Category: Advanced Strategy

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Why Would They Do That?

Bob Dancer

I’ve written recently about looking for certain slot machines to be reset — because some of them, not many, reset to conditions favorable to the player. A reader who calls himself jstewa22 wrote a number of posts saying this didn’t make any sense to him. Why would a machine reset in such a way? A very good question, to be sure. Today’s blog attempts to address this question.

First of all, keep in mind that gaming manufacturers (IGT, Aristocrat, Konami, etc.) are not owned or run by casinos. They are separate entities. Manufacturers need to walk a fine line between casinos and players. To be successful, the game must be profitable for the casinos and interesting to the players.

Also keep in mind that game designers aren’t, for the most part, also advantage players. The game designers might pick a reset number out of the blue — resetting to 12 sounds good, perhaps — and go with it. 

The game manufacturers possibly don’t know the return for the machine when reset at 12 (or any other number). They know the overall Return to Player (RTP) (typically between 85% and 95%) over time, but may not have the return broken out at every possible reset number. 

Advantage players, however, make it a point to know when a game is positive. We collect data and analyze what we find. When we do find a game that resets positively, we play until the game is no longer positive.

A famous example of this happened a few years ago when New Jersey allowed online gambling. I wasn’t involved in this bonanza, and might have some details wrong, but it went something like this.

On the game Ocean Magic, the game reset positively FOR EVERY PLAYER FOR EVERY DENOMINATION. So, a player signed up, deposited money, probably collected a signup bonus, and then played off all denominations and number of coins — of which there were lots. When that player had run through all of the possibilities, he was done gambling and ready to cash out — often thousands of dollars ahead.

That player would then do the same thing using the identities of as many people as he could talk into it. How much these people were paid to let the APs use their name and accounts was open to negotiation. But if a player could get dozens (or even dozens of dozens!) of additional names so Ocean Magic would reset for every one of them, think of the windfall!

It didn’t take long for the New Jersey Gaming Commission (or whatever the organization is called) to notice this pattern: players sign up, play all the Ocean Magic combinations, and then cash out. When the NJGC figured it out, they stopped it. They either got the Ocean Magic manufacturer to change the reset numbers or stopped offering the game.

I heard there were lawsuits against the players for “taking advantage” of the situation. As I understand it, players eventually got paid — but many were barred from playing online in New Jersey thereafter at one or more casinos. The players who spotted this did quite well for themselves until it was shut down. Today there are ways to play Ocean Magic with an advantage, but not when the game is originally reset.

How could this happen? I’m not really sure, but I am sure it did happen. Somebody somewhere didn’t dot all the i’s and cross all of the t’s. This was another case of “the early bird gets the worm.” The early discoverers made out like bandits. The rest of us just heard about it after it was no longer profitable.

While I know of four different games that are positive at reset, at least some of the time, you’ll never see me identify which games those are. The reason is simple. I assume some number of my readers are casino employees. If I told them which games are beatable in this way, you can bet that the opportunity would dry up essentially immediately. Casinos would demand that manufacturers fix this problem — or the casino would no longer offer the game. And since a game that casinos won’t buy (or lease) is no good at all to a manufacturer, the manufacturers will comply with the casinos’ wishes.

Even if the knowledgeable player can figure out how to make thousands of dollars when these particular games are reset, resets don’t happen very often, and the games are still wildly profitable to the casinos.

Consider the opposite side of this: One game that definitely is NOT beatable at reset is Buffalo Power Pay. When this game is reset, all of the betting options have the Major at 30 and the Mega at 50. When the numbers are at this level, the game returns 80% or so. It takes a while for the Major and Mega to be built up so it’s profitable for to the players.

But at some major casinos in Las Vegas, these games are reset by the casinos several times a week! This is equivalent to letting the players build up progressives, and then the casino confiscates the money that the players built up. I’ve asked Bob Nersessian about this, and his belief is that it is patently illegal to do this. And casinos are doing it time and time again.

A player who complained about this to the casino would thereby identify himself as a player who paid attention to such numbers — and, for the most part, casinos don’t appreciate such players. The player who complained would be, in effect, outing himself as a player the casino wishes to kick out. Because of this, players do not complain about this to the casinos.

There’s another way for games to reset positively — and that is for the new starting number to be selected at random! Sometimes it’s positive for the player. Usually not. But it does happen from time to time. On these games, just playing regularly, players have noticed the reset number — and sometimes it is positive after the bonus round is played. Sharp players are alert to this!

I’m not sure my explanation will satisfy jstewa22. After all, the explanation is basically “shit happens on occasion, but alert players can take advantage of this.” 

I think jstewa22 was thinking that casinos and/or manufacturers were INTENTIONALLY doing this, and that simply didn’t make sense to him. As well it shouldn’t. These organizations are in the business of making money off of players — not supporting APs. I’m certain casinos and manufacturers are definitely NOT doing this on purpose. But there are a lot of moving parts and a lot of decision makers, and sometimes somebody somehow someway drops the ball.

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How Lucky Was It?

Bob Dancer

Last week I wrote about completing a royal flush cycle (one or more royals in each suit) within one trip. I was very lucky, to be sure, but just how lucky?

I have a hard time calculating how lucky something was after the fact. You can massage the numbers and come up with all sorts of probabilities. There is not one absolutely correct answer that everybody can agree on.

Let’s start with the 11-day trip. I used all of it, hitting the club royal on my last day there. Most players never have an 11-day out-of-town casino trip in their entire career! I’ve had 14-day trips to Cherokee. I would have been just as delighted to complete the cycle on one of those trips. But I never did.

