A version of this article first appeared about 10 years ago.
Regular Deuces Wild, played for quarters, returns $250 for four deuces. Double Deuces returns $500 for the same hand, but takes away elsewhere in the pay schedule. Loose Deuces returns $625 for that hand and Triple Deuces gives you $750. Each of these games can be found in Las Vegas.
How about Quadruple Deuces returning $1,000 for four deuces? Or even more? In 2007, this game existed accidentally for a few months at a large local casino in Las Vegas, but it could have happened anywhere. And while the base Deuces Wild game on which it was found wasn’t all that great, adding 3,000 coins to an every-4,400-hands event adds about 12% to the return. Apparently four players were able to exploit this and keep the information quiet for a couple of months. They certainly didn’t post it on one of the Internet bulletin boards as that would have killed the play in a day or less.
What happened was this (I might have the facts a little off as I am getting this secondhand): There were eight quarter games tied to a progressive. Six of these games had the progressive set normally, which means that it would be collected when the royal was hit. But two of the games had the progressive accidentally attached to the four deuces hand. Apparently, a slot tech got a little bit sloppy one day and nobody who worked for the casino caught it. So, the four deuces hand started at $1,000 and moved up from there.
Since these were ticket-in, ticket-out machines, winning the jackpot merely spit out a ticket and the players could keep playing, so long as the jackpot was below $1,200. And it usually remained at that level because four deuces is a fairly frequent hand with respect to having the progressive rise $200 or more. When the progressive did rise that high, which it did a few times, these players wouldn’t play. They hoped that one of the other machines would hit the royal so everything would look normal. And their luck held. No over-$1,200 set of deuces was hit on either machine.
The way the bubble burst was that someone “not in the know” was playing one of the two juicy machines and happened to hit the royal flush. The nerve of them! When they were only paid $1,000 instead of whatever the meter read, they understandably felt cheated and called it to the attention of the floor people. When it escalated to supervisors, it didn’t take long for the casino to realize what the error was. The two machines were shut down for a while and adjusted. Christmas was over!
I was told about this play after the fact. One of the four players who hit this hard was attending one of my free classes and told me about it. He had just finished reading my Million Dollar Video Poker book in which I write about taking advantage of a similar-yet-different casino mistake. He wanted to tell me that these errors were still happening out there — if you could find them.
He asked me if the casino could demand its money back because of the machine overpaying. While first making sure he realized that I wasn’t a lawyer and couldn’t speak authoritatively on the subject, I told him that I didn’t believe the casino could effectively take any civil or criminal action against him. If the casino could not show that he was in cahoots with the slot tech who made the improper settings, then the casino was stuck.
What the casino COULD do, however, was restrict him from the property if it so chose. Assuming these four players used their slot club cards while playing this game, it wouldn’t be difficult for the casino to check their records and determine who was playing these machines heavily over the past few months. Even if the players didn’t use their cards, they were surely caught on surveillance tape.
The casino could well decide that they didn’t want these players around anymore and that would be perfectly legal. Casinos in Nevada can restrict the play of anyone, so long as it’s not based on things such as race, gender, or national origin.
Of course while this was going on, the players couldn’t be sure how it would all turn out. They were regularly winning $2,000 a week or more apiece, week after week, and that’s big money for quarter video poker. Winning like that is EXCITING, especially since you don’t know how long it’s going to last.
I wasn’t there, but there had to be discussions about how to share time on the machines, how to keep it quiet from others, and how much they could play without the casino employees noticing that these same guys were playing the same machines EVERY DAY all day long. There are no unique best answers on how to do this and opinions vary widely.
However they decided to do it, it was impossible to predict when a casino employee would put two and two together, when other players might find out and demand a piece of the action, or when someone accidentally hit the wrong kind of jackpot at the wrong time. There would have been all KINDS of things to worry about.
Mistakes continue to happen in casinos. To exploit them, you first have to FIND them. Players who do a lot of scouting have the best chances to find these kinds of mistakes. Players who don’t scout are left with complaining that other people find these things.
I had this same experience at the now defunct Siena Casino in Reno, where a Deuces Wild progressive quarter machine was reset at $500 for four deuces instead of $250….which turned an unplayable 97% machine into a quite playable 101% machine, which became 101.7% by the time I hit quad deuces for $530.
I once played (about 10 years ago) a DDB machine at Slots of Fun that was turned off. I asked a floor person if he could plug it in and he did. I played for about ten minutes and got dealt Aces with a kicker. I collected the ticket and put another $20.00. Dealt me the same hand. Collected ticket and put in another $20. Dealt me the same hand. Then the floor supervisor came over and said I should not be playing this machine because it had a bad program and asked if I plugged it in. Told him slot attendant turn it on. He told me I should give him any tickets i had. I refused and walked out. I could have played that machine forever!
I wonder on the legal ramifications of just walking out with all those $500 tickets in your pocket. Next Thursday, July 20, Bob Nersesian will be on the podcast. This might be an interesting question for him to address.
Two questions:
1) If a $1,200+ deuces had been hit, would the player have been paid that amount? Or would the casino say it was a machine malfunction or something and not pay?
2) Did the person who hit the non-progressive royal eventually get the progressive money? Or just the $1,000?
Reasonable questions, Mark. I wasn’t there. Although I know who the slot director was at the time, I haven’t spoken to him in more than five years and we didn’t discuss this promotion.
But I will turn your question into one for Bob Nersesian on our show for next week. Thanx for the idea!
Re the slot ticket question: legally, a slot ticket is the property of the casino, so, technically, just like a casino chip, you can’t take it off the property–though many people do, of course. It is also both a receipt and a contract. You can argue that if a machine awards credits, those may or may not be valid (if a machine malfunctions), but once you cash out, you are simply trading those credits for a receipt, which the casino has to honor. It’s not any different from turning credits into coins on a coin-out machine. The contract aspect is that in return for your exchanging the machine credits for a piece of paper (rather than actual money), the casino agrees to exchange that piece of paper for cash.
Of course, this is Nevada we’re talking about, so all considerations of fairness, the law, and all that other nonsense are pretty much irrelevant. What the casinos want, the casinos get, including favorable tort rulings.
Regarding the tickets, there is no guarantee you would be able to cash them later. It would take little to no effort for the casino to make those tickets invalid.
What happened in cases like this in the days before tickets, when slot attendants hand paid because machine ran out of coins?
The more human interaction, the less likely these things are to last
This story reminds me of a article I read years ago about a situation where the slot technician set up a slot machine for Pilipino dollars instead of American currency. Apparently the dollar is valued at one tenth the value of American currency. It didn’t take long for people to figure out that for every hundred dollar US inserted into the machine, you could punch out a thousand dollar ticket voucher. I guess this went on for several days before management discover the problem. The casino losses were the better part of a million dollars.