Tag: M Resort

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Interesting Promotion at the M

I received a postcard from the M where they are trying to get new players. The promo was:

  1.         I get $100 in free play right away for bringing in a new player,
  2.         The new player also gets $100 in free play — plus a kiosk spin (usually $5 in free play, I think, but it could be more),
  3.         For every point the new player earns in the first day, I get 10x points, up to a total of 50,000 points,
  4.        Good (if you got the postcard and the new player has NEVER had a card at the M) from June 1 to July 31.

The slot club is 0.3% (slightly more, actually, because they give you $3 for $999 coin-in rather than $3 for $1,000 coin-in). 50,000 points is worth $150 of free play — which is way more than the house’s expected win if you’re playing the best machines.

The loosest game is $2 9/6 Jacks or Better. There are two such machines — newly installed — in the high limit room. There is no choice as to the denomination and no telling how long they’ll last. 10x points (which is worth 3%) on top of a video poker game returning 99.54% seemed possibly like a mistake, except that it was limited to $150 max which might be a reasonable cost for a new player.

I don’t actually know if this was a mistake or not. I hooked up with a player friend, “Kevin,” who lives near Aliante — which makes the M geographically undesirable for him. Which is why he didn’t already have a card. I know some non-players for whom I technically could have played the free play, but that’s strongly against the rules there and I’m well known. No thanks. If I had to use a non-player, I would have let them play and talked them through their $105 in free play — which we would probably have played on 25¢ 8/5 Aces Bonus. If they were a non-player, any possible W2G could have been a problem for them.

As it happened, June 1 was a normal free-play pick-up day for me (they have 6 to 7 such days per month). Kevin and I agreed to go in and play the promotion on the first day it was active.

We were certainly not going to ask for clarification as to whether the 10x points included video poker or not. The booth personnel (who are also the cashiers) would likely have said, “I don’t know. Let me make a phone call.” If they did that, it’s possible that signs would have been posted saying “slots only.” If we could arrange it, we didn’t want such signs posted until after we played.

Our deal was, we would play the promotion and also play an additional 850 points which entitled us to a “free” lunch buffet. Other than the amount of my free play, we split everything based on my $850 worth of play and his $5,850. Whether this split was overly generous or not didn’t concern me. Kevin is a friend. And enjoying lunch together was part of the attraction of the “date.”

I often play for a buffet on my free -play pickup days there. There have been incidents where players who only picked up free-play without any additional play were punished for this. As a known professional player, I am hyper-sensitive about creating situations where it would be easy for them to justify restricting me.

The $205 in free play we got between the two of us more than covered the expected loss of playing $5,850 for him and $850 for me. If we got the additional $150, great, but it was still a decent play if we didn’t. (And yes, we could have lost, but the decision beforehand is made based on EV, because you don’t know what your actual result is going to be.)

I had him play $5,850 rather than just $5,000 because the M usually doesn’t allow you to “double dip.” If there’s a gift of the day you can get for 800 points and you also want the free buffet, it takes 1,650 to earn both. We only had one shot at this and if they decided to give us 10x points on only 4,150 points (which would be 5,000-850), that would cost us $28. No thanks.

We didn’t split the $150 on the day we played because I wasn’t certain whether or not we were going to get it. It could be that they “intended” it to say “slots only,” but they didn’t put that in writing. How it would be enforced down the road was an open question.

I hadn’t decided how aggressively to pursue the 10x points if they denied that it applied to video poker. It was “only” $150 (split between two of us) and you need to pick your battles. In a somewhat similar situation at the Silverton I wrote about a few months ago, we were talking about an $8,000 difference between getting the multiple points or not. I’m willing to fight a lot harder for $8,000 than I am for half of $150.

Eight days after we played, I received an email saying that 50,000 points had been placed on my card, so I sent my friend an email saying that I owed him $75 next time we saw each other.

I never had to decide how hard to argue for this. It’s possible that future players will be told “slots only” when they sign up. I don’t know. But this was a case of taking advantage of the situation before they made changes to it. If they keep the promotion “as is,” then whether we did it early or not doesn’t matter. If they restrict it later to slots only, it matters $150 worth. For me it was a no brainer to do it as early as possible.