It’s not the length of the trip, of course, that determines your chances, but rather the number of hands played. Near as I can tell, I played about 62,000 video poker hands. I know how many points I earned during the trip, but some of my play was on slots. I record my points earned each day, but not how that number of points is broken down between slots and video poker.

I know I’m going to be using the word “cycle” in a different way now, but a “royal cycle” is the number of hands, on average, to hit a royal flush in a particular game. In Jacks or Better the number is right around 40,000, and that’s the commonly used number for video poker royal cycles. But NSU has a longer cycle, 43,456 hands, because you play hands differently in this game.

Calling 62,000 hands 1.4 royal cycles is as close as I can get. The 43,456 number is fairly precise (I could tell you that number is 43,456.27, which would be more precise, but hardly more useful), while the 62,000 number is an educated guesstimate. Using the Binomial Theorem, connecting on exactly four royals in 1.4 cycles happens about 4% of the time, and connecting on four or more royals in 1.4 cycles happens about 5.6% of the time.

If I connect on exactly four royals, all four suits will be present only about 9% of the time. Were I fortunate enough to have connected on five-or-more royals (I wish!), it would have been easier to have all four suits represented. Not a lock, of course, but easier.

Now what do we do with the club royal being dealt? The “dealt-ness” of that royal was overkill. I would have also completed the cycle even if I had needed to draw one or more cards to get the club royal. 

But the royal being dealt allows me to jack up my numbers when I tell people how rare this was. (It’s not something I normally do, but I’m discussing it here because there are always “How rare was it anyway?” questions.)

The dealt royal arrives approximately every 650,000 hands. But since at the time it hit, I needed the royal in clubs to complete the cycle, those only come around one-quarter as often — or about every 2,600,000 hands. 

All these things had to happen on the same trip — namely playing 62,000 hands, collecting at least four royals, having every suit being accounted for in those four or more royals, and (this one is optional), one of these had to be dealt. To determine how likely all of this is, you need to multiply all of these probabilities together. I’ll let others do it, because I’m not at all convinced that figuring out how likely something was to happen — after you know it did happen — is a meaningful exercise at all.

There’s more on this trip. The deuces cycle in this game is about 5,356 hands. In 62,000 hands you have 11.6 of these cycles. I collected 12 sets of deuces — which is essentially spot on given the imprecision of the 62,000 number. The thing is, one of those sets of deuces was dealt. 

Being dealt a specific quad happens every 54,167 hands, on average — so in 62,000 hands “it figures” I would have collected one or more. Mathematically, even though 62,000 is larger than 54,167, I was still a slight underdog to hit exactly one set of dealt deuces on the trip, although I was a sizeable favorite to collect one or more.

What this has to do with anything is that on the same trip I was dealt a royal and dealt deuces! (I was also dealt four aces with a deuce, which is another rare event that is called a 5-of-a-kind for $400 in $5 NSU Deuces Wild and it’s the kind of hand that makes you wish you were playing a different game!) Being dealt a royal is rare enough. But also being dealt deuces is even more rare!

It was, to be sure, a trip to remember!

Sometimes casinos restrict players who have too much success. I’m hoping that’s not the case here.

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Pedaling Hard for the Cycle

Bob Dancer

In baseball, a player “goes for a cycle” if he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in one game. These don’t happen too often — just twice in the 2025 Major League Baseball season, for example. The more at bats a player has, the more likely he can get these four specific hits in a single game.

There is no direct analog in video poker, but several of us have called hitting royal flushes in each of the four suits in a single “trip,” to be a cycle. The word “trip” is somewhat open to interpretation. I accomplished my first one in a day, playing 10¢ Hundred Play 8-5 Bonus Poker some 25 years ago at the Silverton when they had a promotion where the player could earn a Rolex watch if he played some large number of points in a month. I don’t remember why I felt it necessary to do this in one day, but I played many hours and earned the Rolex and the cycle. I didn’t write about my cycle at the time because I felt doing it on Hundred Play was “unfair.” You do, after all, collect a royal every hour or two in that game, so collecting a lot of royals is not a major accomplishment.

In 2026, I had a chance to do it on a single-line game. Last week I wrote about braving the weather to reach Harrah’s Cherokee for an 11-day trip. Although I played some slots, my video poker game of choice was $5 NSU Deuces Wild. 

On day 2, I connected on a royal flush in diamonds. I usually do not take pictures of my royals, and I didn’t this time either. On day 3, however, I connected on a royal flush in spades — this time memorializing it with my iPhone camera. On day 5, I hit a royal flush in hearts and, for the first time, began thinking of completing the cycle. On my trips of this length, I usually connect on one or two royal flushes, so with six days left, I had a decent shot at collecting at least one additional one. 

Hitting a royal, though, is not the same as hitting a club royal. All royals on this game pay the same $20,000, no matter the suit, but I wouldn’t qualify for the cycle unless it was specifically in clubs. And even if I did, I didn’t have a picture of my diamond royal flush, so I would have no “proof.” I decided this wasn’t a problem. Even if I had a picture of the diamond royal flush, there would be no proof that I was the one who hit it and did so on this particular trip. If someone wanted to doubt what I claimed, there would be plenty of room, with or without a picture.

I thought about how far I would go to hit this royal. On a hand such as K♣ Q♣ A♠ 3♣ 6♠, for example, it’s about a 4¢ mistake for the $5 five-coin player to hold the suited KQ rather than throw everything away. Most NSU players ignore the penalty cards on this type of hand, I believe, and hold the KQ. Making this mistake would give me a 1-in-16,215 chance of getting the club royal and completing the cycle on this particular play. While it would only be a slim chance, it would still be bigger than the zero chance I would have if I tossed all five cards. Plus, if and when I do indeed hit the club royal, nobody is going to ask me what five cards were dealt to me on the hands that ended up being royals. 

