Playing Slot Machines For A Living
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- Can You Make A Living Playing Slot Machines
- Cost Of A Slot Machine
- Playing Slot Machines For A Living Well
Introduction to How to Play Slot Machines
Do you remember the first time you entered a casino as a beginner slots player? I know I do. What I remember most is being extremely confused. It was so dark, yet with so many lights. And the smoke everywhere! Perhaps you remember something similar?
My intent is to be genuinely helpful to slots players. While I think I still have a long way yet to go before I’ve shared everything that’s needed, I also believe I have been somewhat of service so far.
But perhaps you are only just beginning your slots journey. What have I done for you to ease your way into becoming a healthy, happy slots enthusiast? So, this article is for you, the beginner slots player, to, well, help.
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Entering a Casino for the First Time
My first experience at slot machine gambling was in 2003 at a small tribal casino (Kewadin Casino in Manistique, Michigan) in the upper peninsula. I was taking a long drive back to graduate school in Iowa after visiting family in the lower peninsula and had found a hotel at which to spend the night.
A casino was located just down the highway from that hotel. I wasn’t aware of the casino being there until the hotel provided $20 worth of tokens to play at it.
I remember feeling a little nervous about entering a casino for the first time in my life. I mean, what would my family of non-gamblers think? But I gathered up my courage and went on in.
I found it to be a highly distracting place: loud, lots of flashing lights, and smoke. This was a time when smoking was more fashionable than it is today, so there was a great deal of cigarette and cigar smoke in the air. This is still true today in some states, such as Nevada, although ventilation has gotten a whole lot better.
I distinctly remember rapidly spending the $20 worth of tokens on slots. Plus, another $50 besides which I could ill afford to lose. At the time I was a poor graduate student on a research stipend working a side job as a temporary instructor of college physics. I’d just spent my food money for the trip home.
Did I win anything that first time at a casino? No, I don’t think so. Why don’t I know if I had won or not? Frankly, how would I have known if I had? If I did, it wasn’t enough to grab my attention.
Maybe a few numbers changed on the player’s console, and the slot machine made an unusual sound. So? What of it? From my perspective, it was doing that every time I made a bet anyway.
I left the casino after having spent $50 I could barely afford to lose. As I continued home on that long road trip, I started thinking about gambling with slot machines. Since then, I’ve more-or-less never really stopped doing so.
After a few months of dwelling on that first experience, I happened to be visiting the Omaha Zoo just over the western border of Iowa in Nebraska. There, I saw a casino (Lakeside Casino in Osceola, Iowa) on the river. Hint: it was a riverboat casino.
With those months of thinking figuratively behind me, I’d concluded from my first visit that I needed a rule for how much I should allow myself to spend whenever, or if ever, I entered another casino.
The careful rule I came up with was this: “Take a fixed amount into the casino, say $25, and spend only that plus whatever you make from it.”
With this simple rule and $25 in hand, I entered this second casino at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday … and left almost 12 hours later at 1 a.m. Yes, that’s right, 12 hours. Why? Because I’d carefully followed my rule.
My error was that I hadn’t been prepared for success. This has continued to plague me, by the way. The error which my simple rule didn’t account for was this: Almost immediately after entering this second casino, I won $500 on a 25-cent slot machine.
Doing so left me feeling quite emotional, which inclined me to try to stick firmly to the rule – which I proceeded to do. As the afternoon and evening passed into the early morning, I continued to win additional small, nontaxable jackpots.
Eventually, I spent my $25 along with what I’d won with it. And so, this was my second experience at a casino. I’d gone from slots gambling for 10 minutes to a marathon 12-hour session.
I did try to find a hotel that morning, instead of driving home at such a late hour (and coming as close as I’ve ever gotten to hitting a deer on the highway), but the nearby hotel wouldn’t accept a credit card – only cash.
The hotel staff insinuated that people would provide a credit card to the hotel upon arrival, but afterward max out their credit limit at the casino. At check-out, they wouldn’t be able to pay their hotel bill the following morning. That shocked me.
My point here isn’t about my not being able to get a hotel room, but that this was my first real clue that gambling was … complicated. It consisted of more than just the act of making a bet by pushing a button.
It exists in a unique environment where loud sounds, flashing lights, second-hand smoke, and even gambling abuses can occur. How fascinating!
