Many athletes know about this phenomenon. It’s called “flop sweat” and it occurs when you are down and out and feeling oh so miserable, usually because of what just happened to you in a game or some form of intense competition.
It could be a loss that causes it – maybe a strikeout or a fumble or something that makes your team lose the game. In a final game in the New York City high school league championships, I kicked the ball out of bounds with 10 seconds to go in the game and we lost – by one point; a point scored after I kicked the ball out of bounds.
That was our first and only loss of the season. Flop sweat started to cover me from foot to head. It was an eerie feeling. I was getting colder and colder.
Until that moment I was playing brilliantly, really, I was. I had the flop sweat after that game and it even came home with me.
I also had the flop sweat one other time, the time when I went the whole route with a Martingale method of casino betting (doubling my bets after every loss), trying to beat the house (a very dangerous playing method I found out) and I wound up losing in a devastating way. Devastating.
Flop sweat doesn’t make you cool off when you are warm. Not at all. It is a cool sweat, yes, but it seems to be coming from somewhere else other than your body and it has no bodily particulars. It seems to be surreal. It comes all over you at once. I don’t even know if it is sweat at all.
Handling Casino Losses
I think some (or maybe many) casino players have felt the flop sweat after their play (or during it) because many have gone down the route that creates the condition. That route is, as I experienced it, a losing session of monumental proportions. A losing session that is unexpected and just seems to come out of nowhere. It lands in your lap and covers you with a cold sweat that doesn’t actually cool you off. Flop sweat it is.
A large part of casino gambling is the ability to handle defeat with some grace. After all, you are playing against the house edge at every game and you should realize this. You will lose, maybe today, tonight, tomorrow, maybe this whole week and on and on.
Really bad defeats are inevitable for most players, especially those players who enjoy long sessions at the machines or the tables. And also those players who simply go to the casinos a lot.
It’s in the cards, the dice, and the Random Number Generators (RNG) at the slot machines. You can’t escape the house edge unless you become an advantage player and those players are so very rare indeed.
Flop sweats do not appear when you are winning – that sweat is just regular, normal “happy” salty sweat. If you are only losing a little I doubt you’ll have a flop sweat experience.
Flop sweat can make a player take a long or short or some kind of pause in his or her gambling routine. It did me.
I dumped the Martingale betting method and took a short time off from casino playing after my flop sweat experience. Actually, I debated whether to ever play again but obviously I did play again and have done so close to 40 years!
Still, I only had one session of flop sweat – and one was more than enough for me to learn my lesson.
(Please note. I don’t know about players who are drunk if they experience flop sweats. Being anesthetized might not allow the flop sweat to appear. Maybe someone has done a study of this.)
Some Ways to Initiate a Flop Sweat
Let’s take a look at the games you play and how you play them and see how close to a flop sweat you might be at any given time.
Blackjack
Blackjack is a truly dynamic game. Every decision you make on how to play your hands matters. Every decision the other players make determines things for them – and for you too. Cards tell the whole story in this game.
In a six-deck game if all the aces (that would be 24 of them) came out in the first few rounds, well, no blackjacks will happen after that until after the shuffle.
When you are hitting your hands – you can bust or draw a good card or draw a card that doesn’t help you very much. The game generally goes in and out for most players. They win some, they lose a little more, you have a decent session or you don’t or it is a wash.
Players will win about 44% of the time, lose approximately 48% of the time and tie approximately 8% of the time.
So, how can the game be so close between the player and the house with that above spread?
Some hands are premium hands and pay back more than even money. A blackjack will pay 3 to 2 (or in some games it will pay the icky 6 to 5). Players can double down on some hands by putting up more money – these are largely favorable situations for the players because they will win more or lose less on the hands on which they are doubling.
Players can split pairs and in some games double down after splitting.
The whole casino-playing world is in some kind of recognizable order when you play blackjack because players generally have a feeling that what they do counts.
You have a fun time; you win a little or lose a little, and then you go home and live your life feeling safe to go back to the casino after a short interval.
If you play basic strategy – the computer-designed strategy for playing all your hands against the dealer’s face-up card, then you face about a half-percent house edge. That’s a supremely close game. You’ll rarely find any games in the casino that can match blackjack’s house edge against the basic strategy player.
