Most slots players make 600 bets per hour. So if you want to estimate how much money you’ll lose at a given denomination, you can figure it out through simple multiplication and guesswork.
The maximum house edge on slots in Nevada is 25%, so you can assume that in a worst case scenario, you’ll lose 25% of each wager you put through the machine. So you just multiple it: 600 bets/hours X £25 per bet X 25%. That means you can expect to lose £3750 per hour at those stakes. Of course, if you’re playing a game with a better payout percentage (and let’s hope you are, because that 75% is the kind of payout percentage you’ll see at a restaurant or in a bar somewhere), you’ll see a dramatically lower average hourly loss. It’s a safe bet that you’re playing a game with at least a 90% payout percentage, which means you’ll only lose 10% of what you put through the machine. That’s only £1500 per hour.
If you’re a low roller like me, you could play penny slots with an 75% payout percentage and still lose a lot less money on average on an hourly basis. 600 spins per hour X £0.01/bet X 25% is an average loss of only £1.50. I can gamble for a long time if I’m only losing £1.50 per hour, but at the same time, I’m going to be bored out of my mind.
The trick is to find a denomination somewhere in between. You want to play for stakes that are high enough to keep the game interesting, but at the same time, you don’t want to lose more money than you can afford.
In John Vorhaus’s book Poker Night: Winning at Home, at the Casino, and Beyond, he describes a concept he calls your “gulp limit”. You use your gulp limit to determine the size of your gambling bankroll. It should be an amount large enough that if you lost it, you’d gulp.
Once you’ve decided on the size of your gambling bankroll, you can back out those numbers versus how much time playing you want to spend on your casino trip.
For example, suppose you’re going to Vegas for the weekend. You’re only spending two days there, but you want to spend four hours each day playing slots. You want to have fun, but you don’t want to destroy your finances, either.
You need enough money to play for eight hours without going broke. If you’re playing the penny slots we discussed earlier, then you’ll be fine with £10 or £20. On the other hand, if you’re playing the £25 per spin machines, you should be okay with losing £12,000 over the weekend. Here are some suggested bankrolls and slot machine limits for that scenario:
Penny Slots - £10 or £20
Nickel Slots - £50 or £100
Quarter Slots - £250 or £500
Dollar Slots - £1000 or £2000
Five Dollar Slots - £5000 to £10,000
Those are just rough guidelines, and the goal isn’t to lose that amount of money. The goal is to just determine how to get the maximum amount of fun given the size of your gambling bankroll for the trip.