There are hundreds of 15-machine Dotty’s outlets throughout Nevada, along with a few larger facilities. I have played at Dotty’s for the past few years and have written several articles about this.
Although they still have far looser video poker than most 15-machine outlets, the games have been tightened sufficiently that I find them no longer playable for me. However, it’s still interesting to see how they ran their W-2G promotions.
Before I start on this, let me preface it by saying a W-2G promotion requires playing for significant stakes. Some of my readers, including the undisputed biggest troll on gamblingwithanedge.com, are quarter players who get annoyed when I discuss bigger stakes. Such players should consider skipping this week’s blog.
The way the promotion works is that on 10% of the W-2Gs, players receive a 10% bonus. For a $4,000 jackpot, in the following week you have a 10% chance of getting a $400 cash bonus. To calculate the value of this, I assume you get a $40 bonus every time. On average it comes out the same.
In the first example let’s look at NSU Deuces Wild, which existed at Dotty’s until the end of 2016. Consider the following data, which comes from WinPoker, although the last two columns were added by me:
| NSU DEUCES WILD | |||||||
| Hand Name | Payout | Frequency | % Prob. | Occurs Every | % of Ret. | Promo | min bet |
| ROYAL FLUSH | 4000 | 59.80633 | 0.00% | 43456.27 | 1.84% | 0.018% | $5 |
| 4 DEUCES | 1000 | 485.2523 | 0.02% | 5355.894 | 3.73% | 0.037% | $6 |
| ROYAL FLUSH W/2 | 125 | 4955.473 | 0.19% | 524.4626 | 4.77% | 0.048% | $48 |
| 5 OF A KIND | 80 | 8078.709 | 0.31% | 321.7049 | 4.97% | 0.050% | $75 |
| STRAIGHT FLUSH | 50 | 13350.26 | 0.51% | 194.6748 | 5.14% | 0.051% | $120 |
| 4 OF A KIND | 20 | 158634.9 | 6.10% | 16.38328 | 24.42% | 0.000% | |
| FULL HOUSE | 20 | 67873.23 | 2.61% | 38.29139 | 10.45% | 0.000% | |
| FLUSH | 15 | 53961.85 | 2.08% | 48.16292 | 6.23% | 0.000% | |
| STRAIGHT | 10 | 149013.2 | 5.73% | 17.44114 | 11.47% | 0.000% | |
| 3 OF A KIND | 5 | 694409.8 | 26.72% | 3.742689 | 26.72% | 0.000% | |
| NOTHING | 0 | 1448138 | 55.72% | 1.794691 | 0.00% | 0.000% | |
| Total Return | 99.728% |
The important numbers are the base return for the game, 99.728%, and the addition to the return (“Promo”) as stakes are increased. You could play $1, $2, and $5 machines from five to fifty coins and receive the proper payout for all pay-schedule categories.
If you played $5 per hand, you got a bonus only on the royal — and it took the return from 99.728% to 99.746%, because the royal bonus adds only 0.018%. If you increased your bet to $6 (by playing six coins on the $1 machine), you also brought in the four deuces bonus, which added another 0.037%.
You can get the maximum bonus at $120 per hand and higher – e.g., 24 $5 coins – which brings the bonus to 0.205% (0.018% + 0.037% + 0.048% + 0.050% + 0.051%). When you add this to the return of the game, it becomes 99.951%.
The game comes with a 0.20% slot club if you play during the right hours. The cash back mailers range between 0% and 0.4%, depending on your score recently, and they have a variety of other periodic bonuses worth 0.1% or so. It was a positive play. But you needed an impressive bankroll to play it.
I played $125 per hand and whenever I hit a royal ($100,000) or four deuces ($25,000), I’d stay away for four months so my cash mailers could regenerate. It seemed as though they used my last four months of results to determine how much free play I’d get.
If I had been losing recently, my 4-week mailer would come back something like $205, $294, $363, and $481. The numbers were always “weird” amounts and they increased over the month. If I had hit a $100,000 jackpot in the past few months, my free play mailer would become $1, $1, $1, $2. They always remembered to give me more the last week of the month!
