Staying in charge at a machine

You sit down at a slot machine with $60 and half an hour. Which of them runs out first, the money or the half hour?

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

People sit down at a machine with a number in their head and stand up with a different one, and nothing dramatic happens in between. A press takes about 4 seconds, the screen counts credits rather than minutes, and forty minutes goes by like ten.

So the money limit and the time limit get written down before the first credit, and something outside your own attention keeps the time for you. Writing down a number you will still respect at minute twenty-five is harder than it sounds, and so is handing the clock to your phone; both are worth ten minutes before you sit down rather than twenty minutes afterwards.

How much money, how long, and the speed that ties them together

Choosing which machine to sit at, choosing how many lines are switched on and choosing the second you press all feel like steering the result. What those three choices steer is the price of a press, and never the way the press comes out. The two things at a machine that really do answer to you are how much money you spend and how long you spend it.

How much money you spend and how long you sit there are not independent of each other, and what ties them together is the speed of the machine. A slot machine runs about fourteen presses a minute, so half an hour of sitting holds 420 presses.

1. One press4 seconds
2. One minute14 presses
3. Half an hour420 presses
4. An hour840 presses

What those presses cost depends on the machine you sat down at, and two example machines are far enough apart to show how far the answer moves. Nine lines on a nickel machine takes $2.25 a press; one line at a quarter takes $0.25.

A press on nine lines at a nickel machine is 45 credits, and at five cents a credit that comes to $2.25. One line at a quarter is an example too, and neither row is a suggestion about where to sit. Of everything pressed through a machine, 8% stays behind.

At nine lines on a nickel machine the money limit is usually what ends the sitting: $60 lasts about 24 min on average, so the half hour still has minutes in it when the money goes. At one line at a quarter the half hour arrives first, and arrives first by hours. Which of the two limits you actually meet is decided by the machine, and that is exactly why the money limit and the time limit are both written down: writing down only one of them leaves the sitting open at the other end.

Both bars start from the same $60 and run along the same half hour. The only thing that changed between them is what one press costs, and what one press costs is what decides which of your two limits the sitting reaches. Neither bar is a reason to sit at one machine rather than the other, and neither is a reason to sit for longer.

An average belongs to a machine over its whole working life, and not to your half hour. The share that stays behind is taken over everything ever staked at a machine, by everybody who ever sat at it, and the column that says how long the money lasts is an average of exactly that kind. A single sitting lands a long way from that average in either direction, which is the second reason the money limit and the time limit get settled before you leave home instead of worked out in the chair.

The credit meter, the last ten games, and the lights

The biggest number on the glass is the credit meter, and it answers one question exactly: how many credits are in the machine at this moment. The credit meter is not where you stand, and nothing printed on the cabinet is.

1,180 credits at five cents a credit is $59, and the money that walked in was $60: the sitting is about $1.00 down at the moment the credit meter is showing the largest figure on the glass. Nobody in the room does that subtraction for you, because one of the two numbers it needs is not in the room.

There is one written record on a machine, and it is a short one. In Ontario a machine has to be able to show a complete history of the game it has just played and the nine games before it. At fourteen presses a minute the last ten games come to 43 seconds: the last ten games answer what was that, and they cannot answer how is this going.

That leaves the lights, and the lights are the part that misleads. A machine lights up and makes noise whenever anything comes back, whether or not what came back is larger than the press that bought it: take twenty credits on a forty-five credit press and the credit meter falls by twenty-five credits while the machine celebrates.

1. Before the press1,060 credits
2. The press takesforty-five credits
3. Comes back, with lights and noisetwenty credits
4. After the press1,035 credits

Lesson 2.5 is about why a press like this sounds like money coming back.

What ends the sitting, and what only feels as though it does

That sense of being owed is the belief that eats a time limit. Nothing carries forward from one press to the next: no machine is warm, cold or ever due. Standing up walks away from nothing you are owed.

One more number can quietly rewrite the plan, and that number is what one press costs. In Ontario a machine is not allowed to encourage you to raise the amount you decided to bet. What does push the price of a press up is the hour, the room and the wish to get something back, and that is why what one press costs gets written down beside the money limit and the time limit — before the first credit, and not at minute twenty-five.

The alarm goes on your phone, not in your head, and it is set before the first credit goes in: a plan that depends on you noticing the time is competing with a screen built to hold your attention. Game plan can hold the money limit too, but it reminds and stops nothing: a reminder waits to be read, and an alarm interrupts.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

If the sitting ends and the thinking does not — if two hours later you are still working out when you can go back — that is the thing worth a phone call, and the lines below are exactly for it. Nothing has to be explained first, and nothing has to be decided on the call.

Practice: thirty minutes at a machine

Nothing in the practice run changes what the reels do. A machine settles the result before the picture arrives, so every moment in the run sits on one side of the button or the other: which money limit and which time limit, before the first credit goes in; what the credit meter, the last ten games and the lights are telling you while you sit there; and when to stand up. There is no money in the practice run, no balance, and nothing to press for a result.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

Back to the question at the start of this lesson. At nine lines on a nickel machine, $60 is usually what runs out first: the money lasts about 24 min on average, and minutes of the half hour are still unused when it goes. At one line at a quarter the half hour runs out first instead, and runs out first by hours. Which of the two it turns out to be is decided by the machine you sat down at; that there were two numbers at all is decided by you, before you left home.

How it’s worked out