FOOTBALL BETTING PREDICTIONS

One-Armed Bandits
I first became aware of the nearly hypnotic hold that slot machines have on their players when my family took a trip to Las Vegas when I was 13. After a few hours we were supposed to go to dinner, and I very nearly had to carry my grandmother out of the casino. “Go away!” she said with a vehemence I’d never heard from her before. “This machine is going to hit soon, I know it!”
Eventually my mother convinced Grandma to take a break, but I knew then and there that I never wanted to be in thrall to a machine like Grandma was. Of course, if you took my Macintosh computer away I would start crying, but that’s different somehow, I’m sure.

I’ve never entered “slot hypnosis” quite like Grandma, but I’ve been lured into slot territory from time to time, and have picked up some tidbits of slot wisdom to pass along.
First, make sure you understand what kind of machine you’re playing. On some machines, playing two or three coins merely doubles or triples payoffs, so there’s no real need to play multiple coins. On most machines, though, playing anything less than maximum coins is a recipe for disaster. The jackpot can come up and you won’t win it!

Once while in the Bahamas I started talking to an attractive young woman playing a dollar machine, and while I usually avoid giving advice to strangers (if the advice works they don’t know you, and if it doesn’t they’re furious), this woman seemed so nice I wanted to help out.

“You know that machine you’re playing won’t pay the $1,000 jackpot if you hit, because you’re only playing one dollar,” I said. “You have to play three dollars to win.”
“Oh, well I guess I better play three, then,” she said. “but I don’t think my money will last very long that way, I only have 20 dollars.” She dropped three dollars into the slot, pulled the handle, and hit the jackpot! She was thrilled, as (sigh) no doubt was the boyfriend she was returning to Canada to see the next day. Ah, well, you know what they say, lucky at cards, unlucky at love.

On the same issue, make sure, before you pull the handle, that all lights or lines are lit. Sometimes coins drop straight through to the tray and you’re only playing two coins when you think you’ve played three. Believe me, the casino won’t believe you. If the machine hits a three-coin jackpot and it says you only played two, you’re out of luck.

All machines list their jackpots, but it’s important to note if the jackpot is a number of coins, or dollars—it makes a difference. 10,000 nickels is only $500, so if you dump roll after roll of nickels into a machine hoping for the big payoff, you might be disappointed.

Sooner or later you will have to make a decision: DC you want to play high progressive jackpot machines that offer great dreaming possibilities but fewer and smaller steady payoffs, or less ambitious machines like the one my friend hit in the Bahamas, where the jackpot is not enormous, but the chances of hitting it are more realistic?

One-Armed Bandits and Their Two-Legged Customers
Progressive slots come in three main types—the wide area progressives like Megabucks, smaller progressive banks of perhaps eight or 12 machines arranged in an oval, and individual progressive machines.

If you play a small bank or individual machine, you can help your cause by searching out machines that have not been hit recently. I’ve seen players on a machine just reset to the minimum $250 jackpot, with an identical machine offering a $3,000 jackpot available four feet away. I suppose the theory was, “This machine paid off once, it will again,” but a smart player will look for the maximum jackpot.
It’s harder than you think to hit the big progressive jackpots. On old-style machines, three reels of 20 stops meant a maximum 8,000 combination’s (20x20x20=8,000). These days the reels look like they have the same 20 stops, but actually the number of stops is controlled by computer, up to 256 stops per reel, and 256x256x256 equals—are you ready?—16,777,216 possible combination’s. Gee, no wonder you didn’t hit the jackpot before lunch.

If that isn’t enough to give you pause, on a four-reel – machine there can be as many as 4,294,967,296 possibilities (256x256x256x256). So even though those Megabucks or Quarter mania jackpots seem by casual inspection easy enough to hit, they’re not.

I think a good way to play (assuming you’re going to play slots in the first place) is to spend most of your time at less ambitious machines, receiving more frequent payoffs, and just to dabble a bit with the big jackpot machines, to feed your dreams of The Big Score.