"I was curious, after reading of Mohegan Sun's recession-busting “Stimulus, Recovery and Rebound” promotion, a potpourri of new discounts on food, hotel rooms and gambling, just what it might be like to play a quarter-penny slot machine.

That's right, in addition to round-the-clock $5 blackjack tables, the Sun announced it now has slots starting at just a quarter of a penny, presumably for those who find the stakes too high on the penny slots.

How long, I wondered, would it take on one of these machines to lose, say, a dollar? It would be at least 400 pulls on a machine handle, in the very unlikely event you never won at all. But given the win and lose and give and take of a churning slot machine, I figured a dollar could keep you there for hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of pulls, a very long time.

A few dollars might even see you right through the recession.

I set out one day last week to scratch my new quarter-penny slot itch, arriving at the casino late one morning to find a pretty fair-sized crowd on the gaming floor, given the recession. Maybe others, I thought, were also there for Stimulus, Recovery and Rebound."

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David Collins: Betting On Casino Recovery (The New London Day 3/8)