If you have been on a machine and you haven’t been winning anything after the first 6 hands when do you switch machines? I am bad at changing machines if I am not winning. I am always afraid that if I get up and switch that someone will sit down and win a big hand that I could have won.

Well I try to switch machines after about 15 to 20 minutes but that’s because I want to play a different slot game. I will only play the slots though when I am with friends. If I am not with friends I tend to stick with the table games.

I don’t play for a certain number of hands, or time, but rather for a certain amount of money. I know what I have to play with for the night and I like to spread it around. That means not sitting at any one machine for too long.

I would not limit yourself like this.  If you understand how these machines work, the odds are the same every time to play, not the 50th or 22nd time, every time.  So if you say your odds are 1 in 500 to get a winning hand dealt to you, then by the odds if you play 500 times you will get at least one winner, but you can play 5 or 55 hands and the odds of winning do not change.  This is a major misconception about these machines.

I will usually give a machine a half of an hour or twenty dollars, which ever comes first.  I know on many of these machines you can play all night on 20 bucks, so that is why I give them a time limit as well.

Using basic strategy for the particulaqr game I’m playing, I know that that I should be hitting at least minimum pay hands for a certain percentage of the hands. For example, if I’m playing deuces wild, I should be getting a FOAK every 15-20 hands. If I don’t then there;s a good chance that the maching I’m playing has gone cold & I will switch machines. So, I would suggest watching the number of winning hands you get in a certain time frame. Or, if you are absolutely convince that a particular machine is going to win or you just can’t leave it, you can alway pull back on the amount you are betting until you get a couple of decent hits. I found that by getting a set of VP strategy cards reduced my losses significantly and enabled me to learn the games so I break even on more sessions than I lose. Winning sessions are less frequent but getting better! I can usually put $20 in a full pay JOB quarter machine & play max bet for 2-3 hours beffore I donate my 20 or win a few bucks.