I decided I didn’t want to change my strategy. If the royal comes while I’m playing correctly, great. If it doesn’t, so be it. But I wasn’t going to be making intentional misplays (even those worth very little) in order to accomplish this feat. What I would do, I decided, was play longer hours. Instead of my normal $150,000 coin-in per day, I would play $180,000. This wouldn’t be cheating at all, at least not to my mind.

It’s one thing, of course, to claim the high ground with an “I’d never do that” promise when it’s hypothetical. There are a number of different hands similar to the one I listed above — but they don’t happen very often. I did get a couple of these hands after I was down to only needing one more suited royal to complete the cycle, one in hearts and one in spades, but nothing in clubs. I wasn’t really tested as to whether I would fudge correct strategy to complete my goal.

Before a hand arose causing me to think about “being flexible” in my strategy, the machine took the decision out of my hands by dealing me a club royal. A dealt royal is a 1-in-650,000 hand event. A dealt royal in clubs is only ¼ as likely as that. But that’s what happened.

As it turned out, I accidentally left my iPhone in my hotel room that day, so I couldn’t take a picture of the hand. I asked the slot attendant if she could take a picture of it and text it to me. Well, no, personal cell phones weren’t allowed for employees when they were working. They used iPads at this casino to process jackpots, and to be sure the iPads have cameras, but it’s a limited Wi-Fi that they use which only allows internal communication within the company.

However, she could AirDrop the picture. I had heard of AirDrop before, but had never used it and wasn’t sure how it worked. But I was told that if I brought my phone within the five remaining hours of this lady’s shift, I could get the picture via AirDrop. I agreed. It didn’t occur to me at the time to leave the royal on the screen for a half-hour while I walked 15 minutes each way to my hotel room. They probably would have agreed to that, but I don’t know for sure.

But the AirDrop worked so I have the picture which I’m sharing here. The way you know the royal was dealt is that above each card it says “HELD.” If I had to draw one or more cards, there would be fewer than five “HELD” indications.

So, I ended up getting the cycle. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! Plus I am now tech savvy enough to use AirDrop!

In my career, I’ve had a number of “braggable” jackpots in casinos. Not that I needed another one, but this one was very welcome and very likely the last time I will ever complete a cycle in one trip! This was my first extended trip of 2026, and it starts off my year with a nice plus score.  

Often when someone experiences a rare hand, or combination of hands, the question of “Just how rare was this?” arises. That strikes me as a worthy topic for next week’s blog. After all, if I can’t get at least two blogs out of this, it couldn’t have been all that rare!

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Money in the Bank

Bob Dancer

Not long ago Bonnie and I invited a friend to join us for dinner at a casino restaurant. The friend, a woman in the same improv group in which I participate, was not a gambler. “Sandy” was a senior citizen and was retired. 

At one point, Bonnie and I told Sandy of a time I was playing in downtown Las Vegas and had gone through all of my cash on hand. I was playing a slot machine, in significant positive territory, and I didn’t want to walk away and leave the machine for others to capitalize on. So, I called Bonnie and asked her to get some cash and take Lyft to downtown (Bonnie no longer drives.) She agreed.

Sandy asked how much we were talking about. 

I didn’t remember for sure, but I told her it was probably $10,000. It was very likely more than enough, but if she was going to make the trip, we wanted to make sure we didn’t run out again.

Sandy remarked that this was way too large of an amount not to be earning interest.

I conceded her point — but suggested that it was a different calculation for a professional gambler.

“How come?” she asked. “Interest given up is interest given up, no matter what your profession is.”

I changed the subject, but have been thinking about this. While Sandy wasn’t wrong, here is my thinking on the subject:

  1. Gamblers have bigger cash swings than most people. Sometimes the swings go against you, and you need a “cushion” available for when that happens. If you have lines of credit at every casino you frequent, this can serve as a sort of short-term cushion. While I have lines of credit at a number of casinos, I regularly frequent casinos where this is not the case for me. So, I need a buffer.
  1. Gamblers for “large” stakes need bigger cushions than gamblers for smaller stakes. I’ve had some monthly negative scores in excess of $30,000 over the past few years. I need a way to cope with these swings. Overall, I’m a winning player, but not every week or month (or even, occasionally, year).
  1. Banks do not like large regular cash deposits and withdrawals from gamblers. Numerous gamblers have had banks terminate their accounts for such activity. I’m not sure why banks act this way, but they do. Perhaps they’re nervous about money laundering situations and don’t want to risk it.
  1. Even if banks did allow large cash deposits and withdrawals from gamblers, banks are not always near the casinos and not always open when the money is needed. Casinos are open 24 hours. Banks aren’t. 
  1. Sometimes casinos will lock up a machine for a few hours for a player. Sometimes they won’t. If a player has cash in a safety deposit box at a bank or casino near several other casinos, this can be used to fulfill cash needs for those casinos fairly quickly.
  1. If I did run out of cash, I have gambling friends I can count on to lend me short-term money. I very much try to avoid this because if I borrow, I have to be willing and able to lend money to others. While most gamblers to whom I have lent money have paid me back reasonably promptly, there have been exceptions. I would rather not open this door.
  1. I don’t know Sandy’s exact financial circumstances, but I suspect she is living closer to the edge than I am. She needs to make every penny count, so to speak, and to earn them while she can. So, she has developed rules of thumb that serve her well for this purpose. A good rule for most people is to keep your money working for you and don’t leave money uninvested.

While I don’t consider myself wealthy, I have enough money to comfortably gamble for considerable stakes without threatening my lifestyle or retirement status. So, I can afford to keep more cash around than many other people can. Very little of that is at home (for safety reasons). Most is spread out in safety deposit boxes in casinos I frequent.