My Initial Gambling Rules
After these first two casino gambling experiences, I spent more and more time thinking about them without much progress in learning how to win. I wasn’t yet thinking about how to win, however. Rather, I was mostly thinking about the potential dangers of what I was getting myself into.
Eventually, I made a decision to keep trying to figure out this whole slots gambling thing. I wasn’t expecting to win any significant amount of money, not ever. But I was hoping not to lose a significant amount of money.
At the time, for me, my primary motivation was wanting to develop better control over my emotions while gambling at a casino. When there, I was feeling overwhelmed by my strong emotions. I didn’t like feeling ruled, at times almost controlled, by my emotions.
If my reaction to these strong emotions was a personal weakness, I knew I wouldn’t just find myself exposing this behavior at a casino. I could potentially be surprised by it at any other time. For example, while living my life or when working professionally. I felt I needed to understand and, if I could, address it.
So, with this reasoning in mind for proceeding with gaining additional slot machine gambling experiences, I took a long look around where I lived for any nearby casinos within driving distance. As it happened, there was a nice casino relatively nearby.
This local casino (Prairie Meadows in Altoona, Iowa) had table games, floors of slot machines, a high limit slot room, and horse racing. And, oh, the splendor of the buffet!
To all my senses, it was simply delightful. So, with that limited assessment of a gambling establishment, about every month or more I’d take about $25 from my monthly stipend to go there with the full expectation of gambling it all away on slot machines.
But would I…? For what happened next, see The World’s Oldest Winning Slots Strategy is Still in Play!!
But that’s just my story. Instead, let’s talk about your story.
The Changing State of Gambling, in Brief
Legal large-scale gambling in the U.S. started in Nevada in 1931. There was Las Vegas, of course, but also Reno, Lake Tahoe, and others. It basically stayed there until legalized in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1978.
Legalized gambling in Atlantic City provided casinos convenient to gamblers on the east coast. And this balance of gambling between Nevada and Atlantic City continued until around the end of the 1980s. At that point, everything started changing more and more rapidly.
Basically, in 1988 tribal casinos became permitted by federal law. Although, tribes did need to negotiate state-tribal compacts with the state their reservations were located within. These negotiations typically took years.
Another substantial change happened in the early 1990s when riverboat casinos became legal in several midwestern states. Originally, state law required these casinos to travel on water, or at least unmoor from a dock, before any gambling could occur.
In the mid-90s, online gambling started up outside of the U.S. This got out of control fast, until various legal restrictions began protecting players. For a while, this protection was to block online gambling in the continental U.S.
By doing so, the U.S. Senate was not just protecting players, but also land-based casinos hurt by online gambling from outside the U.S. Not long after, Canada did much the same. Besides tribal gaming, this was the limit of federal laws restricting gambling in the U.S. until the banning and recent un-banning of sports betting at the federal level.
What all this means is simple. Gambling has become prevalent in the U.S., especially the most popular type of gambling there is: slot machine casino gambling.
There is another side of the coin, as it were, to all this growth and expansion of gambling. All through these changes to the gaming industry in the U.S. and abroad, the technology of gambling was also growing and expanding.
For example, as you might imagine, the impact of microchips and the internet was profound to slots. For a succinct article capturing these near-constant technological developments of slots machines, see The Ultimate Guide to Slot Machine History.
My point of view is that slot machine casino gambling has changed a lot in the last few decades. Further, I believe that these changes will keep on happening. Knowing what has happened in the past will help us understand the future.
Some of the biggest changes occurring right now are related to slot machines no longer being fully random. Frankly, there are degrees of randomness. In the past, most casinos controlled the odds of winning on a slot machine by having slots mechanics physically adjust the odds on a regular schedule perhaps 2 weeks long.
Nowadays, at casinos built or heavily renovated since 2012, this is automated. Doing so both reduced the casino labor force and provided a near real-time understanding of the performance of the casino for its operator.
And therein lies the secret to winning at slot machine casino gambling. But all that is a bit much for the beginner slots player. What you need to know is, the randomness of slot machines isn’t always fully random. There are patterns to this randomness and, if you know to look for them, you can find them.
