Quitting When I’m Ahead

You’ve heard the expression “Quit when you’re ahead,” applied to gambling. You’ve also heard, “When you’re on a hot streak, keep firing away!” These two bromides give opposite advice on what you should do when you actually hit a big jackpot. The first says go home. The second says stay and keep playing.

Since they provide opposite conclusions, obviously they both can’t be correct. But it is possible that they are both wrong. My opinion is that this is the case. Whether you should stay or go has nothing to do with recent scores. So far, this is nothing new to my regular readers. I’ve expressed this opinion numerous times over the years in various formats.

Still, I hit a big jackpot recently and basically went home right away. How come I didn’t back up my words with my actions? Well, that’s what this article is all about.

Dotty’s is a chain of more than 100 small outlets in Nevada that have gambling machines. They exist under a rule that allows bars and taverns to have up to 15 machines should they meet certain requirements, including serving food or alcohol. They’ve been bullied by Station Casinos, the giant among Las Vegas locals’ casino companies, to change the way they operate. But as of now, Dotty’s still exists under more or less the same format.

The game I play at Dotty’s is single-line NSU Deuces Wild. This game can be played at full value for dollars up to five dollars, for five coins up to fifty coins. So you can play this game anywhere from $5 to $250 total bet per deal. The slot club tops out at 0.15% for video poker. And they have mailers, which vary, as we shall see.

The biggest kicker to big players is sometimes W2Gs get a 10% bonus. The number I’ve heard is 10% of the W2Gs get the bonus, but the selection is done behind closed doors so I don’t know for sure. Still, I’ve gotten some of these bonuses and they are a key reason I play there.

For this reason, I play 25 $5 coins ($125 a hand— equivalent to $25 single line) so as to get the W2Gs on as many hands as possible. I get such taxables on straight flushes ($1,250), 5-of-a-kinds ($2,000), wild royals ($3,125), four deuces ($25,000), and royal flushes ($100,000). I could play twice as large, but that wouldn’t give me any more W2Gs and it would increase the possibility that the casinos wouldn’t welcome my action any more.

The mailers are strange. Once a month I receive weekly mailers. At the rate I play (about $50K coin-in a week) I average about $200 a week in mailers. But on a 4-week month, the mailers might be $137, $178, $214, and $275. (These numbers are approximately correct and they give you the right idea. The mailer amounts are not usually numbers divisible by $5 and they increase as the month goes by.) Those are the mailers I get if I’ve been losing recently.

If I happen to have won recently, my mailers are reduced to $1, $1, $1, and $2.

My mailer cycle period is calculated based on the last four months or so — I’m not sure of the exact cycle. So if I hit a $25,000 set of deuces on January 5, for example, there is no need to play the rest of January or any of February, March, or April. In May I’ll start to play again.

If I lose the first month or two after my four month hiatus, I get good mailers. It’s not hard to lose at this game between sets of deuces, and scores of -$3,000 to -8,000 per $50,000 coin-in are fairly typical, with a few weeks of plus scores thrown in. Eventually I’ll hit a set of deuces. Sometimes that still leaves me behind relative to the last time I took a break. In those cases, I’ll keep playing. If the $25,000 jackpot puts me substantially ahead, I’ll quit for a while.

In early March I hit for $100,000, which put me $90,000 ahead after my last previous break. So I will take off until August 1. I would rather not take the time off, but my EV goes way down unless I do. It has happened that I took four months off, came back and hit a set of deuces in five hands, and immediately took off the next four months as well. It has also happened the other way as well, where I have gone months and months without hitting a set of deuces. Oh well, that’s the nature of the game.

Going “months and months” between deuces may seem like an exaggeration for somebodywho plays $50,000 coin-in a month — but it’s not. $50,000 coin-in is 400 hands at the stakes I play, and on average it takes something like 5,500 hands for a set of deuces. That’s about 13 weeks, which means three months. I’ve had the deuces essentially back to back. And I’ve played (and lost) for up to six months between them.

This system is different than what is found at other casinos. In many ways, Dotty’s is a mom and pop organization that makes its own rules. This is the way that makes sense to them — so this is the way they do it. They’ve been successful with it, so why change?

But for me, it often leads to the strategy of “quit while I’m ahead.” For four months, anyway.