This particular incident and conversation with a floor person happened at local casino in Las Vegas. I’m not going to identify the casino because I don’t know if what was told to me represents casino policy.
I was playing $2 Deuces Wild and connected on four deuces for a $2,000 hand pay. When the floor person, “Blanche,” came up she remarked that she was glad I finally hit something because it was slow and she didn’t particularly like just standing around.
I facetiously apologized for not hitting more taxables. Blanche responded in kind by remarking that yes, I should have been playing faster so it wouldn’t take me so long to hit deuces.
I told her that when I play faster I make more mistakes.
She told me that sometimes, now, the casino wouldn’t pay for mistakes. If a player held three aces, for example, and one of them became “unheld,” the casino would check the buttons and if everything seemed up to snuff would tell the player, “Sorry. It’s your own fault for playing so fast.”
This would be a change in policy. In the past, whenever I’ve made such a claim, the casino has always “made it right.” They look at the hand history, figure out what I should have been paid had I made the hold I said I did, and paid me the difference.
This is absolutely the fair thing to do if the machine actually malfunctioned. But there’s no doubt in my mind that sometimes it was indeed my fault. I hadn’t hit the button squarely and it was not the casino’s fault that the ace became unheld.
It’s easy to get angry at a casino for this change of procedure, but it’s also possible to slow down and make sure you’re not victimized by it. It requires a pause after you hit the hold buttons to make sure you hit the buttons correctly. This has the added benefit of giving you an extra second to make sure you found the best play. Slowing down a tick will probably lead to fewer “second best” holds.
Later that same day, I held a deuce and two fours. One of the fours unheld and my hold of deuce-four didn’t improve into a scoring hand. So I lost the $10 that 3-of-a-kind pays in this game.
I could have called over a floor person and asked for “my” $10. I would probably have been paid.
But if what Blanche said was true, it could well be that the casino would pay me this time and tell me that they were putting my name on a list of people that wouldn’t be paid for this type of thing in the future. It’s absolutely a guess as to whether the casino actually does things this way, but casinos that make a change in procedure frequently give players “one chance” while they learn the new way.
Had this been a $250 wild royal that I missed out on because of a dropped hold, I likely would have turned on my service light and ask to be paid. If I’m going to be put on a “no pay for dropped holds” list, I don’t want this to happen for a mere $10. For $250, I’ll risk it.
There are situations where you make a stand on principle. There are also times when practicality mandates looking at the whole picture before making a stand. To my mind, this was one of the latter situations.