Non-math comments!!!
If you are doing a negative play, move around as much as you can - less play, less exposure to casino edge.
If you are doing a positive play, don't move unless you have a "valid" reason: i.e. health factors, a nearby smoker is putting your health at risk, cold air is coming down right on your shoulders and giving you discomfort/pain.
Other valid reasons might be psychological, i.e., you're in a losing streak and you are tempted to go "on tilt" and might decide to stray from basic strategy. Or, you get so upset, you aren't thinking straight and make strategy errors. In these cases, a better option might be to go take a walk, get some fresh air, go take a nap, etc. etc., rather than going to another machine.
Streaks happen - change machines whenever you want to, for whatever reason. Just don't think that changing between two machines with the same paytable is going to change the long-term odds. And you can't know in advance whether the new machine is going to be better or worse in the short-term. Waste of brain cells to try to predict the future results.
What concerns me more is people who change games all the time in one session, moving from one with a better EV to one with a lower one. There might be a valid reason to change once, to seek lower volatility - your bankroll is going down. But I see players all the time go back and forth every few minutes, hoping to find a game that is "luckier." No one can switch games that often and not make strategy errors, momentarily forgetting what game they are playing. It is hard enough to switch games from one day to the next and not suffer from momentary lack of concentration. And the sad thing about all this is sometimes I know the people who are doing this and they think they are "advantage" players - and then hear them complain about their long losing streaks.
I say this kindly: You can't just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. Some players might be happier if they just accept in their mind that they are recreational gamblers, which is a perfectly acceptable goal.
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Jean $¢ott, Frugal Gambler
http://queenofcomps.com/
You can read my blog at
http://jscott.lvablog.com/
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