Dear Mr. Dancer:
My wife Doris and I regularly play at a Mid-West casino. I’d rather not tell you which one. Near the end of last year, they had a “Twelve Days of Christmas” promotion which was pretty good.
On each of twelve days, if you had an Elite card and played $500 through on decent video poker machines, you could come in and pick up a scratcher. Scratchers awarded at least $10 in free play once you scratched the silvery cover off, often much more, and were supposed to range up to $1,000 — but I never saw one that high.
The thing was, at the bottom right of the card there was a number. This number, once you figured out the code, told you what was on the scratcher. Here were the codes I remember.
116 — $10 free play
12 — $25 food
29 — $25 free play
139 — $50 food
221 — $50 free play
629 — $100 free play — we only got one of these out of our 24 picks
My wife and I earn plenty of food from casinos, so we avoided those if we could. So we picked up three of the scratchers out of the bag, glanced at them without appearing to stare, and avoided the ones that said 116, 12, or 139. Anything else was gravy.
When we found a “new number” that we hadn’t seen before (such as when I drew 629 near the end of the promotion), we always grabbed it. We didn’t know the code for $1000 free play, or $500 or $250 for that matter either. If we found an unusual code, we wanted it.
We shared this information with a few trusted friends who helped us complete our list of codes, and we were all sworn to secrecy. If anybody discovered a new code, they’d let the rest of us know.
Officially the casino didn’t want you to look at the scratchers before you picked one. The three boothlings on the day shift (when the manager was around) were real sticklers for this. The three on the swing shift, not so much. So we started to only go to the casino after the swing shift started. This wasn’t as convenient for us, but it was easier to get good results when we did this.
Afterwards, Doris told me she felt so dirty taking advantage of the casino this way. She went along with my “program,” but felt it was cheating and didn’t like it one bit.
Do you think we were cheating?
(signed) Conflicted
No I don’t think you were cheating.
Intelligent game playing often consists of figuring out stuff your opponent doesn’t know. I certainly don’t think it is cheating for Deuces Wild players to know, on a hand like 55669, whether to hold one pair or two. There are a large number of players who don’t have this information. The casinos make more money off the less knowledgeable per play than they do off the ones in the know.
It was clever of you and your friends to figure out the codes to the scratchers. I suspect most players ignored those code numbers — or perhaps believed it was too complicated to figure out.
If you were taking advantage of anybody, you were taking advantage of the other players — not the casino. The casino budgeted the scratchers and it largely didn’t care which Elite player got which scratcher. If you and Doris were getting a higher proportion than average of the “good ones,” that left more of the “bad ones” in the bag for the unknowledgeable players to pick.
You knew this was a game of skill. Many players thought that it was a game of luck. And I suspect those players, generally speaking, weren’t very lucky.
Note that the casino didn’t want you to do this. Workers were told to prevent it. Some workers obeyed — either because they understood what players could do or “following instructions” was just part of their DNA. Some didn’t. It would not have been difficult for the casino to design techniques to prevent this “abuse,” such as:
a. Make sure no easily-read code is part of the ticket
b. Place five tickets on a board — codes hidden — and make players identify which ticket they wanted. Once they had made their selection, players received the ticket they selected and another ticket is randomly placed on the board for the next player.
c. Use a kiosk where players press a button and their award magically appears. Many casinos use systems like this.
d. Physically “ink out” the code so it can’t be read.
e. Etc.
Smart players can take advantage of casinos that don’t follow such procedures. That’s what being an advantage player is all about. The standard in a casino is “casino always wins — players always lose.” If this isn’t interesting to you, it’s up to you to find a legal way to do something about it. And when you can, it’s not cheating!