Data Tracking

My wife, an accountant, bugs me about this all the time. I used to play poker at a pretty high level online for years, and I never tracked a thing. When I first got into slots, I did the same. I couldn’t have cared less. When I wanted to write a book and eventually get a website going, that kind of had to change.

These days, I am mostly tracking wins and losses on newer slots and longer-run games (games in the “red” category). The way I figure, something like Golden Egypt, among many others, is what it is. (I hate that expression, but it fits here.) I don’t need to track how I’m doing on it because a play is a play.

But for anything that came out within the last year or so, I’m at the very least making a mental note of how it went.

As far as the other stuff you mentioned, I think it can only help. I have a pretty good idea of the layout of most casinos I’ve been to. No, I’m not always going to perfectly remember some hole-in-the-wall place in Biloxi, Mississippi, but I have a general feel for Biloxi overall.

That said, these days I try to take videos of all the casinos I’ve been to. I’m pretty far backed up on footage from Colorado and Las Vegas that I will upload shortly, actually.

All of this rambling out of the way, I think it’s going to come down to personality and how your brain works. It certainly couldn’t hurt to track as much as you can if you have the drive to do that, and maybe having everything written out to the cent can help you really maximize your time.

But for me personally, I can’t say that’s how I do things. Slots are enjoyable for me; I love the grind and all the walking. So breaking everything down in a spreadsheet never really appealed to me (even if it could help financially long term).

SlotSlayers.com has thoughtfully laid out the risks involved with each game, for most plays it will be enough to check the color, or read the write-up for a particular game, and that should give you enough information to figure out if you have enough cash on hand to play or not.

Every now and then you might want to have something that’s a little more precise. Such as, it might be helpful to know that on average, the three bonus symbols appear in “Cleopatra’s Taco Truck” on average every 150 spins (or whatever your measurement is). This could be considered the “bonus cycle”.

Here’s a method I use to count spins and keep track of coin in – if I need to do so, and when it’s OK to use a card

1. First, find out how many coin in dollars it takes to earn one casino point. (Do this by writing down your current point total, run something like exactly $100 or exactly $200 through the game you’re interested in, and take note of the change in your point total. If you play at the same place all the time, you can skip this step because you’ll already know what it takes to earn a point
2. Now you know how many dollars it takes to earn one point
3. Next time you play Cleo’s Taco Truck, collect data on how many points earned each time you hit the bonus (or whatever it is you’re trying to do in that game).
4. You can convert points earn to coin in, and you can convert coin in to spins (e.g. $200 coin in at the $2 bet level is 100 spins)
5. After you’ve hit a few bonuses, you can take the average of Number of Bonuses Won / Total Number of Spins, which becomes your estimate of that game’s bonus cycle

What I’m outlining isn’t necessary or even desirable for most games. But for some games, knowing the bonus cycle, or having a decent estimate of the bonus cycle will help you make a play-or-walk decision when you need to be precise. It will also help estimate if you have enough time to knock off a bonus before you have to do whatever (leave, see a show, board a plane, etc.).

It’s also much faster and more accurate than counting spins yourself, because all you have to do is bang buttons and then write down your point total every few minutes, and you can deal with the numbers when you get home.