I recently had a surprising conversation at a local Las Vegas casino. I don’t wish to identify the place any further because they already no-mail a high percentage of their “sensible” players. Besides, it’s not the particular casino that I want to talk about today; it’s a particular player.
A friend of mine, “George,” invited Bonnie and me to dinner using one of his many food comps at the casino. The game he usually plays at this casino, including the slot club, tops out at about 99.5%. However, he also receives mailers, entries into their modest Friday night drawings, and food comps, giving George a small advantage of perhaps $200-$300 per week. Additionally, he likes the ambiance of the place, so he plays there.
Bonnie and I arrived prior to the Friday night drawing. George explained the way the drawing worked, and then he said something I found very strange coming from an advantage player. (Recreational players say this kind of thing all the time, but I consider George to be much more knowledgeable than a recreational player). George said that he didn’t care whether he was called for the drawing because he had hit a dollar royal a few days earlier at that casino and was actually ahead $4,300 for the week. The drawing was for less than that, so he said that he was happy whether or not he was called in the drawing. He had already made his “nut” for the week.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken George’s statement at face value, but if we assume he was being truthful, he was talking nonsense. Whether he was up or down that week at that casino had absolutely no bearing on his need to win that drawing. George needs to win his share of the drawings in order to keep his $200-$300 weekly expectation coming. It is irrelevant whether those drawing wins come the same week as his wins in the casino or they come on the weeks he loses in the casino.
Even if he has a $200-$300 weekly expectation at this casino and possibly a $50-$100 weekly expectation at another casino, at the end of the year it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. It’s typical to be luckier than expected at some casinos and unluckier than expected at others. It is also typical to have a few REALLY good months (say February, March, and September) and a few others (say January, June, and December) that suck score-wise with the remaining months being fairly normal (whatever that means). You don’t want to be making short term decisions in your good months or your bad months — let alone your good weeks or your bad weeks. It’s all part of the mix and you need to keep a longer term perspective.
I certainly say this to him that night — although I will make sure he sees this article. On that night, George was feeling good because of his score at that casino. Feeling good concerning casino scores is a relatively rare event for most gamblers, so I wasn’t going to rain on his parade.
Strangely, near midnight the following night, George came up to me at the Palms and said a variation of the same type of nonsense. He had a lot of tickets in the Palms drawing that occurred four hours earlier and hadn’t been called. (Seven or eight of the ten people called at the Palms drawing received $500 — the others received more. Those of us who weren’t called received, as you might expect, zero). He had just finished playing quite a bit between 8:00 p.m. and midnight (the Palms 5X drawing entries earning period) and ended up with a lot of tickets for next week’s drawings as well as being about $500 ahead. “This makes up for them not calling me at the drawing tonight,” George said. “It’s Karma, I guess.”
No. It’s coincidence. Given the number of tickets that George had in that night’s drawing, he probably had about a 40% chance of having his name drawn. That 40% chance just didn’t come in. (George is among those who get called most frequently at the Palms — largely because he plays enough to have a lot of tickets in the virtual barrel. But often when he doesn’t get called while having the most tickets, he gets upset. He’s not comfortable with the concept that even having a 60%-70% chance of being selected on each drawing means that occasionally he won’t be called. It’s doubtful that he ever has a greater chance than that.)
The fact that the most of those called won $500 at the drawing and that George’s score for the night was +$500 wasn’t Karma. It could easily have been that George intentionally stopped when he was $500 ahead.
Being $500 ahead is just more one data point on his yearly score sheet. George has the skills to be ahead at the end of most years gambling-wise–if he can just shake some of his nonsensical ways of thinking about it!