In September of this year, South Point ran a “Spin 2 Win” promotion every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It was for slots only — not video poker — and I basically ignored it. Still, I received some information during the last week of the month that convinced me that I should play a whole lot of money through $5 and $10 slot machines.
Had somebody written at the start of the year that I would end up playing about $150,000 through a slot machine, I might have suggested they cut back on drinking before lunch. Playing slots is simply not what I do. I play video poker — a thinking man’s game. Slots is a game where a drunken monkey can play as well as I can. But, in my opinion, just because slots are easy to play isn’t what makes them bad.
Slots have a high casino hold. Since my goal in casinos is to only play when I have the advantage, this usually disqualifies slots from consideration. In a casino like South Point, I expect that slots in the high limit room have a hold of about 4%. It would take a very unusual promotion to get me to voluntarily play that game. As it turned out, Spin 2 Win was just such a promotion.
Spin 2 Win was a promotion where you got to spin a virtual wheel on your slot machine every time you played through $300 of coin-in. You could earn an unlimited number of spins. You just had to play them off as you earned them.
The rules stated that you could earn free play or slot club points. Free play amounts were $10, $25, $50, and $100. Slot club point amounts were 2,500 (worth $7.50), 5,000 (worth $15), 10,000 (worth $30), 25,000 (worth $75), 50,000 (worth $150), and 100,000 (worth $300). For me, whether the prizes were free play or points, I considered them to be equivalent to cash at 100% face value.
Just knowing the possible prizes didn’t give me enough information. While I expected there to be a random draw for the prizes, I didn’t expect each of the prizes to have an equal chance of occurring. Since I felt that the machines I would play probably had a 4% hold, when I played through $300 to earn a spin, my expected loss was $12. It was possible that the average prize was more than that, depending on how frequently I got the bigger prizes. It was also very possible that the average prize was less than that. I figured it was too expensive to collect enough information to find out what the average prize was, so I didn’t even try.
During the last week of September, someone whose numbers I trust informed me that the average spin was worth about $18. Really! On average, every time I played $300, I could expect to lose $12 on the game and win $18 on the spin. This was a 2% advantage! (I would be playing a game with a 4% disadvantage and getting 6% back on the spin.)
I wasn’t sure how many spins I could get per hour. If I could play $5,000 per hour coin-in, I’d be earning $100 per hour in benefits, plus $15 from the slot club, plus I’d likely get a better mailer. (Even though I average $150,000 per month playing 9/6 Double Double Bonus Quick Quads, I play most of it on 2x point days — where I have the advantage even though I’m behind on that game this year — and my monthly mailers are usually $10 or $20 per week. I think mailers go up to $75 a week. Playing a lot of slots could boost my mailer.)
I considered what I would say if anybody “caught me” playing slots. First of all, I didn’t expect any video poker players I knew to be walking through the high limit room at the South Point. This casino has lots of loose video poker, but not in the high limit room. Also, this was a “normal” weekend with no special incentives for video poker players. While it was possible a player I know would wander by, I figured it was unlikely. All the South Point floor people and slot supervisors know me, of course. I’ve received hundreds of W2Gs there and they all have paid me these jackpots at one time or another. Since I’m friendly with all of them, I figured I’d tell the truth — namely, I thought this promotion was generous enough so that I was going to give it a try.
I have relatively little information on which slots to play. Just like video poker machines differ in variance between Jacks or Better and Double Double Bonus, slot machines do too. All of the slot machines I considered playing had maximum payouts of about 4,000 coins. While that seems the same as video poker, it is actually much higher. Video poker gives you a 4,000 coin payoff for 5 coins, which comes out to 800 coins per coin bet. These machines award a 4,000 coin payoff for 2 coins bet, which comes out to 2,000 coins per coin bet. The frequency for these jackpots could easily be much longer than the 1-in-40,000 frequency of video poker games. So even though I felt I had a big advantage on this promotion, I could still easily end up on the short end of the promotion.
A lot of players are only interested in the bottom line. Did I win or lose? As I’ve said before, that is a silly way to look at a promotion. It’s far better to be able to evaluate BEFOREHAND whether a promotion is good or bad rather than wait until you know your results and THEN decide. But there are a number of people who do just that. I’ll tell you now that it didn’t go well and I ended up losing quite a bit. But there’s more to the story than just the bottom line. I’ll explain that to you in my column next week.