot machines yield a higher return on money spent than more expensive slot machines.  That mean, overtime, you actually have a better chance of winning money from a more expensive slot machine.  But that margin for potential success is very small.  We are talking on 3 to 4 percentage points.

Once you leave school it is your job to continue educating yourself.  If you think about it, just for a moment, you realize that one thing that will and always has been your responsibility, and yours alone, is educating yourself.  Even a kid in grade school cannot rely 100 percent on the wisdom of their teachers.  Your education is a very important thing that must not be left to wither and certainly not allowed to be easily misguided by other people.  Your education shapes how you look at the world you live in.  There is no piece of information out there that does not help you in some way.  You may never have to directly use information related to quantum physics, but knowing something about the subject is bound to affect your perspective on reality.

I recently read an article about penny slot machines that I found illuminating.  Apparently penny slot machines actually give casinos a higher return percentage than more expensive slot machines.  Most people like penny slot machines because you feel like you are getting more bang for your buck than on a more expensive slot machine.  One of the main points of the article was to encourage people to know more about the odds stacked against them in a casino.  The odds advertised in a casino only give you limited information.  In order to spend your money more wisely at a casino it is on you as a consumer to do further research about your best odds in a given situation.

I do not advise anyone to try and get away with having an illegal slot machine in their business.  It altogether seems to me like a risk that is not worth taking.  I understand that the temptation to bring in revenue that will keep you in business is great, but it does not counter the fact that if the slot machines are discovered you could lose your business.  Some states are really tight on slot machine control and are constantly attempting to crack down on the amount of illegal devices present in the state.  However, I do feel like some businesses can bare the risk better than others.  I have heard stories of little mom and pop restaurants tucking a slot machine away in the back of the restaurant.  Those slot machines may operate for a while before they are uncovered.

However, if you operate an after hours bar, it is probably not a smart idea to have an illegal slot machine in your establishment.  While most bars in Florida close somewhere around 2 am.  There are some bars that are allowed to keep things going until around 4 am.  This is where all the people that want to continue drinking late show up.  It may come as no surprise that officers hang out at closing time to wait for cars to swerve out of the parking lot.  With that much heat on you business I would have to imagine it is only a matter of time be law enforcement figures out you have an illegal device in your business.

Due to the fact that I am not in any sort of illegal peddling business, there is a lot about the illegal slot machine racket that I do not understand.  I don’t really have a problem understanding why some people might be tempted to take that gamble.  While it could ruin their business all together if the law enforcement discover it, it could also bring in a lot of additional revenue to a business if it goes undiscovered.  The real thing that I do not understand is how a slot machine sitting in broad daylight of a mom and pop restaurant or bar can go undiscovered.   That seems almost impossible to me.

I realize that it is a rare occasion that I see on duty officers at a bar, but I know for fact that cops go to bars when they are not working.  I mean seriously.  I would have to imagine most bars have at least on customer in law enforcement present every week.  I mean someone has to notice that there is a big old out of place slot machine in the back of the bar.  Perhaps, slot machine are just one of those things that some law enforcement officials willingly turn a blind eye to.  It would not seem that way according to the stories you hear in the paper.  There are also some cases where police find the illegal machines tucked away in a back storage room somewhere.  But if that is the case I do not see how those machines even make money.

I do not know where most of you went to school but in Northern Virginia we had the DARE program.  Drug Abuse Resistance Education.  This is the program where an officer of the law would come in and talk to kids about the dangers of drug abuse and give us ways of staying drug free.  Having this sort of education made me feel like there were two sets of people.  Clean law abiding people and the shady drug doing and selling type.  It seemed to me that the “bad” people were this sort of other, that you would have to seek out in order to be exposed to.  As I grew up I started to realize that the people you can trust and the people you cannot are all very much intermingled and there are no black and white, hard, fast rules to look to to judge where a person is law abiding or not.

When I saw that young man approach the Florida bartender about illegal slot machines I realized that the opportunity might be tough to turn down for some people.  While the bartender in this situation was working at a successful bar that did not need any legal or illegal assistance, that may not be the case for a person that started up a business that does not seem to be drawing in the customers, it may not be so easy to walk away from a money making opportunity, even at the risk of law enforcement. Not saying it is wise, just trying to understand the people that take that risk.

Until you see it happen right in front of you.  It is sometimes hard to get a sense of how certain types of activity actually work.  I have read story after story about illegal slot machines, but I was never really sure how certain businesses end up with a slot machine on their hands.  Slot machines are not exactly easy to come by.  I am certain that you cannot just call up a company like International Game Technology and just order one since all states attempt to keep a close watch on the legal slot machines they allow.  But, never did I think for a moment that there was a whole business with people peddling illegal slot machines to legal businesses.

In retrospect that should have been obvious.  How else would some of these mom and pop establishments you read about in the paper end up with illegal slot machines in their hands.  I am willing to bet that they had not even thought of the possibility until someone comes along and puts it into their head how much revenue they could turn with just a single machine.  And I have no doubts that the company, for lack of a better term, the provides these illegal machines are taking a big chunk of the profits that the slot machines make.  I can understand the temptation if you are trying to turn a profit with your business, but at the end of the day the risk just does not seem to be worth it.

Willingly or unwillingly, you cannot help but learn from your surroundings.  The people that you spend your time around will shape the way that you see the world regardless of whether you believe nature has more influence than nurture.  This seems to have been the case for me and the time that I have spent in New York City.  I am a rather law abiding citizen, however, when you spend enough time in New York you start to get the sense when people are speaking in code and hushed whispers.  You start to become fluent in the fact that people are using words but having a whole different conversation with gestures and inferences.  It have become so fluent in this coded speech that when I came down to slower paced Florida I started tuning in to conversations I was not yet ready to participate in.

There is a bar down here that my fellow cast mates and I have begun to frequent.  The other day, while throwing darts I noticed a young man come in and strike up a very awkward conversation with the bartender.  I could not hear every detail of the transaction, but I could not miss the words slot machines.  It became very clear that this young man was an illegal slot machine peddler.  It was strange to put a face to an activity.  But, other than his very hush-hush delivery, I do not think most people would have guessed that he was up to no good.