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When the Rules are Not the Rules

The M Casino Resort is located along I-15 at the southern edge of the Las Vegas valley. The location was picked expecting the Southern Highlands development to explode, but that didn’t happen. The 2007 housing bubble hurt that development big time — and this casino as well.

I live about 8-10 miles from the casino, depending on whether I take the freeway or not. I know having a casino this close would be a luxury for many of my readers, but it’s actually too far away for me. Although I do drive and will drive, I do not particularly enjoy “spinning my wheels.” I much prefer playing at closer casinos if I can find suitable ones.

To make matters worse, it’s the kind of casino where you must come in and pick up your free play multiple times over the month. Sometimes up to 10 times.

For the past seven years or so, up until the end of 2016, I had a “special deal” at that casino. This consisted of me coming in once a month and doing all my play at one time. Usually the figure was $200,000 of coin-in played on a $10 single line 8/5 Bonus Poker machine.

In exchange for this, I received all my free play for the month in one lump sum and was guaranteed to receive 2x points (worth a total of 0.60%) each time I came in. If you included the free play and the benefits of being an ICON member (their highest tier), including a certain amount of food each month, this was sufficient to entice me to play there.

Although the arrangement evolved over time, for the last few years I was unwelcome at most drawings and invitational tournaments. The reason for this was that most tournaments included “second chance drawings” where players would play during the weekend event and, based on $5,000 coin-in for one drawing ticket, tickets would be drawn to give away money. The reason for the second chance drawing was to induce extra play out of the players. I was excluded from these drawings because the $200,000 I would play wouldn’t be extra play — it would just be normal monthly play. This would give me an unfair advantage, or so the managers believed.

In late 2010, the M was sold to Penn National Gaming, effective sometime in 2011, but the former owner, Anthony Marnell III, still had a management role. So, most of the special deals that were allowed when Marnell owned the place were still in effect. Eventually Marnell moved on to other opportunities and the new General Manager was a PNG employee with no ties at all to the way the casino was run in the past.

I was informed in November 2016 that my deal was going to end on December 31. I was still welcome to play but I would receive the normal mail for an ICON player — based on how much I continued to play. I would need to pick up my free play in whatever increments the other players got their free play and would be eligible to participate in tournaments and drawings should my play warrant it. If this wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t have to play there at all.

I appealed this decision to the GM, but to no avail. It took until about the end of January to get me back on all mailing lists. I had been manually excluded by the former Vice President of Marketing (because of my special deal), and each of those manual over-rides had to be found and removed.

For March, I decided to play on Thursday, March 2, primarily because there was a drawing on Friday, March 3. I figured my equity in the drawing would help make up for the inconvenience of having to travel to the casino so many times. According to an over-sized postcard I received in the mail, so long as my tickets to the drawing were activated prior to 7 p.m., I was in the drawing. So, I played more than $200,000, at a bigger-than-average loss, and activated my entries at 6:45 p.m.  Unfortunately, I was totally skunked in the drawing.

Since there were 75 names drawn and I probably had more tickets in the drum than anyone else, it was highly improbable that I didn’t get picked anywhere. A “top 10” finish was likely, I believed, with a decent shot at winning the $4,000 first prize. I didn’t think I was intentionally excluded from the drawing (although with the manual overrides the former VP of Marketing had instituted, it was possible that one forbidding me from participating in drawings was still inadvertently in effect). I thought the most likely explanation for me not being called was that they pulled the 75 names before my tickets were in the drum.

The following Tuesday I spoke to the man who was responsible for pulling the tickets the previous Friday evening. He told me he pulled them at 6:30 p.m., as he had been instructed to do. I asked him who told him to pull at 6:30 p.m., because that would be the first person I called — if I decided to follow up on this.

It was not clear that following up on this would yield good results. Using aphorisms, we can say the squeaky wheel gets the grease (which means I should definitely follow up on this), but we can also say the nail that sticks up is often hammered down (which means I should just let it go). Playing “aphorism roulette,” I decided to pursue this.

