I was playing Ultimate X on the Norwegian Bliss. In one area of the non-smoking part of the casino were four adjacent Super Star machines, each with 45 Ultimate X games on them.

I had finished checking the two machines on the right. I checked these machines a few times a day and overall, they’ve been fairly profitable. I found a few plays this time. Immediately before I moved over to the third chair, I saw a lady sit down in the fourth chair. I could see what I presumed to be her husband reaching for his wallet, and I assumed he wanted to sit down at the chair I was aiming for.

Still, when I sat down at the machine, he was still about three feet behind the chair, not touching it, and not making any overt move to sit down. As far as I was concerned, I had possession of the chair “fair and square.”

There are no official rules for whoever gets a chair when two or more people want it. Usually, it’s first come first served. An exception might be made if the person actually sitting down had pushed another player out of the way before sitting down. Nothing of that sort happened here. I had been neither aggressive nor rude in my sitting down.

The wife, however, immediately spoke up. “Hey! My husband was going to play that machine! He’s right there.”

At this point I had a decision to make. A decision where I have incomplete information on what’s going to happen with whichever approach I chose. There’s no doubt in my mind that she was telling the truth. I saw her husband close to the machine, reaching into his wallet, before I sat down. At the same time, I did nothing untoward that required me to give up the machine. 

If the lady called over a slot supervisor and argued her case, I’m pretty sure I would have prevailed. I can’t know this for sure. I’m inexperienced with how cruise ship casinos in general, and this one in particular, handle disputes. I’ve seen plenty of disputes in land-based casinos, but I don’t ever remember seeing one on a cruise ship.

Still, if it got escalated to a slot supervisor, at a minimum I would become far more “high profile” than I already was. Whenever and whatever games I was looking at in the future, I would become a “person of interest” to this supervisor, who would know I’d been in a dispute just the other day. Generally speaking, I’d rather be invisible.

So far there had been no heat with me checking machines for playable games. If players are fighting over a machine, a casino might well decide that it’s better off without machines players fight over.

This was not a particularly unusual predicament for me to be in. Situations similar to this have happened frequently as I’ve played slots. In many venues, there are more players looking for advantage slot machines than there are such machines at any given time. In Las Vegas, where the competition is fierce, players can be aggressive about getting and keeping machines.

But this time, for whatever reason, I let the husband have the machine with no argument from me. It felt right at the time. Had the same thing happened the next day, I might have reached the opposite decision. It’s a matter of “feel” for me and each situation is a little bit different. And once the decision was made, I moved on and didn’t worry about it. Yes, I probably gave up a positive EV situation, but there would be others, and my bankroll is such that it’s hardly a big deal to let one go. This time, anyway, it became a “don’t sweat the small stuff” situation. Next time, another aphorism may apply.