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Beginner’s Corner

by Bob Dancer

Decision Rules

When should you quit for the day?

Let’s say you’re playing at your favorite casino. It’s getting close to the time when you should be leaving. Your score currently stands at 180 credits, but it has been going up and down. You decide that when your score reaches 200 credits, you will cash out and go home. At this particular moment, your machine goes into a “suck-the-player-dry” mode, and, in five minutes, your credits are down to zero. You sigh, and pack up to leave.

This kind of experience has happened on occasion to every gambler—whether at video poker, slots, craps, blackjack, or whatever. As they leave the casino, many people are filled with self-loathing for “wasting” those last 180 credits. After all, had they cashed out five minutes before, they’d now have considerably more jingle in their pocket.

Because of this kind of experience, many players will tell you that their results would be satisfactory if they could only figure out when to leave a machine. They look for decision rules for when to quit, such as, perhaps, when you lose 50 credits in 10 minutes, it’s time to go. Or, maybe, only risk $20 at a time. If it doubles, cash out. If it goes, change machines. You’ve heard people with these theories.

Now let’s take a different case. Same casino, same 180 score, same decision. But this time, when you get down to 35 credits, up pops a royal flush! Wonderful! Four thousand credits. How exciting! Eventually, you get paid, play off your remaining credits, and again, pack up and go home.

This second scenario is a lot more fun than the first. What players want to know is which of these scenarios is coming, back when we had 180 credits and were deciding when to leave. If they knew the first scenario was around the corner, they would have left at 180 credits. If the knew the second scenario was ahead, of course, they’d keep playing.

Unfortunately, there is no way in the world to tell. The first scenario is more likely, of course, because royal flushes don’t come around very often. But always quitting at 180 credits because it is more likely to go to zero than to 4,000 will cause you to miss out on a lot of royals.

The long and the short of it is, your current score, or your results over the last few hours or less, is a lousy predictor of what’s around the corner. It’s easy to understand why players want to know what’s coming. It’s not so easy to accept that they can’t know until they round the corner and find out.

So how do you decide when to quit? I’ll tell you what works for me. First, I choose the game to play based on the pay schedule (i.e., I know that 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54% and 8/5 Jacks or Better returns 97.30%). If I’m going to play Jacks or Better, I play 9/6 or not at all. Second, I take the slot club and promotions into account. Like, playing more on double point days. Third, the denomination is important. The exact denomination depends on your gambling bankroll and your willingness to sustain risk, but that’s a discussion for another article. For now, I never play for stakes that will seriously harm my life if things go bad. And, finally, I look to see if there is some minimum amount I “have to” play in order to get the amenities that Shirley and I consider valuable. Like, maybe, 10,000 points in a day to get room, food, and beverage status.

Once those things are decided, I play as long as I’m feeling alert. If the machine sucks, sucks, sucks, that’s no fun, but it’s no big deal and no reason to quit or change machines. If the machine gives me a royal or two, that’s a lot of fun, but that’s no reason to quit or change machines either.

I don’t know what’s coming over the next few hours of play. But I have a real good idea what’s coming over the next thousand hours of play, based on pay schedule, slot club, promotions, and my skill level. Almost whatever the ups and downs are over that thousand hours is fine with me. A terrible 200-gaming-hours losing streak might cause me to reconsider. But a bad day or a bad weekend? Totally irrelevant.

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