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Found It!

Bob Dancer

A few weeks ago, I wrote that in the hours shortly after New Year’s Eve midnight I was cruising downtown Las Vegas looking for slot attendants resetting machines. Due to the W-2G threshold changing from $1,200 to $2,000 effective January 1, most machines needed to be reset to make them lock up at $2,000 rather than $1,200. My search on January 1 was unsuccessful, as I reported.

One of my readers, Mike, suggested I was off base. The jackpot meters have nothing to do with resets. Well, yes and no. The meters are unrelated to each other, to be sure, but some games need to be reset whenever such a change is made — and a few are positive when this happens. 

Most games, of course, don’t reset at positive levels. With Buffalo Link, for example, the meters reset to a value of 100. At this level, the game returns about 80% and only players oblivious to the meters will play. (There are a lot of such players.) But there are definitely at least two games that reset positively.

On January 17, I found one! Or rather, I found a circular bank of four slot machines which had all been reset. Not immediately before I got there, but not too long before. Maybe a day or two? I can’t be sure.

How do I figure? There were four identical machines with perhaps 40 different combinations of denominations and number of coins required. You could play it for as little as 50¢ per spin — to as much as $50. 

The $50-per-spin games are pretty formidable. Although the player definitely becomes the favorite at the level these meters were at, these are gambling games with considerable variance. Losing more than $10,000 playing a positive game of this size isn’t that uncommon. The vast majority of players who frequent this casino are not in position to play games requiring such bankrolls. The smaller games on these machines, where anywhere between 50¢ and $20 was required to play each hand, had all been played and the meters were no longer attractive. Perhaps by one person who made a day of it. Or perhaps by several people.

But among the four machines, there were five playable games — three for $30, one for $40, and one for $50. I had some money on me, but quite a bit less than $10,000. There was no guarantee I had enough to play one game — let alone all five. Bonnie, however, was with me because we had gone out to dinner together previously using casino comps. As is often the case in such situations, we checked some machines before we went home. If I ran out of money, Bonnie could sit at the machine while I went where I needed to go to get some. We would make sure the machine displayed an unattractive meter amount while Bonnie quietly sat in front of it so anybody walking by would have no reason to challenge her for the chair. I told her about this possibility before we started, and she was fine with it. She was actually pretty excited about us making some “big money.” Regardless of whether the results would be plus or minus, we don’t split gambling results, and this would all be my money we were dealing with. But she’s my biggest fan. Plus, she gets to experience hitting big jackpots with no financial risk to her at all.

When I started playing, I didn’t know there were other positive games on the other three machines because they were occupied. I loaded the first machine with $2,000 before we started. Playing for $30 per pull, it took longer to insert the 20 Benjamins into this machine than it did afterwards to hit a jackpot of $3,700. It took 20 minutes to be paid. I would have shifted over to one of the other machines while I waited, except all three were being played by friends of each other — for either 50¢ or $1. When I hit the jackpot, the players on the other three machines scurried over to take look. They were excited because playing for low stakes, they rarely hit jackpots. One finally saw that I was playing $30 a hand — and even asked me if I knew I was playing for that much! I told her I knew.

Just as we were finished with our first game, (it was the only good one on that machine), one of the other machines opened up. I had Bonnie hold the current machine, without playing, while I checked all the games on the recently vacated machine. Had there been good games on it, I would have had Bonnie hold that chair while I finished off on the machine we were playing. When the third machine opened up, and I found two suitable games, Bonnie sat there until I was available — which came about rather quickly because I hit a jackpot for $2,100 and it was going to take awhile to be paid.

Over the next three hours, we took down all five games — and received a large number of W-2Gs along the way. We ended up ahead a few thousand dollars — but nothing major. It was a decent result — but nowhere near what it could have been. I figure that where we started on those five games, our average expected win for the five was more than $15,000. We got nowhere near that, but I’m still glad we checked those machines that day. Plus, we put thousands of points on both Bonnie’s card and mine and will likely result in bigger mailers in the not-so-distant future.

How am I so sure that these machines were reset only a day or so before I got there? Well, I’m not 100% sure. But close to that.

Consider this: In the previous three months, I have checked those same four machines several dozen times — and have found plays for $20 or higher twice. This time I found five such plays all at once. I figure these games were just too big for casual players and so they remained on the machines. At this casino, the larger denominations don’t get much play.

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Atlantic City Adventure

Bob Dancer

I’ve been to Atlantic City on fewer than 10 occasions. I’ve taught classes at three or four different casinos there and have been there for one or two Seven Stars events. As a player, though, I haven’t played there much. I’ve found Las Vegas, where I live, has better games for me. So why travel 2,500 miles to play lesser games?

That changed in November of 2025. Based on our play in Cherokee, I suppose, Bonnie and I received significant play-up mailers from Atlantic City. A play-up promotion is one where if you play a certain number of points, you receive certain benefits. While we received different offers, I think mine was to play 10,000 Tier Credits and receive $1,000 in free play — repeatable up to 10 times in the month. Plus rooms, food, and some extra Reward Credits.

When we first got the mailers, it was hard to judge whether it would be a good deal or not. I didn’t know what machines were currently available. I didn’t know if they had Next Day Bounce Back (NDB), and if so, at what rate. Did they have any NDB multiplier days? I also didn’t know if they were having any Reward Credit or Tier Credit multipliers. The offer was for any time during the month, and so if we could double up on other promotions, so much the better. To max out the promotion, we’d have to play $2 million coin-in. Since we wanted to do it in three or four days, this meant $25 video poker.