I left voicemail messages explaining what I wanted to talk about to two different Marketing Supervisors. Whether they were in town and received the messages or not, I don’t know, but they didn’t return my calls. So, I next directed a written email to Patrick Durkin, the Vice President of Marketing. I told him I didn’t want to go to the Gaming Control Board if I could avoid it, but I strongly felt I was short-changed.

He sent me a return email saying he would research the matter and get back to me by the end of the day. He did, although he said he preferred to talk face to face. We set up a meeting for the following week, but he also told me the written rules and the postcard sent in the mail had different information on it.

This was an unusual twist. The rules said to swipe before 6:30 p.m. and I didn’t read those rules until afterwards. The mailer — which included a LOT of detail including small print disclaimers — seemed to cover everything and contained what were certainly at least “pseudo rules.”

I hoped the casino wouldn’t argue that the written rules were the only relevant ones and the mailer wasn’t official. I’ve heard LOTS of strange arguments from casino employees through the years. I would just have to wait until the meeting.

I certainly didn’t know how the meeting would go. They could give me some free play. They could say “sorry Charlie.” Or they could restrict me in some minor or major way. I’ve seen variations of all of those. But I wasn’t going to get anything if I didn’t go to the meeting, so I went.

Insofar as the mailer went, I didn’t take it with me. I did, however, take an iPhone photo of both front and back and had that with me. (Years ago, some employees at the Suncoast, after it was purchased by Boyd, disputed that I had received a postcard invitation and asked to see it. I gave it to them and they took it into the back room. I never saw the postcard or them again. Since I couldn’t prove I received the postcard, the Suncoast’s official position was that I hadn’t received one. Although I didn’t think the M would operate in such a rinky dink fashion as the Suncoast, I wasn’t taking any chances.)

At the meeting with Mr. Durkin, he couldn’t have been more gracious. We chatted for 10 minutes or so — one professional to another. He had worked at several casinos over the years and I had played at many of them. We knew many of the same people. I am somewhat of a “special case” in the player community and he wanted to get to know me. He had only worked at the property for a few months and, although we had exchanged some emails and phone calls, we hadn’t met each other prior to our meeting.

When it came time to discuss whether I was going to receive any compensation for trusting the mailer, he told me the promotion had been designed by his predecessor, who now worked elsewhere. Although he and his staff checked the rules and the mailers, they missed the “6:30 vs 7:00” difference. Without admitting any error, he asked what would satisfy me. I, of course, would have preferred that he come up with a proposed amount of free play first. But at least we were finally talking turkey.

I won’t go into exactly how the negotiation to find the “right” number took place, but we came up with an amount of free play that both of us could live with. Maybe a better negotiator would have gotten more. Maybe some players would have gotten less. Being able to negotiate effectively when you have to is a player skill that is underrated.

I came away impressed with how Mr. Durkin handled this. He understood that his company had made a mistake and my grievance was legitimate — and he treated it as such. None of us can guarantee we will never make a mistake, but we can try and clean it up afterwards when we fall short. And that’s what Mr. Durkin did without giving away the store.

To my mind, the fact that I had lost a bit more than usual this time made it easier for him to award me free play. Had I hit a $40,000 royal flush and ended up considerably ahead on the play, it would have been more difficult for him to justify the additional payment to his bosses. So, you can be sure I mentioned my loss in the negotiation. Had I won during the play, he probably would have mentioned that.

While idealists can make a pretty good case that my results shouldn’t have mattered in this case, these things do matter. Thinking they don’t would be naïve.

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Do You Have What it Takes?

Bonnie and I recently cruised the Mexican Riviera on NCL, courtesy of Penn National — in particular M Resort. We’ve vacationed several times on the same cruise line courtesy of Harrah’s/Caesars, but this time it was from somewhere else.

I packed a lot of M logo shirts — of which I have dozens. Perhaps two or three times per week, M offers free gifts — such as shirts or alcohol, sometimes higher-end stuff. I rarely go down to pick up these gifts. It’s ten miles away; it causes another trip which can lower my mailer; and how much do I need another T-shirt anyway? A few times a year, however, they have a “Warehouse Blowout” event on a Sunday, where they “give away” unclaimed items. Depending on your tier level, you get one, two, or three tickets for free and you can earn another four tickets for play that day. If you do “play up” for extra tickets, you also qualify for a free Sunday lunch buffet — which is a quality meal at this casino.

