Let’s take a critical look at some common casino practices.

Special promotions, for instance. Some are designed to get you into the place, others to keep you there just a little longer. The free or cheap meals – an all around winner for the casino – will bringsome people in for a bargain meal. How many will leave without dropping at least some money in the games? Most will end up paying dearly for that “cheap” meal, but will forget that the next time they want to go out for a nice, “cheap” meal. But there’s another aspect to it. If you are already at the games, a cheap meal conveniently available in the casino will keep you in the building at mealtime. You’ll be away from the games for a minimum length of time.

The fairly new bill acceptors on slot machines keep you at your play. When you are out of change, you don’t have to wait around or walk to the change booth for more coin. This adds to your playing time – your playing time is money – for the casinos.

Casinos operators carefully plan their lighting. You may have noticed that when you are in a casino it is difficult to determine whether it is day or night. This is deliberate. Remember, they like you (or your money) so much they want you to extend your visit. If they can get you to drop your usual time consciousness, you’ll stay longer.

Colors are chosen to trigger automatic responses. Slot machines are outfitted in colors that will attract and hold gamblers. Sophisticated color combinations are used to minimize the time you will spend slot hopping. Many casino operators add a scent to the air. Think that’s silly? In anexperimental test the scent was shown to increase substantially the number of coins customers dropped into the slots – very substantially, about 45 percent. Most of these techniques add greatly to your comfort as well as sometimes triggering an automatic psychological response. If your visit is pleasant, you will stay longer, play looser with your bankroll, and come back again.

Other techniques have little or nothing to do with your comfort and are simply exploitive. You are simply the “white rat” – the unsuspecting victim of psychological games. For instance, the payout system of the slots has had psychology applied to that. The system of paying tiny winnings often is that new psychology. How was it done before? Well if you won, you won a reasonable amount, but the payoffs were infrequent. What is the advantage of frequent small payoffs? It is the psychological “promise” of a big win. You will be enticed into staying longer and risking more money.

Putting in a few “hot” machines is also an application of psychology. Your search for the “hot” machine is motivated by the psychological “promise” of a lucky streak. Again, you’ll stay longer and risk more. Some casinos will give you small denominations as change for large bills or, at the tables, small denominations of chips. The reason? Because, as we all know, it is easier to spend a dollar than it is to spend a twenty. Psychological? Of course.

Ever notice how wins are played up? The real coin that’s dropped into metal slot pan when someone wins is deliberate. The noise excites you. The bells and whistles that attend a really big win are also deliberate attention-getters and exciting. The casinos make a big deal over wins but losing is pretty quiet. The excitement of the noise stirs you to try to win, but there is more. All the attention given to winning makes it seem like there is more winning going on than there really is.

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What’s more American than Mom, apple pie, and baseball? Would you believe Mom, apple pie, and casinos? It’s true. Americans are visiting casinos more than they visit Major League baseball parks!

With all this participation, are Americans becoming expert at gambling? Do they know their odds and the ways to improve their odds the way they used to know baseball stats? If we are to judge by the billions of dollars dropped in casinos each year, the answer is a resounding “NO.”

If winning at the casino is the new American dream, it seems to be a dream that comes true for very few – except the owners of the establishments. We’ll assume you are not an owner. Then what can you do to improve your chances of winning a piece of the American casino pie? How can you change your luck?

Would you believe that your “luck” is really only one factor in the game, that there is a lot more going on here than just plain old-fashioned apple pie luck?

First, let me ask you a couple more questions. Do you spend more than you intended to on most of your visits to the casino, stay longer than you had planned, win far less money than you would like to win? Are you frustrated by your inability to really get ahead but find yourself going back again and again?

If you answered “yes” to these questions, you are solidly in with the vast majority of people who visit casinos. But, let’s look at what “yes” answers imply. Notice that what you are really saying is that you don’t seem to have as much control over your “luck” AND YOUR BEHAVIOR at casinos

as you would like to have. Why? Would you believe good old-fashioned American psychology? It’s true – psychology is planned into the casino business!

First of all, there is the general psychology of society’s changing attitude. Gambling has increased in popularity in good part because it is no longer perceived as terribly immoral – even the government has given its approval. Since you’re, in effect, looking through society’s view of

gambling as an acceptable form of entertainment, it’s easy to let your guard down. It’s just an acceptable, harmless way to have some fun. This is fine, as long as you either have inexhaustible funds to throw away or you can keep enough control to spend no more than you can afford. But if

you want to make your casino visits PAY, then you must change the way you look at gambling.

To make it pay you must look at the casino as your adversary. Now, that’s not to say it can’t be fun – after all, wouldn’t it be more fun to walk away from your casino-adversary with bucks in your

pocket and a smile on your face than it is to walk away from your casino-friend with empty pockets?

But the psychology part is more involved and complicated than just analyzing your attitude and society’s attitude. Casinos consciously and deliberately exploit known psychological responses to control your gambling behavior. Knowing some of their methods will help put you back in control.

We all know that casinos are set up to give the casino a mathematical edge. They are in the business to make money, after all. What you may not know is that your mathematical odds of winning are affected by the length of your visit. The longer you stay, the poorer your odds of winning are. That’s mathematical. The casinos, then, use psychological methods to persuade you to stay longer – the longer you stay, the greater the odds that they win.

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