Tag: comp

Recently I posted an article concerning winning a Louis Vuitton handbag at an invited-guest event at the M casino. I said that I had played $100,000 in coin-in before the drawing so that I would continue to receive invitations to such events in the future.

Nobody told me that $100,000 in play was required. There is no magic formula that tells me how much to play in such circumstances. It’s done by feel. The better the invitation, EV-wise, the more I play. The nicer the casino, the more I play. If I’ve been winning at a place recently, I tend to play more. If I “have time,” meaning I’m not trying to squeeze several events (including non-casino activities) into a short period of time, I play more. Possibly no other player came up with the $100,000 figure for that event. This doesn’t mean that any of us are necessarily right or wrong. Each player has to work it out for himself.

It also depends on the available games, slot club, and other promotions. If my play will earn entries to one or two additional drawings in which I think I will have decent equity, I’ll tend to play more.

If I lose a lot early in a promotion like this, I tend to quit. Why? Because a major purpose of the play is to keep the invitations coming. If I lose $3,000 for an event with an estimated EV of $500, the casino marketing department is happy. They got what they wanted. Clearly, I’m a desirable customer in their opinion.  (If there were other promotions going on in that casino, as is usually the case, I might continue to play because I’m getting equity elsewhere. Being behind $3,000 or any other number is not a particularly meaningful event.)

Against this background, I received a question on the gamblingwithanedge.com forum that asked how much bankroll would it take to play $100,000 coin-in in Jacks or Better or Deuces Wild? I was vacationing at the time, so I didn’t respond immediately. I’m going to address this now.

This is an important thing to address before you start to play. You don’t want to tell your wife, “They gave us a $150 Dooney and Bourke handbag. We didn’t win the Louis Vuitton bag. Worse, other than the handbag, we’re flat broke now.”

Important though it is, the question isn’t anywhere near specific enough to be able to answer. What pay schedule are you talking about, what denomination, and what kind of game are you playing? That casino has 9/6 Jacks or Better and NSU Deuces Wild for dollar single line. Fairly fast players would take 25 hours to play $100,000 on such machines. These are not appropriate machines to play for such an event.

To get credit for “playing for an event,” pretty much you have to play that day. For a high-roller event where you intend to play $100,000, that probably means on $5 or $10 machines, or maybe $1 Ten Play, or 25¢ Fifty Play. Something like that. Each casino has its own mix of games. You have to check out each one before you decide what game to play. To be invited to this event, you needed to have played $800,000 coin-in over the previous January – June or July – December period. There are a few players who earned that status by grinding it out on dollar single-line games, but not too many. Most of us played larger games.

For a given game and pay schedule, playing it in the $5 version, $10 version, $1 Ten Play, and 25¢ Fifty Play versions required four different bankroll calculations. 9/6 Jacks or Better or NSU Deuces Wild don’t exist for these stakes at this casino. 9/6 Double Double Bonus does. Is that the game you want to know about? That game requires a significantly bigger bankroll than Jacks or Better — for a number of reasons.

The best tools to figure out bankroll are Video Poker for Winners and Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker. They each have their strengths. I use both.

Use them and you’ll see that the bankroll required is a probabilistic number. That is, if you are willing to accept a 10% risk of ruin, you need half the bankroll as if you are only willing to accept a 1% risk of ruin. What level of risk are you comfortable with?

You’ll also see that playing $5 machines is less risky than playing $10 machines. So what denomination do you want to play? On VPW, you’ll see that playing $1 Ten Play requires significantly less bankroll than playing $10 single line.

One person posted on the forum in response to the bankroll question that if you assume you’re not going to get royals, straight flushes, or 4-of-a-kinds, playing 9/6 Jacks will cost you about 9%. Although we might quibble whether it’s closer to 8.5% or 9%, this is basically correct. And, to me, essentially irrelevant.

This looks at bankroll calculations as a worst-case scenario. Assuming you’re talking about a $5 game, you’ll typically get around 9.5 quads per $100,000 coin-in, almost a half of a straight flush, and a tenth of a royal. Assuming you’re going to strike out on all of these is a very small number — on the order of 1/20,000. Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen this weekend? Almost certainly not. Will it ever happen to you? Probably not that either. If you had one of these promotions every week, this would happen once every 400 years. Good chance you’re not going to live that long.

And if you have some sort of a stop loss figure (for me, I indicated that if I lost $3,000 and this was the only promotion I was playing for, I would probably quit for the day) you’re not going to lose 9% of the entire amount.

So, my suggestion is to get one or more of the software products and wallow in the numbers. Over time, you’ll get a sense of what each game costs to play. You can tweak the parameters so that they are appropriate to the actual games you are playing at any particular casino.

I know that wallowing in the numbers is tougher for some than others. Still, that’s what it takes to become proficient in this game. If you can’t, or won’t, do this, getting good at video poker is a pretty difficult goal for you.

Being difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Richard Munchkin has said on the podcast that since he wasn’t particularly good with math, he teamed with others, some of whom were very good with numbers. Richard had a considerable number other strengths.

This is a LOT more useful information than coming up with a specific number and saying THAT’S the amount of bankroll you need. Any such number would need to be qualified twelve ways from Thursday and would be meaningless in real life situations.

Finally, whatever the bankroll calculators say, you need some experience to make sense of them. For example, the M has a senior drawing every Tuesday. (Obviously some of my readers aren’t eligible for a drawing where you must be 50 years of age or older.) Playing $100,000 coin-in improved my equity in that drawing. By how much? Who knows for sure? Possibly $50 or $100 more? Probably more than that, but I don’t have enough information to calculate it exactly. And even if I did, it would only be an average amount. I COULD end up with first prize of $1,500 or strike out altogether. If I calculated an average win of, say, $263.42, it will NEVER come out to be exactly that. And the casino had a couple of other promotions going on as well that are also hard to analyze accurately but playing an extra $100,000 helped my chances in those promotions as well.

And I like the benefits that come from having ICON status there. If I haven’t reached the $800,000 threshold for this six-month period, playing $100,000 is worth more to me than if I’ve already qualified. Things like this aren’t covered by the software analysis but are nonetheless important considerations in the winning process.