I would like to recommend that you read my fellow LVA writer's blog if you are interested in many facets of Vegas, casinos, and gambling in general. I am always pleasantly surprised by the wide variety of topics he discusses -- and I love the photos he includes. Someday I am going to learn how to put photos in my blog! 

His latest blog entry talks about the Venetian/Palazzo and I would like to add some details about the downgrades in the VP inventory. I had discussed this in my June 10th blog entry and have checked out the inventory in both casinos since then and can confirm that there are no 9/6 Jacks or better below the $10 level. In the high-limit slot salons at both casinos you can find single-line $10 games (that's $50 a hand for a max bet) and $10 machines in the multi-line format. And the game denominations go up from there. 

Watch out for the "tricky" $5 machines in the high-limit room at the Venetian. They fooled us with their 9/6 JoB paytable - until a friend told us to look at the downgrade of the royal flush payoff! We had started playing them until this friend clued us in. I probably would have had a heart attack if we had hit a royal and didn’t get the full $20,000 like we expected. 

Earlier today David wrote another entry, about the $100 rebate of losses offered by Station Casinos to new local players.   He suggested one way to play for this deal was to choose a quarter full-pay VP machine and play until you had $100 or more profit or quit when you had lost exactly $100. He said he really wasn’t sure what the optimal strategy would be. I’m not sure either, but I believe I have seen discussion on this subject in the past and some suggested it would be best to play a higher denomination machine (perhaps like a $5 slot machine or a more volatile VP game like DDB) to try to score a bigger jackpot win. They said that paytable EV was not as important here.   Perhaps some of our readers will chime in here with some comments on these strategies or other possible ones.

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