Breaking the Slot Code – How would you use the information?

Yeah, my thought was, how can anyone accurately calculate what the trigger point is without knowing the base payback and the likelihood of hitting the bonus? And could could anyone know those two things?

I'm skeptical enough that I don't want to buy the book(s).

Oh, C'mon,  I've been waiting to read your review,almost as long as I waited for the book!  there are tips and tricks on 25+ different games,  Certainly you have some input/advise on each!  if you dont read the book...we'll never know.  Believe it or not, while I don't agree with you politicaly on anything! I give you props for knowing about the Las vegas gambling scene. and your experiences Living there, and playing there!   Dont make us start a Go-Fund-Me-Page,Buy the book and give us some specific input.

I'm skeptical enough that I don't want to toss $30 or $23 or whatever it is out the window. The 25+ different games would of course have their own quirks, and I'm sure that the book recommends various trigger points to look for, but the approach would have to be the same: when does the machine become +EV? The only "when" would be, when the bonus(es) get high enough. And then you say, well, how high is high enough? At that point, all the author would be able to offer is an educated guess.

PLUS, even if you have a trigger point for Dragon Diarrhea, that machine might be set at 89% base return at the Golden Commode and 84% at the Stinky Silver. So it might be positive at one place but still negative at the other (given the same trigger point). And how would you know either way? For that matter, the exact same machines in the exact same casinos can and very often are set to different payback percentages.

You can't even say, well, I'll assume it's at least a 75% payback (minimum by Nevada law), so I'll be conservative and set my trigger point high enough that I could still be playing +EV even of that was the case. But you would still lack the second piece of info you need: how often does the bonus hit, which would tell you how long you expect to be playing at that -25% return until you do hit it?

And then there's the moment where you see a big fat juicy bonus on Cow Fart Deluxe and you're sure that it must be a positive play. You run several hundred through it without hitting the bonus. Then it dawns on you...how did the bonus get so high in the first place? Because the machine is set to hit the bonus about once every solar eclipse. Again, how do you know?

I'd be very happy to read the book and give a thorough evaluation and review if someone gave me a copy, just like I would if someone offered me a copy of "How to Make Gold Bullion Out of Chicken Feathers." I'd be mildly curious.

I have some advice for you after three years of doing this.

Don't look at a machine and think, " It's almost at the recommended play level, I'll just start playing and hope for the best."  You'll find yourself in a situation where you've lost money, and now you've run the machine up to a better entry point. Now you don't want to leave, so someone else can swoop in and grab the better situation. In the meantime, you've spent money to get it there, and the payoff will not be a winner.

For me, I always want to start at the highest recommended point, or after playing it a few times, decide when I like to play on that certain machine.

Buffalo Ascension is a perfect example.  The book Gambling 102 said 3,136 could be a good entry point. Take a look at Breaking the Slot code, and he talks about when you would possibly consider 3,136 as an entry point based on the column height. So there might be a good play there, but you need to assess the game to decide.  He recommends 3,920 or higher as a good entry point without considering where each column is, which I agree with; this game can be frustrating.

I figured out that I didn't like playing at 3,136 point and realized which columns mattered. Now I care much more about where the columns are than the 3,160 entry point; 3,920 is always good if you can find it. That is a big if!

But does he elaborate on the basis for the calculation of that entry point? How does he (or you) KNOW that the game is positive at that juncture? I mean, Mike Shackleford is a gambling authority (this other guy who wrote the Slot Code book, not so much), but even he can't just look at a machine and tell its inherent payback, and by that I mean a) overall return exclusive of the bonuses AS WELL AS b) the frequency of the bonuses.

I've speculated that they're both saying, well, if it's that high, it must be positive, no matter what, which is not a bad seat of the pants method as long as, as you suggest, you're quite conservative about it. It would be not unlike a VP player with no math skills seeing a .25 machine with a $3,500 progressive royal and saying, "Well, I don't know what my advantage is, but this has to be a positive play." But even then, the inherent payback of the machine would matter; if it was something like 3/2 Bonus Poker (instead of 8/5), even that big royal wouldn't make it a positive play. (And unlike with slot vulturing, you would have a very good idea of how long it should take to hit the progressive.)

Just like with progressives, though, if you pound away at a slot that you think was positive when you started, and the bonus is now LARGER, it would be ridiculous to abandon it at that point. With either VP progressives or slot vulturing, you resolve to play until you hit or go broke (and as frustrating as the latter would be, I would recommend carrying enough hundies so that it never happens).

I have no idea how long it would take to hit the progressive in video poker, I went 13 months, playing weekly, without hitting a Royal.

In Breaking the Slot Code, he lists the machines in order of potential risk. At the beginning of each chapter, he gives a summary of the game and lists the potential risks. One game might be "less than 10 spins, " another game might be "You won't lose more than 60 bets, some bad runs could cost 100 bets. A rare loss could be 200x the bet".

You can expect to hit a royal in roughly 40 to 45 thousand hands, depending on the game. When the progressive is high enough, you deviate from standard strategy to more aggressively go for the royal, which decreases the "expected" number of hands to hit it.

So the Slot Code guy is indeed guessing. His only data points are from personal experience, which is always woefully inadequate (imagine trying to evaluate a VP machine's payback not by looking at the paytable, but by recording how you did in three hours' play). The quotation you supply is telling in its vagueness. Sorta like asking someone to describe your blind date beforehand. "I don't think she weighs more than 100 pounds, but maybe it's more like 180, and I could be really wrong and she could weigh 300." Definitely a reliable barometer.

In other words, he can't possibly state the potential risks accurately, because he has no way of knowing what those risks are. His personal sample sizes would be much, much too small to be good data. And those samples would deviate wildly from the actual EV, so he might mistakenly conclude that a losing machine (state) is a winner, and vice versa.

There's nothing inherently wrong with slot vulturing. It's better than just feeding hundies to a randomly chosen slot until you go broke. But the best alternative is to not play at all. Slot vulturing is like deliberately driving into a tree, but making sure you have your seat belt fastened. It's better than not having it fastened, but it would be better still to not drive into the tree at all.

Of course, millions of people will doubtless deliberately drive into the slot tree every year.

You're wrong 

How so?

I'm really not interested in going back and forth with you on this because you don't know the different slot machine games. Three years ago, I had no idea how they worked; I would have to ask my wife why something happened. 

In a nutshell, you're not knowledgeable, you're not willing to spend $16 on a book and make a few spins to figure it out, and you're wrong.

You have no idea how long it would take to hit a progressive Royal based on averages. I played Bonus Poker for 13 months, guess what, I know on average a Royal will hit around 40,233 hands on that exact game, check my numbers. You're not the only one who knows this basic stuff. I played 112,184 hands before I hit a Royal. So you have no idea how long it will take to hit, even if you change strategy. In the same time frame, on the same game, sitting next to me, my wife hit 5 Royals.

It's not 1990 anymore.