In business, there is a motto regarding employee supervision: EXPECT. INSPECT. That is, assume that they are going to do a good job — but check on them anyway. You should do the same thing as a video poker player.
I’ve played Quick Quads at the South Point on perhaps fifty different occasions. EVERY time, the first thing I do is verify that the pay schedule hasn’t changed since the last time I played. I do that on every machine I play at each casino I play. Ninety-nine percent of the time the pay schedule is the same as last time — but I am always alert to that one percent of the time when it has changed. Very rarely has the change been in the players’ favor. But occasionally, that does happen. Usually a pay schedule change is sufficient to make a game unplayable for me.
Checking the pay schedule is normally accomplished just by looking at the full house and flush payoffs. But occasionally they will short the royal (from 4,000 to 2,500 coins) or the straight flush (from 250 to 239). The straight flush decrease does not have to be a show-stopper. It only costs 0.02% if it’s limited to the straight flush. It costs a bit more if it’s a decrease on all 250-coin quads on a game like Double Bonus or Double Double Bonus.
When a point multiplier is supposed to be in effect, I check to make sure that I’m getting the extra points — if I am able to check. At some casinos, they’ll put the extra points on your account the following day, so there’s nothing I can check while I’m playing. How you check depends on the casino. Sometimes double points appear directly on the readout. Sometimes you need to take a reading, play a hand, pull your card, put it back in, and take another reading. It requires a certain level of arithmetic agility to do this calculation, but it’s not difficult for most people.
I also check and record my point balance when I leave the casino. If I expect it to be different the next day (perhaps they double points overnight), I will calculate and record what I expect it to be. If the next time I return to the casino and my point balance is different from what I expected, I try to figure out why. If I can’t figure out the discrepancy, I will go to the slot club and ask them to explain it to me. If you bring written records for several previous dates, they will usually take your word that you deserve more points. If you have a scrap of paper with a number on it, they have no way of knowing whether you just wrote that down or if it’s part of your regular record-keeping system.
In my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography, I tell about the MGM Grand switching machines around without dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s — resulting in several video poker machines receiving slot club points at the slot machine rate. Identifying this mistake and capitalizing on it was worth about $75,000 and two cars to Shirley and me at the time. Whenever a casino switches machines around, I always try to check and see how they’ve been set. It’s often a manual setting somewhere that determines how fast you earn points — and when one-at-a-time settings are made by humans, mistakes are sometimes made.
A little more than a week ago was the last time I checked machines which I knew had been switched around. For quite some time, the Palms has had three 50¢/$1 Ultimate X machines with 9/6 Double Double Bonus Ten Play (99.86%) with a tough strategy and hellacious variance. Because these machines have been popular, the casino recently swapped three $1/$2/$5 Triple Play/Five Play machines in the High Limit Room for three Ultimate X machines that used to be 5¢/10¢/25¢. When the machines were swapped, the goal in the High Limit Room was to configure the moved Ultimate X machines to be like the existing 50¢/$1 Ultimate X machines. On the main floor, the goal was to configure the old Triple Play/Five Play machines that came from the High Limit Room to accommodate 5¢/10¢/25¢ games similar to machines that already existed on the main casino floor.
At the Palms, one tricky part of machines being switched is calculating how many drawing tickets you can earn. A machine with a 5¢ lowest denomination will earn more tickets than a machine with a 50¢ lowest denomination which in turn will earn more tickets than a machine with $1 as the lowest denomination. So when the new machines appeared in the High Limit Room, I checked them right away to see how many drawing tickets they delivered.
At the time I checked, I hadn’t worked out my exact strategy if I found a mistake. Clearly, if I found a mistake in the house’s favor I would have spoken up right away. But what if I found a mistake in the players’ favor? Would I tell the casino (after all, they ARE sponsors of my radio show) or would I simply play the new machines, gaining an advantage in the promotions over players who played the older machines?
I never had to answer that question. It turned out that the new machines calculated drawing ticket entries perfectly. But I didn’t know this until I actually sat down and checked.
Since the machines were set up correctly, was it a waste of my time to have gone through the task of checking? Absolutely not! Casinos USUALLY make the correct settings in cases like this. I actually EXPECTED that the Palms slot department would do this correctly. And they did. But I also INSPECTED, “just in case.” A significant part of my wealth has come from this EXPECT/INSPECT “habit.” I never know when I’ll find another “something” and change my behavior based on it.
But you can bet I’ll exercise the habit again tomorrow.