Time to get ready for work & my recommendations

1. I am retired so this Wuhan Virus does not materially affect me as a Scavenger of bonus slots or my ability to make money from table games (so I make less for next two years). I used a constant mix for my stock portfolio, which is effectively 50% stocks & 50% bonds per CFA Institute guidelines due to my age. For the past 4 to 5 years, when I rebalanced my portfolio monthly I was mostly a “forced” seller of stocks as the price of stocks kept going up and a “forced” buyer of safe bonds to help maintain a 50% - 50% balance. Thanks to this crash, I was able to rebalance and buy stocks when they were dirt “cheap”. I also traded options and did really well due to the huge volatility.

2. I am doing a lot of volunteer work right now and it gives me a lot satisfaction helping people. I typically donate food to a food bank at the end of the month. But because I was able to get cheap stables that returned to the shelf at Costco, I was able to donate toilet paper and canned goods (I cannot eat this much food plus other people could really use the food and supplies right now). When I buy food, it’s always portion controlled so I can donate the unopened items to the food bank.

3. I told people in my network, the month-long vacation is over and it’s time to get ready to go back to work. I expect casinos to be open in May. So right now, it’s important to practice 2 to 4 hours to get ready. People in my network mostly play games of skill: VP, VBJ, etc. We expect with lower casino traffic, that the machines will now be available; before, you had Ploppies playing Keno on multigame units for *hours* at *min bets* and prevented us from getting the necessary coin in. The lower casino traffic will now play to our strengths.

4. We will be hitting daily & other promo’s that we had avoided in the past. It did not make sense to chase coin-in based promo’s when the hourly win rates from scavenging bonus slots were so high. Now, we expect fewer scavenging opportunities so by default these daily & other promo’s are now more attractive due to their certainty of outcomes. The nice thing are (a) the machines will be available as listed in pt #3, (b) the coin in from these games provide camouflage as these are non-bonus slot coin in, and (c) we should see dependable mailers & other benefits. If I wasn’t retired, this means I go from a $300 a day coin as a Scavenger making $300 a day profit ($600 coin out) to a $3,000 a day coin in player losing money but making it back on the promo’s and mailers and the limited scavenging profits as gravy. To summarize, I go from a low coin in player with huge profit margins to 10X more coin in AND losing money in the process.

5. Before, I allocated my profits based on 60% reinvestment - 20% slush fund - 20% rainy day fund. Slush fund was to fund R&D in new bonus slots, down payment on a car, new toys like a smartphone, etc. The rainy day fund was for emergencies or to be invested in other assets such that if we had lost our entire bankroll and quit the business, we had something to show for our work over the years. Some of us used 80% - 10% - 10%.

The nice thing about the slush fund was our ability to lose as much as $2K to $3K to reverse engineer a bonus slot machine. Every time we lost money, we show losses on the player tracking system. These were real losses. Not every game we reverse engineered was profitable so we had a lot of duds ... this is a huge risk in prospecting.

One time, a RAT accused us of being “cheats” so I went to the slot supervisor and produced a list of our biggest losses and show him we were losers (we kept records of coin in, losses, dates, games, machines numbers, etc). The RAT had no idea we were down over $10K from R&D efforts just that year alone. So the RAT was asked to stop bothering casino patrons. The RAT lost all credibility. The casino didn’t know us that well but our data matched their player tracking system. Basically, that RAT did not like competition and thought he could get rid of us. Plus that RAT hated the fact that we were smarter than him but did not realized we were legitimate losers and had a right to play in the casino.

But I digress. In today’s environment, I would allocate 40% - 30% - 30% because I see very little reason to reinvest my profits to grow my bankroll in a poor environment; instead, I need a larger R&D budget and put more money aside for retirement.

Good luck out there.