Due to a number of $100,000 royals by me and others, they finally decided the game was unprofitable. The best games now were 9/5 Super Double Bonus (99.695%) and 9/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (99.642%). I’ll let you work out the SDB amounts for yourself, but here we have the numbers for BPD.
| 9/6 BONUS POKER DELUXE | |||||||
| Hand Name | Payout | Frequency | % Prob. | Occurs Every | % of Ret. | Promo | min bet |
| ROYAL FLUSH | 4000 | 61.767093 | 0.00% | 42076.77 | 1.90% | 0.019% | $5 |
| STRAIGHT FLUSH | 250 | 283.32655 | 0.01% | 9173.02 | 0.55% | 0.006% | $24 |
| 4 OF A KIND | 400 | 6132.7776 | 0.24% | 423.7819 | 18.88% | 0.189% | $15 |
| FULL HOUSE | 45 | 29861.008 | 1.15% | 87.03524 | 10.34% | 0.103% | $135 |
| FLUSH | 30 | 28901.832 | 1.11% | 89.92371 | 6.67% | 0.067% | $200 |
| STRAIGHT | 20 | 33213.804 | 1.28% | 78.24939 | 5.11% | 0.000% | |
| 3 OF A KIND | 15 | 192559.08 | 7.41% | 13.49695 | 22.23% | 0.000% | |
| TWO PAIR | 5 | 333687.73 | 12.84% | 7.788599 | 12.84% | 0.000% | |
| JACKS OR BETTER | 5 | 549065.74 | 21.13% | 4.733422 | 21.13% | 0.000% | |
| NOTHING | 0 | 1425192.9 | 54.84% | 1.823585 | 0.00% | 0.000% | |
| Total Return | 99.642% | ||||||
Although this one was just as lucrative as NSU if you played $135 a hand or more, there were additional factors. A jackpot of $5,000 or more required special procedures and every jackpot of $10,000 or more required the supervisor to come in from elsewhere. At $135 a hand, every 4-of-a-kind paid $10,800. These jackpots come around every 424 hands on average, which is more than once an hour. I figured this would cause way too much “excitement,” and would number the days the game was still around.
So, I played $60 a hand, meaning 4-of-a-kinds returned $4,800, which was just underneath the $5,000 excitement threshold. This brought the game return up to 99.642% + 0.019% + 0.006% + 0.189% = 99.856%. With the other promotions this was positive. While less than the 99.951% that NSU paid before the other promotions, it didn’t knock me out of business as often. Now only a $48,000 royal flush (every 42,000 hands) would shut me down for four months. The downside is that playing only $60 per hand instead of $125, even with the same return, would cause the total to be cut in half due to the lesser coin-in.
Another problem at Dotty’s is that each outlet had a limited number of $100 bills, perhaps $50,000 to $100,000 per week or so. If you hit enough $4,800 jackpots (plus other players were hitting jackpots as well), you began to be paid in $20 bills. And then in $5 bills. It was a bit of a problem to handle these.
I’d go in dressed in cargo pants and often come home with my pockets stuffed with twenties. One way to recycle these twenties was to take them to other casinos where I played enough and then use them to buy ‘purchase tickets’ to use during my play. That is, I would take $20,000 in twenties in and they would sell me four $5,000 purchase tickets that I could insert into the machines.
If you’re not a big enough player at a casino with this technology, you’d have to manually insert the money into the machine. The Dotty’s machines would take up to $3,000 at a time. Obviously, it took five times as long to insert 150 Jacksons than it did to insert 30 Benjamins. (If I had a choice of machines, I’d pick the one under a light so I could read while I inserted the bills into the acceptor.) Whether or not this is worth putting up with depends on what other opportunities you have to play positive games for interesting stakes.
Eventually that game was pulled as well. Possibly it still exists in some stores, but I’ve looked at more than twenty of them. It lasted longer at the Hoover Dam Lodge (25 miles away from my home) than it did at other properties, but eventually it was pulled from there as well.
They still have 9/6 Jacks or Better there. Even though it sounds like it’s only a tenth of a percent tighter than 9/6 BPD (99.544% compared to 99.642%), the W-2G bonus affects the games differently. You can work it out if you like. I’ll tell you more about it next week, along with another way that some players chose to play this promotion, until that too was countered.
There’s one hidden benefit to playing at Dotty’s–if you’re a smoker, you can inhale the equivalent of three packs a day just by spending an hour there. That’s a savings of $25 or so! For non-smokers, though…
There’s one consideration that I think is paramount. These games were played for high stakes on medium-volatility games, and getting a positive return depended heavily on hitting the top hands (royals, 2222, etc.). Therefore, you had to be prepared for massive swings. I did a thumbnail calculation and based on the average coin-in you were generating and the volatility of the games, you had a roughly 40% chance of being down $100,000 in any given month. Of course, you stood to make an overall profit (and my figures are just estimates), but I can easily envision any player doing this losing a quarter million or more before the ship righted itself. Or, as so often happens with bankrolls large and small, the ship sinks.