Jimmy Jazz wrote about the promotion and figured it out based on 9/6 Jacks or Better (JoB) — a 99.54% game which requires $25 coin-in to earn one Tier Credit. He concluded that it wasn’t a worthwhile play on those machines. A friend did the same promotion at Caesars Atlantic City a few months before Bonnie and I did and it turns out they have $25 9/6 Double Double Bonus (DDB), a 98.98% game that requires only $10 coin-in to earn a Tier Credit. That game allows us to do the promotion in 40% as much time as on 9/6 JoB. Before the play-up money was received, playing $2 million on 9/6 DDB cost considerably less than playing $5 million on 9/6 JoB. The value of the play-up was more than the cost of earning it. DDB does come with bigger W-2Gs, which was not a factor for me, but may well have been one for Jimmy Jazz. He lives in Michigan and they have a very different state income tax situation than I face in Nevada.

So, we signed up for the promo — went there — and lost a considerable amount. We “forgot” to hit four aces (with or without a kicker) and neither did a royal flush appear on the machines we were playing. We had the edge, I believe, but this time we ended up with a very expensive result. That’s pretty much the nature of DDB. If you don’t hit the big hands this time, you won’t like your score. Still, if they offered us the same promotion again, I’d try it again. 

Based on our play in November, we started to receive mailers for January and February. We each receive $1,000 in weekly free play — plus a free hotel room and more food than we could possibly eat — but of course that free play is only available if we go to Atlantic City. Getting $4,000 free play a month apiece might sound like a lot — but it doesn’t come close to what we lost in November. Still, it’s too much to pass up. As is true on the calendar, the free play week begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday — so if we’re there on the weekend, we can pick up two weeks of free play per trip. It’s a five-hour flight from Las Vegas to either Philadelphia or Newark, which for me is not a lot of fun. If you’re driving, Philadelphia is one hour away from Atlantic City, while Newark is two hours away — but flying into Newark is considerably cheaper than flying into Philadelphia.

On my first such trip there in January, we arrived in Newark at about 6 p.m. on a Saturday — and the trip home left Newark at 7:30 p.m. Sunday. After renting a car I arrived at the casino at about 9 p.m. Saturday night, which was plenty early enough to collect the free play before midnight. Future trips, though, will be lengthier. Weather can delay flights at this time of year and conceivably there could be traffic issues. Getting to the casino too late loses $2,000 in free play. That’s too much to risk cutting it close. If I plan to arrive on Friday night or Saturday morning, that mitigates most of the risk.

Plus, I don’t want to “hit and run,” meaning playing just the minimum amount to pick up the free play and then leaving. (Maybe sometimes, but not all the time.) Casinos offer the free play in order to get you to come in and play — and if you don’t play, some casinos cut you off. My mailers in March and thereafter will likely be larger if I play after picking up the free play. Since there are three separate casinos in Atlantic City that are all connected to this program — Caesars, Harrah’s, and Tropicana — it makes sense for me to walk around all three of them and see what I can find to play. 

These three casinos are not next door to each other. I’ll have a car, so traveling among them is not a big issue, and there is also a free shuttle that runs in a continuous loop among the three casinos. For our trip in November, we didn’t have a car, and we learned it can be a fairly lengthy wait before the next shuttle comes.

Since our normal practice is to spend up to two weeks at a time in Cherokee, it makes sense for us to bookend our Cherokee trips with Atlantic City visits. While these two cities are about 650 miles apart from each other, they are both in the Eastern time zone — three hours earlier than Las Vegas. As I write this, I haven’t yet made the 2½-week trip from Las Vegas to Atlantic City to Cherokee to Atlantic City to Las Vegas — but one is scheduled soon. If we’re still getting Atlantic City mailers in March and beyond, we’ll do this trip more than once.

This makes for a long and intense gambling experience — which is definitely not for everybody. I thought such trips would be over for us because of the tax situation, but I’m glad we found a way to continue.

Author’s note: After I wrote this, I scheduled a trip starting on Saturday, January 24, to do the Newark to Atlantic City to Newark to Cherokee to Newark to Atlantic City to Las Vegas trip I mentioned above. Beginning January 25, there was a huge snowstorm affecting many parts of the country. Because flights were cancelled and I still wanted to get to all of those locations, I ended up with a much longer journey than I had planned. I’ll write about it in a few weeks.

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I Thought About It

Bob Dancer

When you list the financial reasons to intelligently gamble at video poker, it starts with the return on the game itself and the slot club. Promotions get added in, and it’s not too long before you consider mailers.

Mailers aren’t guaranteed, and if a casino decides to reduce or eliminate your mailers, you have no recourse. From the casinos point of view, mailers are a way to encourage you to come and play again — and hopefully lose. From the player’s point of view, mailers are a reward for past play.

If you quit playing, the mailers will stop. If you stiff the casino, meaning you go and pick up goodies but don’t play, the mailers will stop. 

In my case, as regular readers know, I was planning on giving up gambling forever because of the new tax bill. It was only a matter of time before all my mailers disappeared. Still, collecting a few of them before they were cut off seemed to be a potentially lucrative approach. So how would I go about it?

My biggest mailers come from Harrah’s Cherokee, where Bonnie and I make 4-or-5-times-a-year visits. Typically, we stay 10 or 12 days and play considerably more than $1 million in coin-in split between video poker and slots. We get sizeable mailers for doing this — which figures.

Picking up the mailers isn’t easy. It’s a four-hour flight to either Atlanta (three driving hours away from Cherokee) or Ashville (one driving hour away but far fewer flights). Would I be better off coming in and staying a few days without playing, or do a quick hit-and-run and not stay there? Renting a car and a hotel room elsewhere are relatively small costs compared to the size of the mailers.

While the casino offers free rooms, it does so with the expectation that you’ll play. If I don’t play, possibly they’ll charge me for the room — at not-so-friendly prices. To get around that, perhaps it makes sense to book a room somewhere else.

