If you are playing a $1 reel slot machine that takes 2 coins as maximum, with a session bankroll of $100, and whose top jackpot is $2,500, with a secondary jackpot of $800, your win goal should be the top jackpot and/or the secondary jackpot. Otherwise, why play it? However, based on the event occurrence of that specific Slots tournaments very short-term slice of your exposure to this machine and game, your win expectation should be 20 coins. In this case, this comes to $20. This is a 20 percent improvement over and above your starting session stake. Where else can you get such a big return on your investment that quickly? And what if you don’t hit the jackpots, and only make a $5 profit, falling far short of the win expectation as well as the win goal? Have you lost anything? You still made money. And that’s the most important part of both your win goals and your win expectations. Be glad you got what you got. Remember, you are playing a slot machine, which means you are playing a game with a built-in house edge, and therefore a game with a negative expectation. This means the slots games will always make money for the casino in the end. If you hit it for any kind of a win, then you have caught the game at the right time and made money in spite of the fact that it’s a negative-expectation game. If your stock rose by $5 per share, you’d be ecstatic, right? Well, why complain if your session at this slot machine only resulted in a $5 win? Any win means you have beaten the game. Be glad you did. Put it away, and set yourself up for the next session.
What if you lost, instead of winning? What if this machine was just a real dog, and no matter how well you selected it and played it, you just picked a bad one at a bad time? It will happen. In fact, overall, you will pick a winning machine, or have a winning session, only about 40 percent of the time. However, if you do it dealt a blackjack correctly, your overall wins will more than compensate for your losing sessions, and you will still wind up a winner. So this machine was a bad one, and your end-of-session result was a loss of $75. More than two-thirds of your session stake. This is about as bad as it can get. You suffered a 75 percent loss of your session bankroll—but the point is, you still have $25, or 25 percent, of your session stake left. It all adds up. Put it away, mark it as your session result, and move on to the next session. In the next session, you may have a $75 win. So with the sessions combined, you are even, and have accumulated slot club points and comps besides. What about the next session? There you may make $5. So now you are ahead by 5 percent, along with the accumulation of all your slot club points, comps, and freebies, and have done so in spite of the fact that your first session was such a devastating loss.