Beginning Your Slots Journey
Can You Make A Living Playing Slot Machines
Maybe you’ve yet to visit a casino. Maybe you have visited a casino and wondered what the heck just happened. You might even have gone many times but want to restart your slots journey for one of several reasons.
If you’re just started on your slots journey, you may not know how much playing slots has changed so much in the last few years. That’s fine, as more than a few regular slots players haven’t kept up with all the changes of late. Or, rather, what the changes mean.
So, let us begin your journey together. Your first step? Well, it’s probably not visiting a casino. Your first step is to search for info online. Maybe that’s how you found me!
Most people have several casinos near them. In Iowa, for instance, every resident has at least one casino within an hour drive.
What about you? How many casinos are near you? Well, I shouldn’t explain how to use Google, but here’s a hint: Type “casinos near me” in Google. Doing so will show a map with all the casinos in your area. Cool, huh?
Or use my Online Resource for U.S. Casino Slots Enthusiasts with links to my state-by-state slots review articles including lists of state’s casinos as well as their websites … and a map!
What you want to do is visit the websites of casinos near you. See what they have to offer that you might like. Don’t focused entirely on gambling. For instance, you’ll probably want a nice meal occasionally, right? So look at what nearby casinos have to offer which might interest you.
That’s about all the preparation you’ll need to start, other than The Golden Rule of Slots.
The Golden Rule
There is a danger to gambling for the first time. I’m not a medical professional, so I cannot explain this danger as well as I would like. But this is the danger: You don’t know how you will involuntarily react to gambling until you do it the first time.
It’s kind of like that first alcoholic drink. With it, some people immediately realize they are an alcoholic. It can ruin lives and doing something about it successfully will be a life-long endeavor.
I don’t mean to scare you. Not at all. Many people find recreational gambling to be quite entertaining. But others find out they are compulsive gamblers. This can be hard on everyone. So, I have a few things to share about it.
First, please understand that casino’s reprimand employees, or fire them, if they tell a patron they are spending too much money and should go home. That’s just the sad truth. On the other hand, advertisements all over casinos explain how to get help.
Second, I don’t encourage non-gamblers to gamble. I assume anyone who finds me is deliberately looking for information on slots gambling. But, if you decide you want to gamble, then I take it as my responsibility to explain how to do it.
Third, there truly is a Golden Rule. Here it is: Don’t spend any money at a casino which you cannot afford to comfortably lose. That means you’re spending disposable income, which is money left over after paying all your bills along with an additional amount put into your savings account of choice.
Journey into the Unknown … Together
I suppose we should also discuss how a slot machine operates. Most newcomers sit down at a slot machine, put some money in, and start pushing some buttons. But what do the buttons do?
There are several physical components to slot machines, including various interfaces with the player. I’ve already written an article about the common elements of a slot machine called How Slot Machines Work from a Player’s Perspective.
That article, or at least the schematic of a slot machine found in it, should go a long way toward taking the mystery out of how all the buttons, panels, and interfaces work on a slot machine.
Another thing you’ll want to do is get a player’s club card from the casino. At its simplest, this is like your grocery card. In exchange for your contact information, you can earn points by spending money on gambling. They’ll also make some interesting offers.
You’ll get free stuff from the casino, most likely starting when you sign up. Sometimes, in the long term, it’s often the only way gamblers make a profit. Here’s another article with my explanation about these casino rewards clubs called Seven Advantages of Players Clubs for Playing Slots.
So, let’s recap what I’ve pulled together for you to start at slots:
- Go to the websites of casinos near you to understand their differences relative to your wants and needs.
- Check to make sure you have some amount of disposable income if you want to play slots.
- Visit your casino of choice and get a player’s club card at the front counter or kiosk.
- Pick a slot machine, make a bet, and see what happens next.
So, what does happen next? One example would be what happened to me, as explained. Or something similar. If I had one wish for you, it would be this. I hope you don’t win.
That’s probably shocking, but it really is for the best. If you win big at your first visit to a casino, it sets an unrealistic expectation you might take years to recover from … if ever. I hope you win big on your second visit to a casino. That’s what happened to me.
Once you’ve visited the casino a few times, maybe you’ll want to know more about why casinos are the way they are. If so, I have plenty of articles about them. But, that may be too soon. When you’re ready, they (and I) will be waiting here for you.
