Ask the Slot Expert: Seeing into the future on a slot machine

One tip that gaming writers give to help players stretch their bankrolls is to play more slowly. Do anything to slow down the rate of play. Things like: taking a sip of your beverage or looking around the casino at regular intervals (possibly can be done), pausing between plays (very difficult not to speed up to the casino's rhyhym), or dropping coins instead of using the credit meter -- I guess that last idea is a bit out of date.

I don't know if anyone ever followed these suggestions, at least not unless they were 50% through their vacation and 90% through their bankroll. That's the only time I ever tried the slow-down techniques.

Most of today's machines have play-slowing features built in and, as an added bonus, the features can be entertaining.

The most obvious feature is the bonus round. Players don't have any money at risk during a bonus round. Your credit meter can't go down during the bonus and it's probably going to go up. As Homer Simpson said when a bonus was triggered on the Simpsons-themed machine I spent a lot of time playing at The Palms, "Woo hoo! I can't lose!"

I say that your credit meter will probably increase because there are some machines with bonus features in which you can win nothing. (Should that be against the rules? What do you think?)

Another mechanism modern machines have to slow down players is the sometimes excruciatingly long enumeration of all your winning paylines and how much you won on each one of them. That's the curse of machines with loads of paylines.

Another way machines slow down players is by taking a long time to credit big wins. When you hit a large win on a machine I like, the machine rings a bell and the screen displays Big Win over the counter that is racking up what you won. I like listening to the music and trying to hear how it is altered to account for jackpots of different sizes.

Hand in hand with the above is double-displaying bonus wins. At the end of a bonus, some machines display an accumulator racking up what you won in the bonus. That's just a teaser. Afterwards, the machine reverts to the base game and counts out your bonus winnings again, only this time they're actually being added to your credit meter.

End-of-spin animations can also slow down players. Some machines have animations for symbols when they're part of a winning combination. I'm not really thinking of these because once you've seen them, you've seen them. You're not going stop to watch them after the first few winning spins.

I'm really thinking of some animation that goes from the reels up to a bonus-triggering display. Animations like the rockets that shoot up from the reels to the firecrackers on Bao Zhu Zhao or the big dollar signs on Diamond Quick Hit Link.

The winning-symbol animations occur after the spin has finished. The rockets are part of the spin because you don't know whether you'll get the bonus until after the rocket hits its target.

I put the word "trigger" in italics above because almost all of these progress meters are nonsense. They don't indicate how close you are to getting the bonus one bit. The help says that they are for entertainment purposes only.

Under certain circumstances, I can see into the future. And so can you.

When your machine launches a rocket, instead of waiting for impact, hit the Spin button again. If the rocket was not going to trigger the bonus, a new spin will start. If you're going to get the bonus, it won't. You can see into the future and know whether the rocket will trigger a bonus.

I always Spin out of rocket launches, but I let the machine list all my winning paylines on spins in a bonus round. I make an unspoken agreement with the machine. I won't rush it. I'll let it show me the winners the way it wants to, but in exchange I want the machine to give me some big hits in the bonus.

Machines haven't kept their part of the bargain. Now I hit the Spin button to end the listing of winners.

My bonus round winnings are the same as when I let the machine have its way.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.