I considered flying in on the last day of a mailer time period, arriving at the casino at 10 p.m. and picking up the expiring mailer money and sticking around for the new mailer time period that begins at midnight. And then leaving.

I could do that, I suppose, but the mailers will be coming in wintertime, and Cherokee is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Weather can play havoc with airline schedules. A plane delay could remove my chance of getting there before the free play period ends.

I usually get free food “on my card.” Probably I could redeem that while I’m there, but I’m not sure. While I possibly wouldn’t check into the hotel and leave a credit card, I’ve been there enough that there’s one of my credit card numbers “on file.” How much they would charge me, if at all, for eating on the comp without playing is an unknown,

I have a line of credit at that casino. At no time did I consider taking out a marker for, say, $50,000 and then not repaying it. Markers are negotiable instruments. Not only would the casino collect, but my credit score would take a significant hit. No thanks.

Plus (in the hypothetical world where I would be quitting gambling), there’s always a chance that the law would be changed, and I’d want to go back there in the future. They would remember if I had significantly stiffed them before.  

I didn’t reach any conclusions as to what I would do. I have thought about it, but am still not sure what I would do.

I suspect I would do nothing of the kind of things I’ve been discussing here. At the end of the day, my integrity is important to me. Hustling an extra few thousand dollars out of a casino on my way out the door doesn’t feel right to me. I might get away with it, but if I felt bad about doing it, what’s the point?

I understand that not everybody would reach this same conclusion. What would you do?

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Searching for a Reset

Bob Dancer

As part of the Big Beautiful Bill which passed Congress and then signed by the president in July of 2025, the W-2G rules changed effective January 1, 2026. The threshold used to be $1,200 and now it’s $2,000. Most slot and video poker players believe that $2,000 isn’t nearly high enough, but that’s a decision for another Congress to address.

On December 31 there was one set of rules for W-2Gs. On January 1 there was another. The machines had to be reset to lock up at $2,000 instead of $1,200 as soon as possible after the clock on New Year’s Eve struck midnight.

The thing is, this has to be done manually, machine by machine on at least some machines. While most slot machines at reset start off with meter numbers that are much too low to be of interest to advantage players, that’s not always the case. Some games reset in positive territory — meaning that if you’re the first knowledgeable player on such a machine when it gets turned back on — you usually have several games where you have the advantage. 

Often these games will have four or more denominations, and five or more “number of coins” settings for each denomination. Some games have way more than this. There are games where you will have 50 different games, all in positive mode, whenever the machine is reset. This could easily mean $10,000 or more in EV if you have the bankroll to play all of the games, including the ones at $50 a hand or more. 

You aren’t guaranteed to win on these — it is gambling, after all, with variance — but the odds are in your favor. 

So, shortly after midnight (early New Years Day), I planned to be in a major casino looking for slot techs making adjustments to machines. On most machines, resetting the machines won’t create an exploitable situation, but on a few machines they will. I had a list of machines that I thought might qualify — but I’m sure there were others that I didn’t know about.

Once I found a team of slot techs working on games that I thought would turn positive at reset, it would simply be a matter of sitting down and waiting until they finished — and then being the first player there. 

Most players were not aware of this opportunity, but surely some were. The thing is, I believe there were relatively few pros “in on” this deal — and lots of casinos to cover. I figured if I picked a casino with a number of the machines I liked, my chances were pretty good to get one or more of the lucrative resets. 

If at 1 a.m. somebody hit a jackpot for, say, $1,500, and the machines had not been reset yet, the machine would lock up. When an attendant game, they would just pay off the jackpot without issuing a W-2G. There are relatively few jackpots higher than $1,199 and less than $2,000, so not too many players would be inconvenienced by this. And the ones that were would be delighted to not get a tax form with their money.

And there is always a problem with staffing. When are the slot techs scheduled to work? And how many of them partied for New Years Eve? Maybe the casino would want to wait until 8 a.m. or so to start. If these slot techs were making changes to hundreds of machines, the casino certainly would want them to be at their best.

Plus, in the early hours of January 1, casinos are very busy with more-than-the-usual-number-of-inebriated players looking to get lucky. Casinos very well might not want to shut down any machines in order to maximize their profits from this party-like atmosphere.

I decided to go downtown at about 3 a.m. There are lots of casinos within walking distance which would all be affected by the new tax bill. While I don’t have player cards at all of them, if I can get on a reset machine I’ll happily play without a card. Better with a card, of course, because slot club points and mailers are valuable, but a reset machine could potentially be worth more than $10,000 and I wasn’t going to be a stickler about whether I got every slot club point.

On December 31, Bonnie and I went to a quiet NYE shindig at a nearby residence. I had one glass of wine starting about 7 p.m. and cut myself off so I’d be at my best later. We told the hosts we were going to leave at 9 p.m., no matter what state the party was in, and we did. I was in bed by 9:30 — setting my alarm for 2 a.m.

I got up with the alarm, did my morning routine, and was on the road by 2:40. It’s about 15 minutes from our house to the downtown casinos — so I was right on time with my plan.

I started at Circa because that’s the downtown casino with the most suitable slots. I walked around five casinos over the next half hour looking for working slot techs. Nothing! There were relatively few customers at this time of morning, and no slot techs changing machines that I could see.

I was surprised. I thought I had outsmarted most other players — but it turned out that whatever my calculations were, they were wrong. Oh well. Not the first time.

While I was out and about, I checked around for some machines that were in winning position. After all, a whole mess of players went through in the past few hours, and a lot were out-of-towners who were clueless about winning at slots. Maybe they left something!