I hope you have a great time at the casino playing slots. As I’m always saying: Have fun, be safe, and make good choices.
Summary of Learn How to Play Slot Machines
Too often a beginner slots player gets lost. So much happens at once in a casino! Lights! Sounds! Smoke! There really is a lot going on for beginners. And, unfortunately, a casino doesn’t help. After all, it isn’t in their best interest to help.
Savvy slots enthusiasts understand what they are doing. We are all self-taught. Well, it’s time to fix stop leaving all that learning up to chance. With this primer, a beginner slots player no longer starts from scratch.
When you’re ready for more information on playing and winning at slots, it’ll be here for you. Best of luck and let me know if you have any questions!
Related Articles from Professor Slots
Other Articles from Professor Slots
- Previous: Can You Win at Video Poker Using Slots Strategies?
- Next: American Casino Guide 2019 – A Review by Professor Slots
Have fun, be safe, and make good choices!
By Jon H. Friedl, Jr. Ph.D., President
Jon Friedl, LLC
You can find stories about people gambling for a living. Many people play poker for a living, and it’s easy to see why. Poker doesn’t have a built in house edge; it has what amounts to a seat charge in the form of rake. Poker players aren’t trying to win the house money, they compete for other player’s money. This is different than most other forms of gambling.
You can also read about blackjack players that have learned how to count cards or find sloppy dealers that flash the value of down cards. Some of these players are able to play blackjack for a living. A small percentage of sports bettors, horse track bettors, and dog track bettors are also able to make enough money to gamble for a living.
But it’s rare to find people who can gamble for a living who play other casino games. Bob Dancer claims that he was able to play video poker for a living several years back, but even if his claim is true, many things have changed since then. It’s harder to find full pay video poker machines and casinos pay lower comp rates for video poker play.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that and I’m not trying to say that he didn’t make money playing. But I don’t know if anyone is making a living playing video poker today. It’s possible, but if there are players doing it, there aren’t very many.
A few authors claim to make money playing craps using dice control. This has always struck me as a way to sell books and training courses, but just like Dancer’s claim in video poker, I suppose a few people can use dice control. Also just like video poker, if people are successful at dice control, there aren’t very many of them.
Games like slots, roulette, baccarat, and other table games don’t have stories about gamblers playing them for a living. Does the lack of stories mean that these games are impossible to beat?
Slots are the most popular form of gambling in casinos. People love to play slots. This brings me to the reason for this article.
The Hard Truth
Before you continue, consider exactly what making a living means. Some people live on $25,000 a year, while others seem to need $50,000 or $100,000 a year. Many factors come into play when determining how much someone needs to live.
Some of the factors include:
- Where you live
- How many people you have to support, like a spouse and children
- How frugal your lifestyle is
- How much debt you have
For the purposes of this article I’m going to use $52,000 a year as the threshold for making a living. This works out to $1,000 a week. You can use any number that you want, but unless you live in an expensive area, most people can survive on this amount.
Another issue that must be considered when you think about playing slots for a living is the lack of health insurance and other benefits. Professional gamblers have to find health care and they don’t get paid time off. Health care is a serious expense for many people and it can be dangerous not to have some type of coverage.
Many young people don’t worry about the lack of health care coverage, but as you get older it often becomes a real concern. If you have to pay for health insurance it can take a big chunk out of your income. Keep this in mind when you determine how much you need to make to play slots for a living.
The hard truth is playing slots for a living is almost impossible unless you’re already wealthy and have enough money that you can afford to lose in the long run. It’s much more likely that you’re going to lose $1,000 a week than win $1,000 week playing slots.
While most slots players lose in the long run, it’s not 100% impossible to play slots for a living. But such a small percentage of players make money that the truth is that you should probably forget the idea.
Each machine is programmed to pay back a certain percentage of every dollar wagers and keep the rest for the casino. These numbers are called different names, but I call them pay back percentage and the house edge.
A slot machine’s pay back percentage is the amount of all bets returned to the player through wins on the machine. If a slot machine has a 95% pay back percentage that means that on average it gives back $95 out of every $100 wagered to the player.
If you consider this from the other angle you get the house edge. When the slot machine pays back $95 out of $100, it keeps the other $5 for profit. In other words, a machine that pays back $95 out of every $100 wagered has a 5% house edge.