Still another consideration is that when you depend on casino largesse to turn an inherently negative game positive, you’re always dealing with the possibility of the casino pulling the plug—on you, or on the promotion in general. Thus, you may never get to see the long run. Bottom line, you need a million dollars or more in your bankroll, PLUS the ability, financial and psychological, to withstand losing 25 or 50% of that bankroll.
Kevin, your second point is valid. Your first point applies to any video poker play. That’s like saying if you play 10,000 hands of Jacks or Better and don’t hit a royal, you will lose a lot of money. Most video poker plays rely on hitting the big hands and if you don’t hit those, you will lose a lot of money.
I’ve seen your posts for quite a while and it doesn’t seem like you understand Bob’s play book for video poker. Fairly thin margins and huge bankroll requirements are nothing new to him.
I suspect in part 2 Bob’s going to explain why this play wasn’t really such a thin margin. Or maybe he’ll just leave it as an exercise for the readers.
I understand “Bob’s playbook” extremely well, in fact. However, what you may not understand is that Bob’s playbook is only worthwhile for Bob. You need a combination of massive bankroll, very, very high risk tolerance, absolute accuracy in play, willingness to spend a great deal of time, and an extensive information network, Lacking any ONE of those things, doing what Bob does is impossible.
But you can incorporate some of the concepts and practices into your own play. If I always play with an advantage ( even a slim one) I’ll do better than playing lesser games. If I increase my accuracy of play, I’ll increase my EV at the game. If I work to avoid silly errors ( playing too fast, talking to the cocktail waitress while playing a hand, etc), I will increase my EV.
I don’t have to play $100k a day though to follow a lot of the methodology. It is applicable to all play.
Bob talked about this promo a few months back.
Bob wrote: “I played $125 per hand and whenever I hit a royal ($100,000) or four deuces ($25,000), I’d stay away for four months so my cash mailers could regenerate. It seemed as though they used my last four months of results to determine how much free play I’d get.”
Other casinos have similar systems, basically they penalize you for hitting a royal with a timeout period. You can modify your strategy and gain an edge against this sort of casino strategy. One such strategy is to set the royal value to zero in your strategy generator thus maximizing the return of the non-royal hands but of course there are other variants depending on which hands are the penalty hands. Bottom line it’s important to figure out the casino’s promo system and to adjust strategy to maximize your return against it and make further adjustments as the casino makes changes, which they will. You are playing against the casino’s promo system, not so much any more against the machines.
Well said by Kevin.
Every day our world shrinks a little more. This post is a great description of the lengths one has had to go to in recent years in order to obtain value from playing VP. Now this play is gone, too. In northern Nevada, I basically have one casino left where I consider it worth my time to play VP. At what point do we say it’s time to move on, people, nothing to see here? If you want to be an AP, you’d better be flexible, and realize that no type of play remains a moneymaker forever, although vestiges of it may remain for a long time in odd corners of the world.
I’ve said a few times, that it’s good to have more than one type of bullet in the AP arsenal. This is a problem many card counters have. Having a full repertoire of AP tactics might make you look like a civilian for a bit longer by playing all sorts of different games. One day you might be counting and the next on a slot/vp play. Then on the third day, a different table game.
I had diarrhea once at the Bellagio. It sucked. I won $7,500 later that night at some dump casino with no handle on the urinal to flush. Good Times.
I don’t believe the way your free ply is calculated can be right. I gamble there and my freeplay goes up if I gamble more. If I stop using my card or not gamble my freeplay goes way down. When I won a total of $23000.00 in a 3 month period, all hand pays, $1200 to 2900, my freeplay skyrocketed. So I don’t understand this.
Hi Bob Dancer, this some great math. Can you Calculate the daily average return for a Dottys slot machine? I am really interested about understanding the return for the tavern licensees perspective.
I dont play the poker or keno but I do play the slots and I used to win pretty well. Now, they have tightened the slots noticeably
5 to 6 dottys one being a red dragon… it’s like feeding the machines now.
Very very tight in 2018 I hit a total of 64 jackpots 2021 I had 3 jackpots for the year