The half-full charter bus chugs out of Gateway Center at 6:45 a.m., collecting another 10 sleepy-eyed passengers in Cranberry who join the others with purses and wallets flush with $10 and $20 bills.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette
	Martha Ferchak, of McKeesport, smiles as the bars line up for a win on a slot machine at Greektown Casino in Detroit earlier this month. Ferchak traveled by bus from Pittsburgh for the one-day gambling excursion.

They're headed to a downtown farther west, one that has something Pittsburgh lacks -- for now. They're on a one-day, 560-mile, 17-hour marathon run by Debolt Unlimited Travel several times weekly to the Greektown Casino in Detroit.

It sounds grueling, but everyone aboard is a willing participant, most of them talking about a cheap getaway to indulge a pastime that's still unavailable within Pennsylvania's borders. They don't look so different from those still waking up in Pittsburgh; there's a good number of retirees, a few more women than men, about two-thirds white, a mix of job backgrounds.

The casino industry portrays this cross-section of middle America as the people it thrives on, but the group of pairs and singles with their water bottles and pillows is short on the high-rollers and hipsters who give a dash of glamor to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J. High-rollers and hipsters don't take bus trips.

Also absent, apparently, are the addicts whom gambling critics point to as Exhibit A of what's wrong with Pennsylvania's plan to take in at least $1 billion annually from slot machine tax revenue within a couple of years.

No one on the bus admits to being a compulsive gambler. No one acknowledges their mortgage payment depends on the outcome of a "Wheel of Fortune" slot spin. Addicts don't plan ahead for trips like this.

In the front of the bus, a young, blackjack-loving college educator from the North Side sits beside her father, who will split from her for the slots upon arrival. A 68-year-old widow is farther back, traveling on her first casino pilgrimage out of curiosity.

Around and behind them are married couples, sisters-in-law, housemates. All the way in the back are three bachelors, 50s and up, a pair of Georges and an Angelo. They don't know one another but strike up conversations about their wagering as the hills flatten and the Debolt bus builds speed on the Ohio Turnpike.

"Slots, percentage-wise, are the worst bet. You're not going to beat them," said Angelo DeCaria, a retired carpenter from Ellwood City who is lured instead by Greektown's $10-per-hand blackjack tables.

But Martha Ferchak across from him, a talkative, thrice-divorced McKeesport resident, tells DeCaria her secrets to success: "You don't stay at one machine for long, and you get on the quarter machines. Nickel machines? Forget about it. ... That's a waste."

Or so goes the plan. She was among those who confessed on the way home to losing money. Others such as DeCaria said they broke even. And a few said they made a nice little profit, including video poker player Renee Robinson, 34, a single mother from Shadyside enjoying a day off from work. She hit twice for $500 by lining up four deuces on her machine.

"Oooo, it's hot right now, I don't want to quit," the sleek federal government employee would say when extracting a winning ticket in midafternoon, after an hour pushing buttons on the same machine.

If you tallied all their money, the pockets of the three dozen Western Pennsylvanians should have returned about 5 percent to 10 percent lighter in darkness than at dawn. That's the kind of take on which the casino industry operates. It aims to tempt, reward and entertain people just enough to keep them coming back.

Who's betting?
The idea will be the same in Pennsylvania once slot machines are permitted next year at the Meadows in Washington County and other racetracks. By 2006 or '07, slots should be available at a parlor in Downtown Pittsburgh or just across the river from it. You might also play by then at a new Western Pennsylvania track, or at Nemacolin Woodlands or Seven Springs resorts, depending on how the 14 licenses in the state are distributed.

To make the state's plan for property tax relief and economic development work as intended by Gov. Ed Rendell and legislative proponents, slots patrons will have to lose $3 billion a year in Pennsylvania. That's about $340 per adult resident, although the majority of Pennsylvanians won't play at all. Their reluctance will have to be made up by even more spending from slot-loving Pennsylvanians and out-of-state residents.

The casino industry keeps plenty of information about who those slots players are. Players provide details of their backgrounds when signing up for cards they put into the machines each time they play. The cards record their playing activity and, when they play enough, they receive perks such as free meals or gifts. That builds customer loyalty.

