The Las Vegas Advisor solicits “Questions of the Day” and some of the ones related to video poker are passed along to me. I answer, on average, one or two of these a month.
On February 9, there was a QOD about hitting a jackpot while using someone else’s slot club card.
Continue reading The Last Thing I Would DoEmails and letters from video poker players are part of my life, and often I get the same sort of question or request over and over again. Every month or so I get some version of the following:
Dear Bob:
I’m a huge fan of yours. I’m leaving for Vegas in nine days and counting. I want to know where the pros play so I don’t waste my time on inferior games. If you don’t tell me, it’s because you are a selfish jerk and I’ll never buy any more of your products.
(signed) Appreciative Fan
It’s gratifying to know that I have fans, even though I’m a selfish jerk. But there are many reasons I can’t give Mr. A. Fan what he asks. Let’s look at some of them.
These are a few of the things to consider in choosing what game to play and at which casino. I can’t answer the “where to play” question for you without all of this information.
I suggest that you’d be better off if you considered these questions before you made your own decision about where to play.
I received an email asking which of two casinos was the better choice for this player.
Casino A had 9/6 Jacks or Better with a 0.1% slot club with no multiple points ever. Casino B had 8/5 Bonus Poker with a 0.25% slot club, and he only played when there were triple points. He said the food comps at Casino A were better, but he wasn’t there for eating. He was there for making money.
He told me he played both games perfectly. This is extremely unlikely. Although 9/6 Jacks or Better is one of the easiest video poker games to memorize, 8/5 Bonus Poker isn’t. I would estimate fewer than one in a thousand 8/5 Bonus Poker players play the game perfectly. But letting that assumption slide, let’s see what we have, assuming perfect play.
Casino A: 9/6 Jacks 99.54%
Slot Club 00.10%
Total 99.64%
Casino B: 8/5 Bonus 99.17%
Slot Club 00.75%
Total 99.92%
The obvious answer, then, is that Casino B is considerably better. For a dollar player who plays 600 hands per hour, Casino A is $8.40 per hour more expensive than Casino B.
The obvious answer is incorrect, however. For this player, it is not the case that Casino B is better. Why not? Because his stated goal is to make money and that means that both casinos are TOTALLY unacceptable. Not less acceptable; TOTALLY unacceptable.
A return of 99.92% is not “close enough.” It’s impossible to end up a long-term winner when the casino has any advantage at all.
If the casinos had other promotions, however, that could change things. Perhaps one or both send periodic checks in the mail on the order of “come in during the first two weeks of the month and we’ll give you $50 just for showing up.” Or perhaps they have regular drawings and the player has a decent shot at winning something valuable. Either or both of these promotions could make the casinos potentially profitable. But without such promotions, the house has the edge.
For most players, this would not be an insurmountable problem. Few players demand that casinos be potentially profitable. (No slot player, for example, has any realistic expectation of being an overall winner. They hope to win THIS TIME, but they know that in the long run the casino will most likely win from them.)
Many players value the gambling experience and count the free meals and rooms as part of the deal. For players like that, both casinos offer an excellent gamble which is better for the player than can be found in many casinos. Which casino is better might well depend on how much better the food is at the casino with the lesser game and how important that is to the player. To some people having a quality meal is extremely important. Others don’t care that much.
Or perhaps how nice the rooms are. Or maybe how smoky the casino is. Or possibly “easier to get to.” All kinds of solid reasons exist for choosing one place over another.
What should this particular player do then? The choice is between either not playing, or lowering his expectations about whether or not this game will be profitable. It would not be terrible should he decide to play anyway because he really enjoys it. After all, people pay to do many pleasurable things. And if gambling is pleasurable, it’s okay to pay for that too. But I encourage you to be realistic about whether you are playing for profit or playing for pleasure.
In similar cases, I ALWAYS choose not to play. I’ve played video poker for close to 25 years and it’s isn’t a “special treat” to me. I enjoy it. But I can go without playing if the odds aren’t there.
I received a postcard from the M where they are trying to get new players. The promo was:
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.
