American cartoonist and humorist Kin Hubbard once said, “The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.” Sound advice, indeed. Advice that I should’ve taken last Friday. Instead, in the middle of a postcard-perfect summer afternoon, with cotton ball clouds hanging in the sky and a crisp $20 bill burning a hole in my pocket, I stepped into the air-conditioned cool of the Senecas’ new Buffalo Creek Casino.

I’ll admit up front that I’d never gambled at a casino before in my life. I’ve only been to two before: Crystal Bay Casino in Lake Tahoe, where I saw a mediocre band play; and Circus Circus in Las Vegas, where I spent one very short night before high-tailing it out into the dead-quiet emptiness of the high desert. These are the images I carried with me into the current incarnation of the Buffalo Creek Casino, which from the outside appears as a large blue corrugated steel utility shed. The building’s interior matches its utilitarian exterior. Sure, there are a few pastel colors splashed on the walls and some weird conceptual banners hanging from the ceiling, but those aren’t important. The real focus here is on the slot machines.

As soon as I stepped inside from the relatively quiet, relatively abandoned industrial landscape of Perry and Michigan Streets, my senses were overwhelmed. Banks of slot machines—124 of them in all—glowed like video games throughout the hall. The machines split the air with a cacophony of electronic beeps, blips and buzzes; some playing songs, some telling players they’d won something and some apparently just making noise for the hell of it. The place had the air of a children’s video arcade. Except for one thing. Nobody was smiling, not in the whole chockablock room. They didn’t seem to be having fun. At least not in the traditional telling jokes and slapping each other on the back sort of way. Hell, they weren’t even talking. The only people smiling, in fact, were the security guards who stood at the front desk.

As one might imagine, I was nervous with anticipation as I stepped up to the cashier and said, “I’ve never been here before.” She explained it shortly. “The machines take bills, five dollars and higher. No dollars, no coins.” I tried to conceal my surprise as I handed her the twenty and asked for change in fives. “5, 10, 15, 20,” she counted. “Good luck.”

Whether the cashier knew it or not, that simple two-word phrase she uttered—good luck—belies the logic upon which all slot machine gambling operates. There is no luck involved. Rather today’s slick, high-tech computerized slot machines are run by strict formulas. Formulas, it’s no surprise, that favor the house over gamblers.

That’s why slot machines are often called “one-armed bandits.” Even though they’re not your worst bet (that honor goes to keno) slots still account for the majority of revenue—up to 70 percent—brought in by casinos nationwide. That’s because they’re by far the most popular, entertaining casino game. And they’re programmed to beat gamblers, lucky or not.

Every slot machine today is outfitted with a sophisticated digital processor that runs a random-number generator (RNG). Every second, whether the machine is being used or not, the RNG cycles through 200 million numbers. When a player places their first bet and presses the “spin” button or (for the old-fashioned among us) pulls the lever, one of the numbers freezes and is communicated to the reels. The reels spin for a few seconds, providing the player with a sort of low-budget, redneck fireworks display, and the alignment of symbols—cherries, diamonds, numbers and bars—that appears on the reels is a visual representation of that number.

The catch here is that the RNG isn’t all that random. It’s run by software, which, by law, is programmed by the casino to pay back to customers a certain percentage of the money that it takes in. Usually that number falls between 80 and 95 percent. Though that doesn’t sound all that bad, remember that even a 100 percent machine (which doesn’t exist), over the long run, will only break even, giving players an equal chance to win or lose.

The principle that governs this high-tech system is not a new one. It’s more than 300 years old. Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli discovered the two-part Law of Large Numbers in 1689. It says that, first, random outcomes like a coin flip are unaffected by previous flips. Each time (assuming the coin is legit), the odds are the same as the one before or after that you’ll turn up a tail. Further, the law says that overall result of random outcomes becomes more predictable as the number of outcomes increases. Therefore, though you might turn up 17 tails in 20 flips of a coin, chances are good that if you flip it 100,000 times, you’ll get around 50,000 of each.

In other words, though players will variously win and lose on a single machine, over time they will lose more often than win…it’s guaranteed. What it also means is the more often a single player pulls the lever, no matter what machine he is using, the more likely it is he’ll end up with a net loss between 5 and 20 percent—the house’s take. After all, the casino isn’t staying in business by giving money away.