When you add the house edge percentage and the pay back percentage together, they always equal 100%. This means that if you know one number you can subtract it from 100 to get the other number.
You can use these numbers to predict how much money you should win or lose over a set period of time, based on how much you bet per hour. Because the house edge is in the casino’s favor, it means that if you can’t figure out how to overcome the edge or get lucky, you’re going to lose in the long run.
Most slot machines have a payback percentage between 90 and 98%. This means the house edge is between 2 and 10%. With a house edge, it means that you lose between 2 and 10% of every dollar you run through the machine.
Here’s an example:
- You play on a slot machine that has a 98% pay back percentage, which means it has a 2% house edge. Your bet size is $2 per spin and you make 400 spins per hour. You can figure out your average loss rate, or what you can expect to lose on average per hour, by using this formula.
- Amount bet per spin times spins per hour times the house edge.
- $2 X 400 X 2% = $16
This means that if you play for 10 hours your expected loss is $160. You simply multiply the expected hourly loss times the number of hours you plan to play and you get the average expected loss.
Slots are run by computers, which use a program based on math. These programs, unless the programmers made a mistake, make sure that the underlying math principles always come true. It might take millions of spins, but the programs guarantees that the machine produces the programmed profit percentage for the casino.
The house edge and pay back percentage are long term things. This means that these percentages are realized over a long period of time. In the short term the house edge and pay back percentages vary, sometimes a great deal. But eventually the short term variance evens out and produces the correct results.
Most players can’t, and this is why it’s almost impossible to play slots for a living.
If you still want to try to play slots for a living, the following sections have additional information you need to know. Just keep in mind that even if you use every trick and strategy in your power, you still might lose money in the long run.
Finding the Pay Back Percentage of Slots
You just learned about pay back percentage and the house edge and how these things guarantee the casino a profit. So the next question is how do you find out the house edge and pay back for slot machines?
Most casino games are designed in a way that it’s fairly easy to determine the house edge and pay back percentage, or you can easily find the numbers with a quick internet search. But slots are different. The programs that run the machines have so many variables that unless you have access to the program it’s impossible to determine the house edge and pay back percentage.
Another problem is that some machines offer different pay back percentages from the manufacturer, so each casino can order their machines with the percentage they want. You can find out more about finding slot machine pay back percentages here, but the news isn’t good.
The following sections include everything I know that can help you improve your chances to win. Four of them are strategies that you can put into action yourself, and the other one is based on hope. Sadly, hope isn’t much of a strategy, but it fits in perfectly with how most people gamble. They put their money out and hope to win.
Online Bonuses
Online casinos often offer bonuses for slots players when they make a deposit. You can get 100% or more of your deposit matched with bonus money you can use to play slots. This sounds like a great way to overcome the house edge, and if the money was free it would be.
While bonus money looks like it’s free, when you read the conditions and terms associated with the bonus you find out that it’s not a simple as the casino giving you free money.
Every online slots bonus comes with rules and regulations about how you can use it, what you have to do before you can cash out your money, and if you get to keep any bonus amount when you meet the terms of the offer.
The terms vary from online casino to online casino, so it’s important to read them before you make your deposit. Some bonuses are deducted from your balance when you make a cash out request, while others can be cashed out eventually.
When you accept an online slots bonus you have to meet certain requirements. These are usually called play through requirements. A play through requirement means that you have to play the bonus amount, and sometimes the deposit amount as well, a certain number of times to clear the bonus. The requirement is usually shown as a multiple, like 25X or 50X. This means you have to make wagers totaling 25 times or 50 times the bonus, and sometimes the deposit amount.
Here’s an example:
- You sign up at an online casino that offers a 100% sign up bonus on deposits up to $250. You make a $250 deposit and get a $250 bonus. This gives you a total bankroll of $500. The terms and conditions state that you have to play the deposit and bonus amount 50 times before you can cash out.
- The total of the bonus and your deposit is $500, so you multiply this by 50 to find the total amount you have to bet. 50 X $500 = $25,000, so you have to make $25,000 worth of bets before cashing out. The best can be any size as long as the total amount reaches the limit.
You can use a trick at this point to get an idea of the possibility of clearing the bonus and having money left over. You can multiply the total amount you have to wager times the house edge to find the expected loss.
