I have been playing in casinos since the day after I turned 21 (some 13 years ago - eek getting old here:) and since the first time I sat down at one of those ‘one armed bandits’ I have been superstitious about what machine I play. Well maybe superstitious isnt quite the right word, maybe I should say very selective. You see, I will look at a row of machines and I usually like one over the others. Call me crazy, but I always get a hunch on which one will pay the most. But since I’m not playing all of the machines in a particular row, I could be completely full of crap about all of this! The last few times I’ve been in a casino, my so-called hunches have paid off.

We stopped at Sam’s Town in Shreveport LA a few months ago on the way home from visiting some family and I saw this one machine that just seemed to be beckoning me to play (yes more complete hooey!). So I sit down, hubby beside me, stick a twenty in the machine and about 3 spins into playing I hit the a $500 payout. So, for you non-believers, I have partially proven that my superslotsense, not to be confused with spidey-sense, may actually be true. Now, I’m not even going to tell you about the woman sitting 3 machines down from me that hit $11,000 on her machine.

So, now fast forward to last week when I was at another casino, this one on the Carnival Funship Ecstacy, I walked around and around the whole place, only about 3,000 sq feet until I found the machine that was calling my name. Well, techically it kept saying ‘HotShot’ but ya know, I am and so I sit down. Now this machine is a penny machine - cool it’ll take days to wipe out $20 in credits. Not exactly, since the machine was a 20 liner, 5 reel, with a 10 coin per line max bet. All that means is that if you really want to win the big jackpot prize, you must spend $2 on each spin. So I stick a $20 in this machine and bang, first spin is the ‘hotshot’ game where you can win additional credits. Within about 15 minutes my original money had grown into well over $300 but as i often do, i just kept spinning and saying to myself, I’ll stop when I hit the next jackpot, or when i’m broke. Luckily the latter never came and I left the casino when it closed at 3am (we were getting ready to pull into port) with slightly more than $200.

I think next time i’ll get my lucky rabbits foot at home.