I was playing $1 8/5 Bonus Five Play in the Slot Emporium at the Palms. The machine is right next to the set of restrooms adjacent to the poker room, so whenever I play there lots of people see me on their way to and from the facilities. A player I knew, Henry, saw me and sat down immediately, saying “I don’t play at the Palms very often and I don’t know why you’re playing these machines, but if they are good enough for you they are good enough for me.”
Maybe.
8/5 Bonus Poker only returns 99.17%, and the slot club returns 0.25%. Most people who know me as a video poker player know that if I didn’t think the game returned more than 100% I wouldn’t be playing it in the first place. But just because I knew of enough other things to make the game positive doesn’t mean that Henry would be privy to the same thought process. Or find value in the same things.
For starters, this was on a Friday and the Play, Earn, and Win (PEW) promotion this particular month was worth something to me. PEW is an ongoing promotion at the Palms, but the prizes you get vary each month — and frequently every half-month. Sometimes the prizes have more value to me than they do at other times — and I don’t expect Henry’s preferences to necessarily align with mine. For example, I willingly played for gift certificates to Sports Authority. (But no, I am not looking to buy yours if you have extra.) I avoided playing when the gift certificates were to Edible Arrangements. Nutritionally I can’t justify eating anything they make. I’m sure there are others with opposite preferences, but I suspect we all agree that there’s a limit to the number of Palms logo key chains that have value to us. Did Henry like the gifts this month? Did he even know about them? I have no idea.
How much are the weekly drawings worth? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do know that if you’re not planning on being present, the drawings are worthless. Sometimes it’s a “winners come back at the end of the month” structure for an additional drawing. Is Henry going to be in town for that and willing to participate? You can be sure that’s the same night a big end-of-the-month drawing will also be happening at another casino or three.
Earning tickets for the drawings depends on the lowest denomination on the machine you are playing — not the denomination of the actual game you’re playing. The $1 Five Play machine is figured to be a “quarter denomination” machine. If you’re playing another machine where you can find nickel or lower games, you’ll earn 2.5 times as many drawing tickets as you will playing the games where quarters are the lowest denomination on the box.
The $1 Five Play game in the Slots Emporium area comes with a $750 cash-or-gift-card bonus for royal flushes. That makes the game return very close to the amount of 9/6 Jacks or Better, albeit with a higher variance, which is the loosest game eligible for Palms promotions. The quarter Ten Play 9/6 Jacks or Better machines are popular ones to play — or at least they were until they slowed them way down — combining decent coin-in ($12.50 per play) with lots of drawing tickets (there are nickel games on the box). The $1 Five Play Bonus Poker with the $750 bonus on royals is worth the same percentage-wise, playable at twice the amount of coin-in, but does not earn the same number of drawing tickets. It could have been I WANTED to play the 25¢ Ten Play machine, but that bank was busy and I was waiting for a call from a friend who would be giving up his seat in a bit. This would be an extremely unlikely scenario for me, but Henry couldn’t know that.
There are bankroll differences between 25¢ Ten Play and $1 Five Play machines. Just because someone you respect is playing a game doesn’t mean that you have the bankroll for it. (Or even that the person you respect does either.) Is Henry cognizant of these considerations? Knowing Henry, he just might have enough money so that stakes for this size are “pocket change” to him and the difference is insignificant.
Was this a day I came in to pick up free play? Henry couldn’t know that. I typically play some when I pick up free play. Some casinos concentrate on this. Assuming you’re playing a given amount during the month, I don’t see a difference as to which day you’re playing on. But some decision-makers in marketing do. They argue, “We’re giving him money today and we want a shot at getting it back without merely being walked out the door.” While I think that thinking is flawed, they are the decision makers and their thought processes need to be considered.
To keep receiving monthly mailers, you need to play. Was I playing a breakeven game or even a little less to keep the mailers coming? Henry had no way to know this. I could have been playing extra for a comp to somewhere. Henry wouldn’t know. It’s even possible that this wasn’t a well-considered action on my part and I was just playing to be playing. This would be highly unusual for me, essentially impossible, but Henry couldn’t know for sure that today wasn’t that day I acted outside my usual parameters. It could also happen that I was making a miscalculation as to how good this game was. This might be relatively unusual, as I’m careful about these things, but this scenario it is nowhere near impossible. It’s happened to all of us.
Henry could have asked me the details of why I was playing, but I wouldn’t have answered completely. Although I do teach and write more about why I do things in video poker than virtually anybody else does, I’m not somebody who is willing to drop whatever I’m doing and give a 15 minute explanation on demand to everybody who comes along. There are some friends to whom I give complete answers to, but Henry isn’t one of them.
If someone else were highly cognizant of how to work the Palms system, seeing me play a particular machine might give them some insight as to what I was doing. Many of the regular players who have seen me play this particular machine have taken the point of view that it’s not for them and they like some other machine better. If they are frequent players who understand the system, they have enough information to make that decision for themselves. Perhaps they value the PEW, drawings, their time, or something else more or less than I do.
Would Henry have come up with the same conclusion if he had all of the facts? Who knows? But as an infrequent player at the Palms, he just didn’t know the ins and outs of the system.
If you think you understand the point of this article, hold on because I’m going to do a 180 on you.
You only learn new things about a casino slowly, over time. Seeing which machine someone you respect is playing is one data point. And sometimes you need to make your decisions with very incomplete knowledge. So even though Henry didn’t know everything as to why I was playing that machine that day and all the ways for me to get value out of it, his overall conclusion of, “If it’s good for Bob it’s good for Henry” wasn’t a terrible one. It’s possible that that was the best information he had. So for today, perhaps it was his best decision.
Down the road, Henry is capable of gathering more information and making a better decision. But that takes time and energy — and for many people it’s just plain not worth it.