But casinos consider the details of their players' lives proprietary. Harrah's puts out more public information about casino visitors than anyone in the industry, but it doesn't divulge much about slots devotees.

The company's annual survey report, "Profile of the American Casino Gambler," says the more money people have, the more likely they are to visit a casino, and that they also have more savings than nongamblers. They are more likely to frequent casinos in the 51 through 65 age group than any other.

The report states that the 51 million Americans who visited a casino last year preferred slots to other types of gaming among every demographic group. Eighty-one percent of women prefer them, compared with 67 percent of men. The machines are preferred by 78 percent of those over 65, and 69 percent of those ages 21 through 35.

Whereas table games dominated the industry when Nevada was the only place with legal casinos, slots now rule everywhere. They generate more than half of the gambling revenue at the gleaming Las Vegas Strip palaces, three-fourths of it in Atlantic City, and 90 percent at Indian tribal casinos in California and elsewhere.

The absence of table games from Pennsylvania will leave out of the mix here some of the more affluent, more educated individuals who like the strategy involved in card games such as blackjack. It will leave out some couples in which the wife likes slots and the husband enjoys craps. And it will leave out some of the young men drawn to poker games by their new popularity on television.

"For table games players, there will be some crossover [to slots], but a table game player is not going to stop going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City" because of the local availability of machines, said Paul Girvan, managing director of The Innovation Group, a consulting firm that helped frame the Pennsylvania legislation.

Still, that leaves plenty of slots players for Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and other slots locations in the state. Many of the future customers are already playing slots at racetracks in West Virginia and Delaware, where no table games are permitted either.

"Eighty percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your people, which is maybe 10 percent of the overall population," said Jim Rafferty, vice president of marketing for Wheeling Island Racetrack and Gaming Center.

Analysts sometimes focus on a radius of about 50 miles from which casinos draw customers. In the hilly Tri-State region, where transportation isn't always easy, Rafferty said, visitors come in more of an "amoeba pattern" along major arteries stretching up to 75 miles out. Two hours is generally the maximum drive for Wheeling's players.

On average, customers leave behind about $50 per slots visit in West Virginia, Rafferty said. The average loss is typically higher at places that include table games, especially destination resorts such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where people stay overnight.

Too much of the casino's earnings, critics say, is from those who can't control themselves. The rate of compulsive gambling is often put in the 1 percent to 3 percent range, but the percentages typically increase with expansion of legalized gambling.

John Kindt, professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contends that the industry overstates its emphasis on people who have disposable income and who view gambling as leisure activity.

"You walk into these places, and half of the money is from people desperately trying to win money, to get something for nothing," he said. "The addicted gambler is going to be spending every penny that [he] can beg, borrow or steal ... and other problem gamblers will be spending money from the necessities of life."

Industry spokesmen say so much legal and illegal gambling is already available that compulsive gamblers are finding it, regardless of new slot machines. They insist they're just providing another option to people, who might like this new wagering more than spending money to play golf or attend a Pirates game.

That would include Walter and Ruth Reese, 75 and 72, of Economy, who prefer grazing in blue jeans and sneakers among the whirring, beeping rows of machines at Greektown or in West Virginia to their former pastimes such as hunting and fishing. They pump in about 15 cents each per turn on a machine, maintaining a sunny disposition throughout.

"We're very frugal. If we win, then we play bigger," said Ruth Reese, who gave up bingo because she couldn't compete with the women playing 30 cards at a time.

"That's not fun -- you have to pay attention too much," she said. "I myself like these new electronic games. They're so much fun to hit the bonus round and see what's going to happen."

She and Walter roamed from the Munsters machine to Bewitched to Monopoly to Stampede and back again, navigating the second-floor section of Greektown known as "Nickel Heaven" for its low-cost machines. She ended up $42 ahead and Walter, $20, when back on the bus at 6:15 p.m. The casino had given them $25 in gambling tokens just for coming and $5 for lunch, nearly equivalent to the $35 cost of the bus ride.

"I heard one lady in the casino say, 'I'm going home, I lost $400.' That would really upset me," said Ruth, who can't imagine such a risk.