OR
About the Best $.25 I Ever Spent

Gambling doesn’t attract me at all. In fact, it mostly seems idiotic, since everyone knows ‘the house’ is going to win in the long run.

Furthermore, I’ve never liked casinos much. The first time I went into one, at the urging of a friend, I was already developing my psychic abilities, and all I could see or feel was everyone’s depression and desperation. I couldn’t find anyone who was having fun. And I kept wanting to leave my body, because it felt so unsafe in there. I went a couple more times with other friends, and felt the same awful energy. Someone once gave me a roll of dimes to convince me to try the slots. I actually won -- $1.30 more than I’d played — which was kind of nice, but so what? Still didn’t seem like fun to me.

Fast forward a decade or two. I now have a friend, Kim, who is a massage therapist at a casino. She’s a terrific psychic, and we trade readings a lot. We also look psychically at world events, non-physical beings and other things together. A couple of weeks ago, a woman came in for a massage who made her living playing cards at casinos. She described her 6 figure income, as well as the royal treatment at the casinos. Kim thought about this, and said to me, “Well, if we’re good psychics, we should be able to figure out which slot machines are going to pay off, and then just play them.” And in the spirit of experimentation, I agreed to join her for an afternoon at a casino local to Sacramento while I’m up here on business. (For those of you wondering why no radio show, the answer is that I just couldn’t keep up all the driving while I have to be here — it’s about 3 hours each direction, which drains me for several days.)

There were a couple of weeks between the day I agreed to go to the casino and the day we actually went, so I had time to think about what I wanted to know and how I might go about it. I decided that my goal for a first visit was just to be able to stay in my body and feel safe in the casino. If I could do that, then I might set about figuring out how to connect to a slot machine to learn if it would pay off.

We went to the casino on Tuesday. At first, I was totally disoriented as I walked into the gigantic room, where it’s perpetual night (no windows), with rock oldies playing, all sorts of lights flashing at irregular intervals and bells and sirens going off periodically. I really understand now that part of their strategy is to disorient the patrons, to suck more money out of them. But we did what I always do — walk around to understand the layout of the place, which is casino in the middle (only about a third is “people games”, like blackjack, and the rest is a huge field of slot machines) and food, drink and bathrooms on the edges. We had to leave after about half hour to relax by a fountain in the shade and get back into our bodies. Kim had a cup of coffee.

Then we went our separate ways. I concentrated on learning about the machines: what you’d do to play one, how many ways there were to play it, how much each one costs. Turns out that there are basically two kinds of machines, one in which some symbols always line up and another where they aren’t even always on a “winning” line. Each type is can be “dressed up” in different types of themed symbols, like Indian or Chinese or Native American or Hawaiian. (each theme will appeal to different patrons as lucky, I guess, but they’re really the same machine.) There were more themes than I could count. And you can play each machine in a myriad of ways, with up to 20 different (straight and crooked) winning lines, at multiples of the minimum bet. After half an hour of this, Kim and I went back outside by the fountain again. I had to get back into my body again.

When I felt like I could be myself and still be in the casino, I began to consider how I could tell when a machine was about to pay off. First I tried looking for a color in the space over a machine, somewhere on the floor, hoping I could just go directly to the right machine. No luck (pun intended). So I resorted to walking up and down the banks of slot machines, seeing if I could feel anything in my aura. Nothing. Then I thought maybe I could ask each machine if it were about to pay off (for you hypnotherapists, or folks who have been in some of my classes, I was using the ideomotor finger response). When I found a machine that “said” it would pay off, I sat down and put my first dollar in the machine (at 5 cents a play, I figured I’d get a real chance to see if I were right). After about 60 cents, the machine did pay me — 35 cents. So I was right, but the question was wrong. The question needed to be, “Will you pay me MORE than I put in?” I further amended that to ask, “Will you pay me within 10 plays? 20 plays?” because I quickly discovered that playing slot machines is boring. Another trip outside.

Back in the casino, I began to ask each machine if it would pay me more than I put in, in fewer than 20 plays. It was really hard to find a machine that would say yes, and I tried dozens. In fact, I never found one. I did find one machine that said it would pay me within 10 plays, but not as much as I put in. As I stood staring at it, a skinny elderly woman, who was playing the machine two over from it, scooted across the chairs directly to it. Her feet never even touched the floor! She began to push “Play” over and over, like a demon. At first, I was annoyed, because now I wouldn’t get to find out if I were right. Then I realized I could see her totals, money in and money out, from where I was, so I’d get to find out for free. She was playing multiple nickels, and on her sixth play, she won — about fifty cents less than she’d bet in total!

It’s clear to me that these machines don’t pay often, and when they do, they don’t pay much. I’d certainly want to go back a number of times to verify that my intuitive methods really work. So even assuming I’m able to regularly suss out which machines will pay, how much time am I willing to spend prowling the floor to find the ones with the big payouts? Probably not much. Of course, Kim and I did have a really nice lunch, with very good food for the price, so that’s a plus for going back.

But I left feeling really good. Not only had I been able to stay in the casino with my wits about me, I’d possibly figured out how to use my abilities to beat the system. You might even say I had fun.

Hollis Polk (www.888-4-hollis.com) is a personal coach, who has been helping people create lives they love for 15 years. To do this, she blends neurolinguistic and hypnotherapy techniques, decision science, clairvoyance, and the common sense learned in over 20 years of business experience. Hollis is a Master Practitioner of neurolinguistics, a certified hypnotherapist, and has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Princeton and a Harvard MBA. She is also a successful real estate broker and investor, and has owned and run several successful businesses.

Send Your Questions and Feedback to