The first slot machine I sat down at was called Triple Double Diamond. I fed a $5 bill into the machine, and addressed the screen to try and figure out how to work the contraption. The first thing I noticed was that 50 credits showed up on the screen, each one worth 10 cents. Sixteen buttons stared up at me from the control panel, variously lit up and blinking. I was baffled. The woman next to me, an African American lady of early retirement age, seemed to know what she was doing, so I asked for help. “Just press the five and the two, then press ‘bet,’” she said. She reached out and pressed the buttons for me, and in doing so, lost my first dollar for me. It happened so fast that I didn’t really get it, and I turned to her with a half-crazed, wild-eyed look on my face. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just press the button.” Which she did, prompting her machine to beep repeatedly as her winnings stacked up. She had amassed over 2,500 credits.

After a minute or two, I worked out that one row of buttons allowed you to enter the number of credits you wanted to bet, and another row was for the number of lines you wanted to bet on. The “lines” are laid out in a grid over the reels, allowing you more chances to win. It’s sort of like bingo, where you can win diagonally or across the board at different points. The more lines you play, the more likely you are to win something. Simultaneously, though, you are betting more money.

In the next two minutes, taking time to carefully review my bets, I blew my first five bucks and fed the machine another fiver. Over time, I made an interesting observation. Between each spin, a player has to re-enter his bet. If you’re planning to settle in for a while, as most folks do, this gets to be a little tedious. But not to worry, the slot machine has a solution for you—the “max bet” button. It is a huge button, placed right next to the “spin” button, and it’s always lit up, as if the machine is giving you a helpful suggestion. With nine lines to bet on, though, at up to 20 credits per line, the max bet is 180 credits. Suddenly a 10 cent machine is looking more and more like an $18 machine. That is the pitfall of modern slot machines compared with the old one-line, three-reel model.

According to Martin Jensen, author of Beat the Slots, these days the average bet on a slot machine is $5 per pull. Based on that, he calculates that a player using a machine with 90 percent payback will typically lose $240 an hour.

Lucky for me, I didn’t last that long. After dumping $10 into Triple Double Diamond, I wandered over to another game, called something like Triple Lucky 7s. Since each credit was worth 25 cents, I put in all $10 I had left, which bought me 40 credits. The max bet was $1.25, and the woman sitting next to me was repeatedly plunking that button. At one point, I tried to ask her a question about the card that was attached to her belt and plugged into the machine (which I later found out was a “bonus card”), but she didn’t seem to notice me. After three or four attempts, I gave up.

She’s an example of the modern day slot addict produced by the whiz-bang, flahing-lights model of slots. People in the industry refer to them as “escape” players, because they seem to desire an escape from reality. They zone-out and yearn for the numbness produced by the spinning of the reels and the electronic chirping of the machine, hoping that no one will bother them.

I watched her for a moment as she churned through 65 credits and fed the machine another $20 bill. I turned back to my machine and promptly lost my $10. I was flat broke.

I still wandered around, though, and looked at the rest of the facility. There wasn’t much else to see, it turns out. There’s a pleasant little cafe that serves sandwiches, baked goods and beverages (including, notably, Red Bull), though there’s no sitting area. That’s because people who are seated at tables and eating lunch aren’t putting money into the machines. Next to the in-house ATM, there was a debit/credit card cash advance machine. That allows gamblers who’ve run out of money in their bank accounts to gamble on credit. The surcharges for the cash advances are exorbitant—from $7.95 on an advance of $1-50 to 3 percent on $5-10,000. A gambling addict, I imagine, would probably have no problem justifying such an expense.

That was all I could handle of the casino, so I got the hell out of there. As I walked out the front door, I glanced at the stopwatch I had running. The whole episode had lasted 22 minutes and 43 seconds.

Both the Senecas and gambling opponents prefer to call the shed a “temporary” facility. The Senecas have proposed a hugely expanded $125 million, 200,000-square-foot gaming resort. Gambling opponents—as represented by a number of groups including Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County and the Network of Religious Communities—hope that the facility will soon go away altogether. The matter is yet undecided and rests at the feet of US District Court Judge William Skretny.

If the Senecas get their way downtown, an expanded casino will house 2,100 slot machines. If that happens, take Hubbard’s advice. Fold your money over and put it in your pocket, because there’s nothing more foolish than being pickpocketed by a one-armed bandit.