Slot session log.

A session is one sit at one machine. You put money in. You play. You cash out, or you walk. Everything between the first bet and the last spin is one session. A trip to the casino is usually three to twelve sessions stacked back to back, with coffee breaks and meals in between.

The session is the atomic unit of a slot player's life. A handpay is a single moment inside one. A winning trip is a group of them. A year of play is a few hundred. Any useful log starts by getting the session right.

A minimum useful session log has five pieces of information. You can keep more, but less than this and the entry is too thin to look back at.

• ·Machine. Game name, maker, denomination, typical bet.
• ·Casino. Name, and ideally the city, because a slot machine at Park MGM is not the same as the same name in Reno.
• ·Cash in. What you put in, in total, including top-ups.
• ·Cash out. What you walked away with.
• ·Bonuses. The ones that landed, the type, the amount.

Every other field is a nice-to-have. Duration. Photos. Notes about the server, the neighbour, the music. Good logs include a few of these because they are what make a session into a memory. But the five above are what give you a trip net you can actually trust.

Most slot players log the big ones. The handpay. The bonus chase that finally hit. The night they doubled their money. Those sessions are the easy part. The rest of the year is the part that disappears.

A log that only records highlights is a highlight reel. It tells you your best nights, which is nice, but it does not tell you your year. You know your year in slot play by looking at your losing sessions as clearly as your winning ones. That is the whole difference between Strava and a ski-run-of-the-year video.

The session flow in Handpay is one of the most-used parts of the app, so it is deliberately short.

• ·Sit down. Open Handpay. Tap Capture.
• ·Take one photo of the machine. On-device OCR reads the game, the denomination, and your starting credit.
• ·Confirm in one tap. The session has started.
• ·Bonuses log in one tap each, during play.
• ·Cash out or walk. Tap End session and enter the ending credit.
• ·The session saves with machine, casino, cash in, cash out, net, duration, bonuses, and a photo.

The whole interaction takes under ten seconds at start and end. Short enough that you actually log every session, not just the interesting ones.

A session on its own is an entry. A trip is what happens when you stack six of them at the same casino across three nights. Handpay groups sessions into trips automatically, based on the trip you are on at the time.

When you look at a trip in the app, you see the list of sessions underneath it. The biggest win. The longest stretch at one cabinet. The bonus that paid. A Vegas trip ends up with a photo roll, a net, and a short list of the machines worth coming back to.

See Casino trip planner for the trip-level view.

After a few months of logging, you can look at the shape of your slot year. The months you played more. The trips that cost the most and the ones that paid. Which machines paid reliably. Which casinos you cashed out ahead at more often than not.

None of this is predictive. Slot results are random. But the log is a true record of what you played, and it tells a story that mental averages cannot: where the year went, not just where it went well.