Strictly Slots July 2022

PLAYER’S EDGE BY JOHN GROCHOWSKI

THE “OOPS!” FACTOR The best assumption is that you can make no assumptions

E ver have an“oops!”casino moment,one of those times when things have gone wrong and you know it’s your own fault because you didn’t check the game rules or assumed a little too much? I sure have. I’ve been going to casinos since the 1980s, and I’ve pulled some doozies.One came at an Indiana casino a while ago,back when most machines were still set to a single coin denomination.The casino was one of the Midwest’s first to offer SuperTimes Pay.I like the game quite a lot,and have no qualms about playing SuperTimesTriple Play on a quarter machine with a decent pay table, even though the $7.50 maximum bet is double that on normalTriple Play,and six times the $1.25 on a standard single-hand quarter game. Problem:I assumed this was a quarter game.A natural enough as sumption, since my wife was on a quarter machine one spot to the

right.It wasn’t.When I hit the max coins button, it deducted $30 from my $100 buy-in.Turns out my wife and I were on opposite sides of the dividing line between quarter and dollar games.This wasn’t the game for someone of my modest means.I cashed out the rest and moved on to something more bankroll appropriate. Oops! I witnessed one of the great“oops”moments in LasVegas in the early 1990s.TheTropicana at the time had a bank of big-money quar ter progressives near the entrance, with a three-coin maximum bet and a jackpot that often reached $250,000. One morning, I got off the elevator and walked into the casino to be greeted by a host I knew. He directed my attention to a player who was just sitting and staring at the reels on one of the progres sives, so motionless he could have been a mannequin.

22 JULY 2022 ■ STRICTLY SLOTS ■ www.casinocenter.com