I found a number of small plays and one “sorta big” play requiring a $10-per-spin input. I loaded it with $1,000 and began to play. I hit three or four $500+ intermediate jackpots, including a final one of $1,100. 

The game ended up showing $3,400 in credits which included the $1,100 final win — and the machine locked up! The attendant came and asked for ID. I told her I didn’t hit any jackpot — the $3,400 was accumulated credits. She “corrected” me, telling me that it was a $3,400 jackpot. I quietly told her that the last score was “only” $1,100 and that there was no taxable event.

She was unsure and said she’d have to talk to her supervisor. She took my player card and told me she’d be back. Five minutes later she correctly paid me the $3,400 that I was owed. 

At first, I thought the machine had been reset incorrectly and instead of the W-2G amount being set for $2,000 they set the machine lockup amount when you tried to cash out for that amount. Other casinos have similar features. I hadn’t experienced it at this casino before. Maybe this was a long-standing policy there. 

Although I did make $2,400 on this particular play, and a bit more on other plays, I didn’t find the reset opportunity I had hoped to get. I had planned my work, worked my plan, and it all came to naught. This happens sometimes.

Over the next few days, I continued to look for working slot tech teams. The change didn’t have to be done in the wee hours of the new year, and it would be just as valuable to me on January 2 or 3 if I could be there when it happened. But no. I failed to find any.

I didn’t have to tell you about this “failure.’ You would have never known had I not written about it. But the winning process, for me anyway, has included a number of these one-of-a-kind situations. When I find one, I try to figure out the best way to exploit it. This one didn’t pan out, but maybe the next one will.

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Before New Year’s Eve

Bob Dancer

Three weeks ago, I addressed end-of-year considerations about emptying your slot club accounts — or not. Today I’m addressing a different, albeit related, subject. And that subject is reaching a specific tier level.

Some casino slot clubs have tier levels — silver, gold, platinum, or whatever. Often these are annual awards earned January 1 through December 31, although they don’t have to be. 

I was prompted to look at this for personal reasons relating to Caesars Rewards. As I wrote this, I was planning one last trip to Harrah’s Cherokee in order to reach some not-well-known goals — and I needed to plan accordingly. It may well be my last trip to Cherokee, ever. The planning I’m doing may be applicable to some of my readers. Some of this is speculation because as I write this, I haven’t received the December mailer yet.

If you play at a Harrah’s or Caesars property, you know that Seven Stars is the highest tier level and that level requires 150,000 Tier Credits (TCs) per year. For slot and video poker players, these TCs are earned in one of three ways: playing the machines, receiving bonuses for reaching predetermined daily levels, and TC multipliers — which are promotions occurring periodically throughout the year. In the last few months of the year, TC multipliers are more common as players strive to reach the next tier.

Making it to Seven Stars is huge — with their $1,200 retreat, five $100 dinners, highly discounted cruises, and some other goodies. Ending the year with slightly less than 150,000 credits is a big mistake. But we’re played a lot of high stakes video poker at several Caesars properties, mostly Reno and Cherokee, and we’re far beyond the 150,000 level. For the past few years, we’ve reached this level before the end of February.

Most players don’t realize that you can earn quite a bit more than the 150,000 TCs required for Seven Stars, and get rewarded for doing so. For every 250,000 TCs earned, you get one Seven Stars Experience Credit (SSEC), which may be redeemed for a variety of things. For Bonnie and me, we redeem each of these SSECs for $450 in free play at either a Las Vegas or Cherokee property.

While the following numbers aren’t exact, they’ll give you an idea of how I went about my decision making — and may well be applicable to you in a similar situation. I planned a 10-day trip. At the start of the trip, Bonnie needed 90,000 TCs to reach the next SSEC and I needed 260,000 TCs. (Actually, I only needed 10,000 but I figured I could complete that and make it all the way through the next one as well.) There was one TC multiplier where you received 5x TCs up to 25,000 points. And I can comfortably play about $180,000 per day, split between Bonnie’s card and mine. At Cherokee, $180,000 played on video poker will result in 18,000 TCs. I play primarily video poker, but also some slots, which accrue TCs twice as fast.

For the TC multiplier, I don’t know if the bonus is 25,000 or only 20,000 and they count the 5,000 I’d earn as part of the 25,000. I’ve seen it both ways at various properties and sometimes the people at the booth don’t understand the difference and so can’t give precise answers. At Harrah’s Cherokee, they usually have one or more high level people at the booth, so I expect to get accurate answers there. But for planning purposes, I’ll assume the “worst case,” which is that I only receive 20,000 extra TCs. I don’t want to assume the best and possibly miss the next SSEC (and my $450 bonus) by 5,000 TCs.

For normal daily play there, earning 5,000 TCs ($50,000 coin-in) per day is pretty standard because doing that earns a 10,000 TC bonus. Here, though, Bonnie only needs 90,000 TCs and the multiplier day she’ll earn 35,000 (the 5,000 played, 20,000 multiplier bonus, and the daily 10,000 bonus). That will leave her needing “only” 55,000 other TCs to accumulate over nine days of play. So, I’ll play on her card 5,000 TCs for four days and skip playing on her card the rest of the trip.

On my card, ten days of 15,000 TCs (earning at least 5,000 daily with the 10,000 per day bonus), plus the 20,000 TC multiplier bonus means 170,000 out of the 260,000 needed. Earning an extra 8,000 TCs per day for the five days I’ll play on Bonnie’s card earns me an extra 40,000, and earning an extra 13,000 on the five days I don’t play on Bonnie’s card gives me an additional 65,000 TCs. This adds up to 285,000 — which is more than the 260,000 needed. Good. I can always play less.

