So far this year, Mr. Troutbend has not been lucky with gambling. He's only hit a few hand-paid jackpots, and is probably down several thousand dollars chasing the dollar.

Last weekend I told him I was going to get a shock collar that would give him a zap if he looked at a slot machine, and he stopped gambling for a couple days and watched movies with me.

Today we experienced what it could be like to be at the end of our money, as if we'd lost it all to gambling. There is a penny slot machine 'Green Stamps' which is very cute and 1950s looking with a cute little ditty - "Green Stamps, they're really, really swell/Green Stamps, they're keen -- as well!"

The items on the reels are the sort of things you would save green stamps to get - a bowling bag and shoes, a TV set, a diamond ring, and if a green stamp appears, you get that value stored up in a 'book.' 1200 stamps = the free spin bonus at the first level of 5 free spins. You can keep collecting in multiples of 1200 stamps until you get to 25 free spins in the bonus round. After the bonus ends, any stamps collected in excess are saved and you can start building again, or you can cash out and leave any remaining stamps on the machine.

It takes about $20 to get the first 1200 stamps unless you're lucky and hit some big combinations. Most people play to the first bonus, and cash out when it's done. Sometimes the bonus pays well and you get your $20 back, but we've seen people get as low as $2.80 in the bonus. The most we've won was $78.50 in the bonus.

People sometimes run out of cash before they get to the bonus round, so they will have to leave the machine with unused stamps, generally less than 100 stamps. If we see more than 600 stamps left on a machine, we'll consider risking our $20 to see how we do in the bonus, given that head start.

Today on the way to lunch we found a machine with 685 stamps left on it, so decided to play. All we had was $7.00 between us. Mr. T had some 'free play' which is match play - you put $5 in the slot machine and with each deal of the cards, it matches your bet. So if you bet $1, it gives you $1 whether you win or not until you use up all the match credits. He had $7 in match play, so stuck in his $5 and came out with $14.00. We played that in Green Stamps and didn't make it to the bonus round, so now there was about 850 stamps saved up and we needed to insert some more cash. Now, all we had was the $2 we needed to pay the waitress's tip for lunch (he uses points to pay for the lunch itself).

Then I remembered that the casino recently started a deal where you can use your slot club points to get free play. Mr. T has a lot of points, so he went and got $25 in free play while I guarded the Green Stamps machine with all those saved up stamps on it.

He didn't want to use all of his $25 free play in that penny machine because it would fritter away, so played it through on a video poker machine. He only had $1 to get started with, but right away he got a three of kind, then a four of a kind, and a full house, so by the time the free play was done, he cashed out with $75.00.

Putting that into Green Stamps, we finally got to the bonus round, and did okay - $28.50, so ended up cashing out $95.27.

I told him that we're never going to go through that kind of experience again; it's too nerve-wracking. It was a good lesson for me, but I don't know if he learned anything useful.