Mid-week in early May, I received an email from the Palms talking about a $15,000 Rock and Win series of drawings the following Sunday, May 15. There would be five drawings, every two hours beginning at 11 a.m., where the prize structure was first: $750; second and third: $500; third through tenth: $250 down to $100 — where the total prize pool amounted to $3,050 every two hours. You could win up to two times on Sunday, and you could begin earning drawing entries Friday midnight.
This appealed to me. I hadn’t played yet at the Palms in May because:
- 1) The PEW (Play, Earn, and Win) awards on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in May were for desserts early in the month and for alcohol later in the month. These aren’t interesting to me. For weight control purposes, sugar is poison. And alcohol is a type of poison as well to someone who wants to stay on top of his game. Normally the PEW awards are more desirable from my point of view — so I’d voluntarily play to earn them.
- 2) There were Friday/Saturday drawings at the Palms in May (SLOTMAN swap). I liked the drawings Friday somewhere else a little better. Play during the week makes you eligible for both the Friday and Saturday drawings. Since I wouldn’t be there on Friday, that cut half my drawing equity and so I hadn’t played at all.
Still, I need to play at least a hundred thousand dollars coin-in each month to get the mailer I wanted. $200,000 would be better.
So if I played $100,000 on Saturday, I’d get some equity in the Saturday night drawing, and would likely have more entries in the Sunday drawings than anyone else. My game of choice was going to be two hours on 25¢ Hundred Play 8/5 Bonus Poker (99.17%). Playing $100,000 costs $830 in equity, offset by $250 in free play, adding up to $580 in the hole. I should be able to get considerably more than this in the drawings and the monthly mailer.
I could play 9/6 Jacks or Better, I suppose, which is a looser game and would save me $370 in expected value compared to 8/5 Bonus over $100,000 of coin in, but this would take 10 hours on a $2 single line game (which wouldn’t get me nearly as many tickets in the virtual drum due to the way the Palms decides how many tickets to award you per dollar of coin in) or 15 hours on a 25¢ Ten Play game. I had too many other things to do on Saturday. Plus, probably the mailers are bigger if you play a 99.17% game than a 99.54% game. I don’t know the Palms formula for sure, but it seems likely that the looser games you play, the worse your mailers are.
When I started to feed $100 bills into the machine on Saturday, I couldn’t help but notice the machine was entirely lime green. The last person who played that machine was dealt a $6,250 straight flush, was paid by hand after signing a W2G, cashed out and left. Good for them. That has nothing to do with me one way or the other.
I played my scheduled $100,000, swiped for the Saturday drawing. I wasn’t called in the first ten spots, but three people didn’t show up and I was called eleventh — which translated into the eighth place award — worth $750. On Saturday, I won $500 in the first drawing and $750 in the second. A net of $2,000 was a good net result in the drawings. It could have been better, of course, but it could have been quite a bit worse. This part of my play worked pretty well.
My expected machine loss of $830 on the machine, however, turned out to be $8,470. The good drawing results and the decent mailers won’t come close to making up for that. Oh well. Sometimes when I play that much on that machine I end up ahead $5,000 or $10,000. The $830 expected loss is an average over hundreds of plays or more.
Shirley asked me how my results were. I told her, of course. She’s pretty philosophical by now about the loss. She’s seen the swings go both ways. She’s not happy about losing a net of more than $6 grand, of course, but no longer lives and dies by the daily scores.
I did not tell her about the dealt straight flush for somebody else just before I played. No matter how much we’ve talked about this type of situation, deep down in her gut she feels I should not play a machine that has just paid off. If the hand had been dealt to me, it would be fine with her that I keep going because the machine is “hot.” But if it’s happened to somebody else before I showed up, she believes the machine has to “catch up” by making the next player lose big time. Don’t tell her these view are inconsistent. Her mind is made up.
To Shirley, my latest results at the Palms “prove” her point of view. No matter how many examples we’ve had to the contrary, if she knew about this she’d believe I was rather foolish playing on this machine at this time. I wasn’t not in the mood for this discussion again. So I didn’t tell her.
As I’m writing this article two weeks after the fact, I finally tell her. (I couldn’t tell the world without her hearing about it sooner or later anyway.) Sure enough she reacts in her typical fashion. But since she has already adjusted to the $8,000 loss (minus the $2,000 in wins from the drawing) and this news didn’t cause any additional loss over what she had become used to, it took a lot of fire out of her anger.
Delaying the news by two weeks worked out well this time. Clearly this is a move with positive EV. Lying to Shirley is not an option for me. Timing when I tell her things improves the quality of my life.