They have Next Day Bounce Back (NDB)at Harrah’s Cherokee, and I think the current rate of free play is earned at 0.375%. I will try to earn my points by the ninth day. I don’t want to earn it for the 10th day I play because our plane leaves before the NDB is available for me to play. Playing $180,000 coin-in on a day when I’m not getting NDB costs about $675 in EV. Doing that to earn $450 in free play doesn’t make sense. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll have met my goals before the 10th day and so I won’t have to play at all that day. It’s also possible that playing $50,000 that last day and earning the 10,000 TC bonus will be required, but that’s only around -$165 in EV so it remains an option. Or, better, maybe $25,000 will be enough earning half the amounts as $50,000. That will only cost $80 in EV for missing out on NDB.

NDB on your card lasts for 30 days there, so if I were a local and planning to come back within a month, I could play right up to the last minute. But since I’m not planning on coming back, I sit out playing on the last day of my trip — other than picking up NDB from the day before and any other free play that might be available. If the mailer has weekly free play starting on Monday, for example, I might well plan my departure for a Monday.

While this trip actually ended the first week of December, and I have three additional weeks to earn the SSEC goals in Las Vegas, there is a Great Gift Wrap Up that ends December 14 where every Reward Credits earned throughout the year at any of the Caesars or Harrah’s properties counts towards gifts (or free play), I want all of my play done before that. 

My lesser play on Bonnie’s card compared to mine will mean she’ll receive lesser offers down the road from Cherokee than I will. But unless the tax law changes, we won’t be going there anymore so how big the offers are is irrelevant.

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I Might Be Losing It

Bob Dancer

My host at Circa called me up to invite me to a promotion in late November. I had actually been napping when she called (I had played graveyard the day before) and was a little fuzzy on the details she told me. I figured out that I’d have to play to earn tickets to a drawing — and while I do play at Circa, it’s mostly slots and I don’t play enough to have a real chance in drawings. 

I started to decline but she prompted that this one was really a good idea for me because only 50 or so people were being invited.  

She texted me a flyer announcing a drawing where 10 people would get $500 each. You could earn one drawing ticket for every 100 points you earned from Thursday noon to Saturday 2 p.m. If 50 people were invited and we all played the same, my EV for the drawing was $50. I didn’t study the text carefully. I would play some, but not a lot. 

I usually study rules carefully but this one was for a giveaway so small, I didn’t figure it was worth it. I couldn’t figure out why my host thought this was a good deal.

When I got there, I found out. They were also giving away a Ford F-150 Raptor truck! And for that, it didn’t matter how much you played — everybody got one ticket! The truck, including with big “Circa” stickers on both sides, was in the lobby of the drawing area. I had seen the truck displayed, but I figured I had no chance to win it, so I paid no attention. And now I had a 1-in-50 chance? Not sure how I got that chance, but here I was.

I’m not a truck guy and had no idea of what an F-150 sold for. I looked it up on my cell phone and learned they went for $85K each when new. I wondered how much they sold for if they had “Circa” logos on the sides? 

Would they offer a cash or free play option instead of the truck? I didn’t know. My host didn’t know. Probably not because it was now “used.”  But surely, I could sell it for $60,000 at least to somebody, couldn’t I? A 1-in-50 chance to get that much was worth $1,200 in EV. Now I understood why my host strongly encouraged me to be here.

They made a pretty big deal out of the drawing. There were only 48 contestants and two of them had two entries, because they had been runner-up in a previous drawing. When they called your name, you walked up to the stage down a big aisle they had set up to pick one of 50 small boxes. One of those boxes had a key fob in it.

They had already had the drawing for 10 $500 winners, and these were announced when you were called up to get your small box. When they called my name, they didn’t say I had won $500 — which was disappointing, but not surprising. I had played considerably more than my weekly average — but not really all that much.

Also surprising was when they called my name, they said I was one of the two people who had two entries! I had been runner-up for a previous Raptor drawing and wasn’t even aware of it!

How could I possibly not know of this? I don’t believe I even entered a previous Raptor drawing. I really must be losing it! Seriously, this doesn’t strike me as something I could forget.

Now I had two chances to get this truck. My EV just shot up to $2,400. When called the second time, I dutifully walked up and picked up my second box. 

Most of the entrants were from out of town. Some flew several friends and family members to witness their 1-in-50 chance. I thought I was doing Bonnie a favor by not inviting her. She’s a good sport and would have come if I had asked, but I was getting downtown at 9 a.m. and staying all day. I checked all three properties (Circa, Golden Gate, the D) twice, looking for games to play. And then Bonnie and I were hosting four family members to a Hugo’s Cellar “Thanksgiving Dinner” later that night because for Thanksgiving Day itself, we’d be in Cherokee.

Bonnie isn’t a slot player — although she’d definitely be willing to hit the buttons should I tell her which ones to hit. I have to watch her, though, because not infrequently she hits a button she shouldn’t and changes it to another game or denomination which isn’t such a good play. But it was going to be a long day and she had packing to arrange for our out-of-town trip, so I suggested she stay at home. Her sister and brother-in-law, invited to dinner, live only a mile from us and were very willing to bring Bonnie along with them. But had I known what a big deal this was, Bonnie would have been there with me.

This is the point in the blog where you’re expecting me to reveal that I actually won the truck. Well, I would if I did — but I didn’t. Some lady from out-of-town had picked the correct box and was quite happy about it. As she should have been!

To me, this story is about my legitimate concern regarding how this snuck up on me. Being on top of drawings and knowing what promotions are going on and how to succeed at them is something I’ve done for more than 30 years. And I’m really good at this part of my “job.” And I totally missed this one. As they said in the 95-year-old movie Little Caesar: “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

I’m planning on quitting gambling at the end of the year because of the new tax law. Maybe this was a sign I should quit now!