Using stereotypes to say “women are this way and men are that way” in today’s political climate is a formula guaranteed to generate multiple negative comments. Rightfully so. There is very little interesting where you can say that every female (or every male) is a certain way. There are always exceptions.
With that said, there are also tendencies that appear to be there. A tendency doesn’t mean a certainty. For example, I can correctly say that in general men tend to be taller than women. And that’s true on average — but we recognize there are some taller and shorter examples of each sex.
What brings this up is something that happened to a friend of mine, Reuben, who is also a competent video poker professional. He was playing at a casino whose name he doesn’t want me to publish, and playing a game that is still around. He said that if I wrote about it, I could call it $5 Multi Strike — just to give it a name — but in fact it was a different game.
He was playing two machines at a time — which happened to be the only two $5 Multi Strike machines in the casino. He believed that the game plus the slot club plus whatever promotions were going on gave him enough of an advantage to justify him being there.
He rarely played two machines at a time. It often announces “I am a pro” to a casino which tends to reduce your longevity there. But in this particular casino, he had run unlucky and to date was a big loser — even though he had always played games with positive EV. Since he figured this casino wouldn’t make him as a pro, he could play more aggressively than he otherwise would.
After playing a while, a woman he had never seen before came up and asked if these were the only two high-denom Multi Strike machines in the casino. Instead of his usual “I don’t know,” which is generally the smart answer in cases like this, he told her that yes, he believed they were.
The woman then asked, “How long do you intend to play?” Reuben said he hadn’t really decided yet. It depended on how much he lost and how quickly. Which was nonsense, of course. Reuben was planning on playing until midnight, which was when the promotion ended. She looked at the machines longingly for a while and then left.
Reuben speculated that she was waiting for him to offer her a machine. After all, in Reuben’s experience, women tend to be more empathic and less direct in their requests. Had it been his wife instead of a stranger, his wife would have expected him to realize that she wanted a machine — and hence, given one to her because it was the polite thing to do.
Still, keeping both machines was the desired goal and if this lady wanted a machine, she was, at a minimum, going to have to explicitly ask for one. Whether Reuben would have said yes or no wasn’t a certainty. He would have made a decision when necessary — but not before. There are often extenuating circumstances one way or the other.
Reuben considered the possibility that the woman would go to the slot shift boss and complain that she couldn’t get a machine and one guy was hogging both of them. He didn’t want that to happen, although it was largely out of his control. He preferred to be a “low maintenance” player. It doesn’t take too many incidents for some casino employees to conclude this player is “always” causing trouble. If he developed that unwanted reputation, close calls down the road (such as whether to pay him in a sticky button situation — or whether to allow him to remain even after he starts winning) might not go his way.
If the slot shift boss came over and asked for a machine for the woman, Reuben’s answer would have been an immediate, “Of course.” He likely would have added, “All she needed to do was to ask me, but she never did.” The last four words were absolutely true. The first nine — maybe. But the slot shift boss couldn’t know that.
It’s possible the woman believed she shouldn’t have to ask. She possibly believed even a guy should have been able to understand she wanted a machine. It could seem to her to be common courtesy that should prompt Reuben to give up a machine. That definitely was Reuben’s best guess as to what his wife would believe were she the one wanting a machine.
One thing that Reuben felt was a bit of a safety cushion this time was that the slot shift boss was a man. Right or wrong, he believed a male shift boss would be more sympathetic to “she never actually asked” than a woman shift boss would. Reuben’s actions would likely have been the same with any boss, but he would expect the aftermath to be gentler on him when the boss was a male.
Could Reuben’s stereotypes and assumptions based on them have been way off? Of course. No player or boss acts exactly like you expect him or her to.
Is he smart to use such stereotypes and assumptions in his decisions? Absolutely. You are frequently called on to make decisions based on incomplete information, and sometimes stereotypes give you some extra information that is useful.
Would Reuben be called prejudiced or sexist if he verbalized his thought processes? That too. You can’t please everybody, and people will use whatever ammunition against you that you give them. Often, it’s better to make your decisions quietly and not discuss why you made them.