Once inside, you spend your tickets on whatever you like — keeping in mind that the pickings are pretty slim (leftover alcohol rarely finds its way to these events). Often neither Bonnie nor I can find stuff we can’t live without, so T-shirts and polo shirts (for which you get two shirts for one ticket) are our default. More than once I’ve brought home eight or ten shirts.

On the ship, a senior couple, “Marge” and “Ed,” recognized the shirt I was wearing and told me they lived in Henderson, which is in the greater Vegas area. They played Double Double Bonus and told me the casino they played at, Emerald Island, had the 9/6 version on a 100-coin penny machine — a level at which they were comfortable. “We’re retired, you know, the casino is close to home, and they give us free food.”

“That’s fine,” I told them. “The game is costing you a penny a hand on average, assuming you play well, offset by whatever food they give you. It sounds like low-cost entertainment.”

“What do you mean ‘play well?’” Marge asked. “It’s pretty much common sense.”

“Every hand has a mathematically correct play. Let me ask you some basic ones,” I said. “How would you play A♠ Q♥ J♣ 7♦ 4♣?” I knew the correct choice was QJ, but many DDB players hold just the ace. Occasionally some players without a clue hold AQJ.

“I’d throw them all away,” Marge announced.

Whoa! This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game is played. I wasn’t sure how to tell her that without insulting her.

“No,” I told her. “That’s not close. Sorry.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Computer programs tell you how to play every hand. Over time I’ve learned correct plays,” I told her.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Ed said.

“Do you guys own a PC?” I asked. They did. My computer, with Video Poker for Winners installed, was in my cabin. I was willing to spend a few minutes showing them — but if they hadn’t owned a computer there was no hope that they’d remember enough hints to make a difference.

When we got to my cabin, I let the computer deal hands just to see where they were. I had it set on “Advanced” so the hands were tougher than average. I didn’t do this to be mean — it’s just that they are more interesting. Having the computer ask them if they know how to play Q♥ Q♣ 7♦ 7♠ 7♥ is a waste of their time and mine.

One hand was K♠ Q♥ J♣ 9♣ 7♣. This is not a beginner level hand. Not all players would correctly play KQJ9. Some would hold KQJ and other hold J97. But not Ed and Marge.

“I’d hold king jack,” Ed told me. “Holding queens is always unlucky.”

“And I’d throw them all away,” Marge chimed in.

These were both awful decisions

Next was K♦T♦7♦ 6♠ 3♥. Ed held the KT and Marge held the K. Both wrong, but at least reasonable. They didn’t come close on three of the next five hands we tried.

There are some people who just aren’t smart enough to play intelligent video poker. I concluded I was talking to two of them. I didn’t suggest they buy the Winner’s Guide for the game because I think it would have been incomprehensibly difficult for them.

I did suggest they get the software. I told them that if they practiced a couple of hours a week before they played, and attempted to play like the computer recommended, they would save more than a thousand dollars a year.

Marge was doubtful. “I’ve seen people use strategy cards, including some with your name on them,” she told me. “They don’t do any better than anybody else.”

I asked Marge if she knew for sure how well she and Ed were doing gambling-wise this year. She didn’t. “Keeping records is too much like work. We’re retired, you know.”

I wanted to ask her how she could possibly know that somebody else was doing better or worse than she was if she didn’t even know how well she was doing? Surely, she had no strong knowledge of how the other person was doing either.

But I didn’t. I did tell them that strategy cards worked well if you practiced with them and used them regularly.

I also told her that I’d be teaching beginner DDB at the South Point, probably in January. I invited them and promised it would help them a lot. Although the DDB class is for beginners, they would probably still find it too difficult.

They left with a “we’ll think about it.” (I know what that means! It means I should assume 10-1 odds against them showing up for class.)

Playing video poker intelligently isn’t for everybody. It takes a certain level of the right kind of intelligence. Not everybody has a chance to succeed.

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D T B

Bonnie’s family accepts that I’m a successful gambler. They also believe that the methods and discipline I use to succeed involve far more study than they want to invest — especially since it will never be more than an occasional hobby for any of them. Continue reading D T B