A version of this article first appeared about 10Â years ago.
Regular Deuces Wild, played for quarters, returns $250 for four deuces. Double Deuces returns $500 for the same hand, but takes away elsewhere in the pay schedule. Loose Deuces returns $625 for that hand and Triple Deuces gives you $750. Each of these games can be found in Las Vegas.
How about Quadruple Deuces returning $1,000 for four deuces? Or even more? In 2007, this game existed accidentally for a few months at a large local casino in Las Vegas, but it could have happened anywhere. And while the base Deuces Wild game on which it was found wasn’t all that great, adding 3,000 coins to an every-4,400-hands event adds about 12% to the return. Apparently four players were able to exploit this and keep the information quiet for a couple of months. They certainly didn’t post it on one of the Internet bulletin boards as that would have killed the play in a day or less.
What happened was this (I might have the facts a little off as I am getting this secondhand): There were eight quarter games tied to a progressive. Six of these games had the progressive set normally, which means that it would be collected when the royal was hit. But two of the games had the progressive accidentally attached to the four deuces hand. Apparently, a slot tech got a little bit sloppy one day and nobody who worked for the casino caught it. So, the four deuces hand started at $1,000 and moved up from there.
Since these were ticket-in, ticket-out machines, winning the jackpot merely spit out a ticket and the players could keep playing, so long as the jackpot was below $1,200. And it usually remained at that level because four deuces is a fairly frequent hand with respect to having the progressive rise $200 or more. When the progressive did rise that high, which it did a few times, these players wouldn’t play. They hoped that one of the other machines would hit the royal so everything would look normal. And their luck held. No over-$1,200 set of deuces was hit on either machine.
The way the bubble burst was that someone “not in the know” was playing one of the two juicy machines and happened to hit the royal flush. The nerve of them! When they were only paid $1,000 instead of whatever the meter read, they understandably felt cheated and called it to the attention of the floor people. When it escalated to supervisors, it didn’t take long for the casino to realize what the error was. The two machines were shut down for a while and adjusted. Christmas was over!
I was told about this play after the fact. One of the four players who hit this hard was attending one of my free classes and told me about it. He had just finished reading my Million Dollar Video Poker book in which I write about taking advantage of a similar-yet-different casino mistake. Â He wanted to tell me that these errors were still happening out there — if you could find them. Â
He asked me if the casino could demand its money back because of the machine overpaying. While first making sure he realized that I wasn’t a lawyer and couldn’t speak authoritatively on the subject, I told him that I didn’t believe the casino could effectively take any civil or criminal action against him. If the casino could not show that he was in cahoots with the slot tech who made the improper settings, then the casino was stuck.
What the casino COULD do, however, was restrict him from the property if it so chose. Assuming these four players used their slot club cards while playing this game, it wouldn’t be difficult for the casino to check their records and determine who was playing these machines heavily over the past few months. Even if the players didn’t use their cards, they were surely caught on surveillance tape.
The casino could well decide that they didn’t want these players around anymore and that would be perfectly legal. Casinos in Nevada can restrict the play of anyone, so long as it’s not based on things such as race, gender, or national origin.
Of course while this was going on, the players couldn’t be sure how it would all turn out. They were regularly winning $2,000 a week or more apiece, week after week, and that’s big money for quarter video poker. Winning like that is EXCITING, especially since you don’t know how long it’s going to last.
I wasn’t there, but there had to be discussions about how to share time on the machines, how to keep it quiet from others, and how much they could play without the casino employees noticing that these same guys were playing the same machines EVERY DAY all day long. There are no unique best answers on how to do this and opinions vary widely.
However they decided to do it, it was impossible to predict when a casino employee would put two and two together, when other players might find out and demand a piece of the action, or when someone accidentally hit the wrong kind of jackpot at the wrong time. There would have been all KINDS of things to worry about.
Mistakes continue to happen in casinos. To exploit them, you first have to FIND them. Players who do a lot of scouting have the best chances to find these kinds of mistakes. Players who don’t scout are left with complaining that other people find these things.