Cost Of A Slot Machine
Using this example, if you play on a slot machine with a 5% house edge, your expected loss is $1,250. This means that usually you’re going to run out of money before you clear the bonus. The only ways to change this are to play on a machine with a lower house edge, or find bonuses that have lower play through requirements.
You also need to make sure you understand the difference between cashable bonuses and the ones that are deducted from your balance. A bonus that can’t be cashed out when you meet the playing requirements makes it unlikely you can beat the house edge.
Here’s an example if you play a slot machine with a 2% house edge, using the same bonus numbers in the last example.
$25,000 X 2% = $500. This means that your expected loss is the same as your total bankroll of $500. Even if you get lucky and don’t lose all $500, the odds of you having more than your deposit of $250 left after clearing the bonus is slim.
You should defiantly use online slots bonuses if you want to play slots. Even a bonus that’s not cashable gives you extra money to gamble with. It also gives you extra chances to hit a big jackpot, which is the only way most slots players have of getting ahead.
Slots Tournaments
Slots tournaments aren’t run at all casinos, but some casino run them from time to time, and a few run them on a regular basis. A slots tournament offers a minimum amount of play for a set entry fee and awards prizes for the top finishers.
Some casinos offer slots tournaments as a reward for a set amount of play and/or connected to their slots club program. If you can earn a free entry into a slots tournament, anything you win helps overcome the house edge on your normal slots play.
When you’re looking for a slots tournament that has an entry fee, you should look for ones that have a guaranteed prize pool. If you can find tournaments that don’t get enough entrants to cover the prize pool you can play with an edge. It won’t greatly improve your chances of finishing in the money, but when the entry fees don’t cover the prize pool it’s profitable to play.
Here’s an example:
- The casino offers a slots tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $1,000. The entry fee is $10 and they only get 80 people to sign up. If you divide the prize pool by the number of entrants you get the average value of playing.
- In this case, the average is $12.50. Any time the average return for playing is higher than the entry fee you’re playing with an edge.
You still have to finish in the money to win some money, but if you play in enough of these types of situations you come out ahead eventually.
Playing Slots for Comps and Promotions
Every time you play slots you should be earning comps. Sign up for the slots club at your local casino and look for online casinos that have a rewards program. The casinos don’t give back enough in comps to overcome the normal house edge, but every penny you get back in comps helps lower your cost to play.
Casinos also run promotions from time to time. You might be able to find free slots play vouchers and match play coupons in the local paper or on the web site of the casino where you’re planning to ply. Promotions and coupons are a great way offset the built in house edge of the slot machines.
Getting Lucky
I hate to say it, but the only way most people can play slots for a living is to get lucky. If you’re lucky enough to hit a big jackpot sometime in your life, and are smart with the money, you can afford to play slots full time.
Playing Slot Machines For A Living Well
The only slot machines I play are the ones that offer either a progressive jackpot or ones that have a set top jackpot prize of $100,000 or higher. I know I can’t overcome the long term house edge without a big win, so I don’t waste my time on machines that can’t make a big deposit into my bank.
Getting lucky isn’t a strategy, but if you don’t put yourself in position where you have the chance to be lucky you don’t even have reason to hope. If you want to play slots for a living focus on slots with big jackpot possibilities.
Progressive Jackpots
The only way to truly play slots with an edge over the house is to play a progressive jackpot slot machine where the top prize has grown so high that it overcomes the edge. The problem with this is the same as I discussed earlier. If you don’t know the house edge you can’t determine how high the progressive jackpot has to climb before it makes the play profitable.
If you don’t know the house edge, simply play the slots that have the highest jackpots. Most casinos, both online and off, have at least one slots game with a jackpot over $1,000,000.
If you can’t find one with a jackpot over $1 million, look for the highest one you can find. A $500,000 jackpot win might not set you up financially for life, but it’s enough to help out quite a bit.
Conclusion
Playing slots for a living is a dream of many gamblers. But the truth is that it’s almost impossible to succeed. The house edge locks in a long term profit for the casinos, so very few people win.
You can use the tips and strategies on this page to give yourself the best chance to overcome the house edge, but if you want to gamble for a living your best bet is to stop playing slots and pick a different game.