{"id":124441,"date":"2022-10-18T10:46:56","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T18:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/?p=124441"},"modified":"2023-08-29T15:44:25","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T23:44:25","slug":"putting-bills-into-a-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blog\/putting-bills-into-a-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting Bills Into a Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before playing a video poker machine, I typically load it with $500 or $1,000 in bills or tickets. I do this for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. I keep records of how much I win or lose each day. It\u2019s easier for me to remember round numbers. If I\u2019m playing a $2 game, ($10 a play), it\u2019s common to be up or down several hundred dollars in a session. If I add another hundred-dollar bill as needed, it can be difficult to remember whether it\u2019s four or five of those so far.

    For each additional bill, I could record it on my phone (I use the Notes app on my iPhone), but I can keep thousand-dollar increments straight more easily. If I go in for $3,000 or more in a session, I write each $1,000 play as I go.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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    1. For a time-sensitive play (such as 5x points during Monday Night Football), I want to have premade tickets. It\u2019s time intensive to insert hundred-dollar bills one at a time. If I put them into the machine I\u2019m playing, sometimes the bill acceptor fills up during the play, robbing me of valuable playing time. So I\u2019ll create $1,000 tickets on a slot machine. If that starts to get close to being full (I can easily hear this), I\u2019ll just cash out of that machine and move to another. I might start my play with five or ten $1,000 tickets in my pocket.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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      1. Some casinos, like the South Point, pay off all jackpots in cash. They do not use ticket-in-ticket-out tickets. When I was playing $1 Ten Play Quick Quads ($60 per play), W-2Gs were fairly frequent and the amount of cash I had in the machine was always emptying out — whether I was winning or losing. For one of those plays on a day I planned a long sesion, I\u2019d begin with multiple $2,500 tickets in my pocket — perhaps $20,000 to $40,000 worth. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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        1. If there\u2019s a vacant machine immediately to my left, I\u2019ll play the game with my right hand only and feed bills into the adjacent machine until I reach an appropriate-sized ticket — or I run out of bills. Vacant machines on my right don\u2019t work as well due to the location of the bill acceptor, but I can usually switch to the right-most machine and now the empty machine is on my left.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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          1. Sometimes casinos will create and sell you premade tickets — sometimes $1,000 — sometimes any amount you like. I\u2019ve used this option several times in the past. I know full-well that if I give them $20,000 to start with an ask for tickets, my name is going on a CTR (Currency Transaction Report). This does not concern me. I file as a professional gambler, get a large amount of W-2Gs, and will not be under suspicion as a money launderer.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

            None of what I\u2019ve just said should surprise regular readers of my columns. The reason I\u2019m mentioning it again is a friend of mine, a strong player, was musing out loud about the number of players he sees playing one $20 bill at a time. If they build it up to $100 or more, they\u2019ll cash out, put it into their pocket, and insert another $20 bill. My friend was questioning why players do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I can think of two major reasons, coming under the general headings of Money Management and Security. For those of you who read this column on the www.gamblingwithanedge.com<\/a> page, there is plenty of room for comments. Please feel free to add to my list of reasons. Perhaps an entirely new reason. Perhaps a nuance to a reason already mentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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            1. Money management. Most players play under circumstances where the house has the advantage. These know from bitter experience that they will usually lose. Every time they run out of credits and have to insert another bill or ticket, this gives them an opportunity to leave the machine. Sometimes they actually do leave the machine. They know that when they have lots of credits still on the machine, they rarely think about leaving.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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              1. Security: On most machines, people walking by can tell how much money you have in credits. If someone sees you have, say, $2,300 in credits, they may well take note of what you look like and are wearing and consider meeting you later in the parking lot. A person with $80 in credits wouldn\u2019t run the same risk.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

                I assume these people aren\u2019t keeping accurate records of their gambling (Most people don\u2019t). It\u2019s possible for people to accurately record their cash-on-hand before they enter a casino (perhaps $384), and then count their money when they leave (perhaps $214). In this case, simple arithmetic tells them they have lost $170 (assuming they didn\u2019t spend money on anything other than gambling.) It\u2019s not hard to record this number — but most people don\u2019t. For me, I would have started with $1,000, ended with $830, and recorded the -$170 figure. And then moved along to a different casino. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

                I further assume, perhaps incorrectly, that these people are more concerned with today\u2019s score and not paying too much attention to their year-to-date or lifetime-to-date scores. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

                We all know people for whom it is like pulling teeth to open up their wallet and bring out a $20 bill. For these folks, it\u2019s probably money-in-the-bank for them to enter only one bill at a time. It simple hurts too much for them to keep putting twenty after twenty into the machine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

                For me, my score at this casino today is just a number. I\u2019ll record thousands of minus numbers and thousands of plus numbers throughout the year. There\u2019s not much emotion attached to this process. BIG numbers, either plus or minus, generate some emotion out of me, but relatively small numbers barely register at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

                If my annual score is negative, especially two or three of those years in a row (Which hasn\u2019t happened yet, but might in the future.) that requires some self-evaluation. I\u2019ll deal with that when it arises, if it does. I can see how people whose scores are negative four years out of five can adopt a totally different set of rules for themselves than I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                Before playing a video poker machine, I typically load it with $500 or $1,000 in bills or tickets. I do this for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":6498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Putting Bills Into a Machine by Bob Dancer","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[601,558,557],"tags":[561,1069,709,585],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}