For a five-year period ending about a decade ago, I played a lot at certain 15-machine pubs in the southeastern section of the Las Vegas valley. Places such as Village Pub, Raye’s, Doc Holliday’s, and Franklin’s. Most of these places have changed owners and names since then. All have removed the game I played.
My game of choice was a version of Deuces Bonus in the Gambler’s Bonus system called Deuces Plus. Today, the best IGT version of this game pays 45-20-20 for straight flushes, quads, and full houses with a return of 99.45%. The version at the pubs paid 50-20-20 with the royal returning 1,000-for-1 rather than 800-for-1. This made it a 100.35% game. Plus slot club. Plus bonuses. And all these places had the game for ten-coin $5 — meaning $50 hand.
All Gambler’s Bonus locations participated in a bonus system where every time you hit a natural four of a kind — or a five-of-a-kind with exactly one deuce — your card got marked electronically. If you could get all 13 ranks in few enough hands, you could earn up to $50,000.
After 10,000 or so hands, the $50,000 would start to decrease, depending on your denomination. It would end up at $39 if enough hands passed before you scored all 13 ranks. Deuces Wild variations aren’t the most efficient games for a natural 4-of-a-kind bonus, so out of the 200 or so times I collected this bonus, perhaps 180 of them were $39. I think I once got a bonus of $500 or so.
But there were also bigger bonuses. Sometimes, for every full house made up of picture cards, you’d receive 20 coins. That was $100 on the game I played. Sometimes every time you got four threes you earned 30 coins. Sometimes every natural straight flush earned you so much. These and many others were all within the Gamblers Bonus “catalog” and the bar owner selected the ones he wanted to offer that month.
One place gave you a $500 bonus for every royal flush hit between midnight and 6 a.m. (Guess when I played?)
They had a slot club that returned at least 0.1% — and more if you had played enough to belong to one of the higher tiers. The promotions varied and each place was a little different, but overall, I figured I averaged a 0.6% – 0.8% edge on a game where you could play $40,000-per-hour. Plus, they all had kitchens where regular players could eat for free and take stuff home for the wife.
Most of these places let a player hit two or three $50,000 royal flushes before the player was deemed “too good” to play there anymore. One place allowed me to hit thirty of these before I was asked to leave.
Those days are long gone. Gamblers Bonus removed this particular game from their menu and their best game today returns less than 99%. They still have bonuses available, but it’s a rare situation where the bonuses make the game playable. It still happens sometimes, so periodically I check in to see what the latest promotion is, but it’s rare.
This was a play that I only wrote about after it was gone simply because one or two extra $50-per-hand full-time players would have killed the golden goose. There were only a few such places and they were all small. Each additional $5,000-a-week drain on the system came that much closer to shutting the places, or me, down.
There are a lot of my readers who lived close enough to play this game when it was alive. Even if they only played the 25 cent or dollar version of the same game, it would have added up.
With this environment as a background, next week I want to share an unusually profitable situation related to this game.
It’s possible it was related to organized crime. I truly don’t know.
This blast from the past seems like a generation ago now. Wife and I preferred to play it at Yorky’s pub that we could get to quickly if we got off of Flamingo and on to Sandhill. Food seemed to be better than Village Pubs, and a bit cheaper. Short distance from Sam’s Town, if we had something there going on the same day. Seemed that we could always get a seat no matter the time of day. I agree with Bob, as I never mentioned this play either, even when we had the LV locals video poker group. Thanks much Bob, for yet another feel older than Methuselah moment!
I played those $50 Deuces Plus for many years at the Village Pubs. I preferred playing at the big one on Sunset on Graveyard shift when Skip was working. It was a gold mine while they were giving away $100 freeplay for any taxable jackpot.
hey old man Nudge. It’s good to hear from you. It’s been a while.
I heard in the 1990s Vegas had 3% plus ev vp plays in abundance downtown. Anyone remember this?
Gamblers Bonus could really keep you busy back then. I remember being concerned about hurting the bar owners so we’d save the act of redeeming points when we could and do that elsewhere. Would hit the 7-11s and do our dirt there instead of at the bar. Back then you could make names up at will. There were literally people with cards for Yosemite Sam and Porky Pig.
“That’s All Folks”.
Redeeming points was a problem. There were limits on how much you could redeem each day — midnight to midnight. It was very easy to earn more points in a day, especially with bonuses, that far exceeded your ability to cash points. For several months after my welcome was gone from all of the places with these games, I’d still be going out to cash points — arriving somewhere at 11:50 p.m. and cashing points for both today, and after midnight cashing points all over again. I had cards in my name and my wife’s name. I felt using more names than that would shorten my welcome.
Interesting. Completing a set of quads was sort of like a reverse progressive. Evidently, this concept is still around, but just on poorer base games? Is that right? Could you give a little more detail? Were there just a few step-down levels or did the amount to win just drop almost continuously little by little? Were you actually able to win 10,000 coins (in this case $5 coins) by completing the set within 10,000 hands? That seems like it would be likely to occur once in a while, perhaps roughly once in about 20 times. The Wizard of Odds shows that the average cycle for a similar 9/4/4/3 Bonus Deuces Wild game is 19,891 hands with no changes in strategy to shorten the duration (under the Game type of Power Quads). If the odds were 1 in 20, you would almost certainly have hit the top prize once in 200 trials if the cutoff was as many as 10,000 hands. I’m certain you would have remembered such a win, so maybe my calcs are off a bit or perhaps the cutoff for the top prize was fewer than 10,000 hands. Did you actually know when the amount was set to decrease after so many hands or did you just observe it dropping during your play? Did you ever try and go after quads more aggressively early in the cycle? Or just ignore the additional payout and take the likely 7.8 coins ($39) or more as just a tiny extra every 20,000 hands or so?
Evidently you have a 2nd part to this column. Just wondering if you could answer some of those questions there, here, or maybe in a future column. Thanks for your stories. Not being a Vegas native, this concept is something I had not seen or heard of before.
new2vp — I know you from the forum on videopoker.com — and know you to be a knowledgeable player and analyst (despite your misleading name.) Thank you for posting here.
Next week’s column (already ready to be posted) doesn’t address any of your questions. Since I’m always looking for subjects to address in future columns (doing 52 of these a year gets old pretty quickly), I’ll tell you as much as I know about Gambler’s Bonus system (which I’m sure isn’t as much as you’d like) in my August 4 blog.
After making the earlier reply, I saw an article posted in Gaming Today, titled “Gamblers Bonus Tops in Taverns,” with a date/time of Nov 1, 2004, 10:32 PM. It said, “The player is allowed 2,000 hands to hit all 13 quads.” I can see where that would be a rare enough event to evoke such a large bonus. Maybe 10,000 hands was a misprint or a “mismemory”?