Now that I’ve settled in to offering both a daily video and a daily installment of my Betting a Million to Win a Million series, some recent questions sent in to Flip The Switch showed a revived interest around how I tend to handle casino budgeting:
I have a question out of curiosity…Did you start off day one with a million dollars set aside to do the challenge? I’m curious how much you set aside to start.
Chronathome
Fortunately this is not the sort of endeavor that requires me to set aside such a large sum of money, for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t film everything in a day, but over a series of filming sessions that run a couple of months. So I’ll film more than one on a given casino trip, given I’m not in a casino every day (a popular casino myth that some still believe).
The other is that even if things don’t go my way (to be expected with casino games having a house edge for the casino), I also don’t expect to lose everything. In both of the series we’ve completed so far, my losses were less than 10 percent of the total amount wagered.
Of course there’s the ups and downs that go with the jackpot sounds, but as I’ve shared here previously, I do set budgets per casino trip, knowing what I’ll be filming for that visit. By keeping to that budget, it means if things go south fast, I’ll recalibrate some of my other plans for that trip to ensure things stay on track.
I won’t film videos with the potential for high spend if I’m not able or willing to budget that for a particular trip. Increasingly I also have to keep which casinos I’ll be at in mind, and what they can support, including:
- Game and bet availability
- Whether fast pay/self pay is allowed
- At what point a machine locks up if there’s too much cash when you attempt to cash out
- If their cashier is able to print tickets for me or if I can load funds to the machine digitally (as putting in 100 x $100 bills for each Betting a Million episode is out of the question!),
These are all important questions given the amount of play I record on a trip.
So ultimately that means, luckily for me, there’s no need to budget a $1 million upfront for the Betting a Million series, since I’m only betting a million, not losing a million. Instead, based on the amount of wagers and the size of them, I’m able to do some rough math on how much I need on hand to sustain that day’s play. It’s never anything close to $1 million in a single visit, thankfully, even at the levels I can bet on video.
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