Gambling It Away

Yes, I know I’ve been back from Vegas for a few days (and have been behind on my posting). Still, it seems, I’ve got a little bit of gambling still on my mind, for the news and the RSS feeds brought me two articles related to the subject, and I hunted down a third I was thinking about:

• But Its Only a Penny. If you recall, while in Vegas I wrote that all the coin slot machines seem to have gone away (meaning the minimum is a $1 bill), but they all were denominated as “1 cent” machines. I found a good discussion of the tricks behind this — and there are many. For example, most have minimum bets for each line, making the true “price” of a bet between 25c and 40c. Then they encourage you to bet multiple lines, each requiring the minimum bet. Further, to keep you playing, the payoffs aren’t always multiples of the bet, meaning you’ve always got credits to use (and these aren’t coins in the tray — they are credits on the screen you must redeem). In other words, rarely can you bet just 1c on 1 line , and they are pulling every trick in the book to keep you there until you have no credits.
• But Those Aren’t All The Tricks. Boing-Boing had even more information on slot philosophy, with a short documentary on all the tricks the slot software designers do to entice you to play and to keep you playing. Well worth watching — I’ll look for these tricks the next time I’m in Las Vegas.
• Playing The Ponies… Not. My grandfather used to love to play the horses. He wouldn’t do it that often, but he did love to watch the horse races on TV. Today, news came out that one of the granddaddy of racetracks in Southern California is closing down: Hollywood Park has indicated there will be no more meets once the currently scheduled set is over, and the park will soon be torn down to be replaced by a housing development. This just leaves Santa Anita and Del Mar as Southern California racetracks.

 

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