Sadly, many players do not play basic strategy properly and some so-called casino “experts” decry it as being a false option and caution players against it. More fool them and their followers. They are helping the casinos make more money from the players.
So, what kind of situations are more likely to bring out the rare flop sweat in blackjack players?
Let us say that you play perfect basic strategy. You make all the right decisions and suddenly nothing works. I mean nothing at all.
- You get a blackjack and the dealer gets a blackjack – a few times during the session.
- You double down in the right situations and the dealer keeps drawing winning hands.
- You split pairs, you double after splits, and you lose a bunch of a bunch of hands that you felt you should have won.
- All the bad hands become busts when you make all the correct plays.
Now you decide to go for it. How long can a bad streak last? You ask yourself. (This is the start of the self-conning stage.) You double up the amount you are betting and continue to see your money flying into the casino’s vault.
Do you stop and take a break?
Nope.
You think, let’s go to two hands with those twice as large bets. Why not? My luck has to turn around soon, right? I mean come on really.
Yikes! The casino trashes you. Can’t you win a hand here and there? No siree. You're betting the most you ever bet and now you are playing two hands perfectly and you are getting trounced! Clobbered.
You are running out of money. Okay, let’s really go for it, folks, right now! Take all the money you’ve brought with which to play and let her rip!
And you are slaughtered. Ruined. Broke. You can’t play anymore because you have lost your whole session stake just like that!
And the flop sweat can now be felt all over your body. It signals the lowest point you’ve ever been in a casino playing perfect basic strategy at blackjack.
How could this session possibly happen? Really, how could it? How could every decision seem to be wrong?
You go to your room and think about how you are sweating because you are hot but you feel the cool wave of the flop sweat all over your body.
Weird. How could such a thing be possible? Yet it is. Hopefully, you are able to hit the bed and fall asleep. Hopefully.
Slots: The Former One-Armed Bandits
Slot machines used to be simple mechanical devices. Now they are computer marvels, allowing players to often wager 100 bets at once! Chew on that for a moment.
They have shiny lights of all colors; fun and fascinating sound effects. You can play movie-style slots, television show slots, world events slots, historical slots (imagine playing a slot machine titled the Titanic!).
They bring in most of the money the casino makes from its players and have for almost half a century. Slots rule the casinos and have ever since 1984.
Slots players are a guaranteed huge win for the house because the machines can actually take 10 or more percent from the players! Amazing. Machines that pay out the most money – you know those multi-million-dollar progressives – are the cheapest. They often keep around 17 percent of all the money played in them.
If you are playing a multi-game machine then you are asking for trouble – the returns are killers. Many slot players get really, really close to flop sweats when they play such machines even though the machines don’t really allow you to make decisions that actually count. They are strictly random devices programmed to knock the players senseless. And they often do.
So, how does a player get into the flop sweat situation on slots? Here’s one way of many ways.
The machine the player chooses to play can have certain features that make it abominable. One such feature is the “hit” without actually winning money or earning anything other than frustration.
The player presses the credit button and the reels do whatever they do and suddenly you hear that you have hit! Hooray! Oh, wait, the machine only returns a couple of credits to you, nowhere near what you just wagered. You had a hit, yes, but a losing hit anyway.
These ghost-hit machines can rattle a player’s nerves. You think you’ve won something when in fact you haven’t. Slot players have been trained to accept long losing streaks but even they can get antsy and move from machine to machine looking for one that actually hits winners.
After hours chasing the glory of winning something or other, the slot player must decide: quit play or just keep throwing credits into the machines.
Smart players just take a break from play. But potential flop sweaters continue their pursuit of Lady Luck’s favors. That reward does not come no matter how much money they have spent.
The losses pile up and so does the frustration. At some point it is possible that the player begins to feel the cool, cool flop sweat covering their body.
What Do You Want From Your Casino Play?
To win!
Yes, every player fantasizes about winning. Such fantasies are the food of our illusions and are generally harmless – until they aren’t.
If you are having a poor session why not just take a break? The games won’t go away, nor will the house edges. When you come back to play those edges will still be working.
So, why take a break? To settle your mind and emotions. You can go back to play after awhile and still get hammered. True. Still, you need to recoup.
One last word from me: All the best in and out of the casinos!
