Downtown Grand: Best $1 VP?

Thanks LVRoyale. pjstroh recently wrote that the Bonus Poker at DG was terrible, 6/5 instead of his preferred 8/5 if I recall. Hmm . . . .

Right. All the paytables I saw were under 98% (and some way under) except for 9/6 TDB at 98.15%.

As of two weeks ago, here's the VP situation at Downtown Grand.

First off, as best I can tell there's real uniformity there, with no variation between the paytables for a given game and denomination. In other words, every quarter JoB machine in the place pays 8/6. Also, quarter and $0.50 machines all share the same paytable.

Here's the best of what I found at the quarter and $0.50 level:
8/6 JoB 98.39%
6/5 BP 96.87%
9/6/4 DB 96.38%

And at the $1 level:
9/5 JoB 98.45%
7/5 BP 98.01%
9/6/5 DB 97.81%

I wound up playing my $1000 in freeplay on 9/5 JoB at the $1 level. After playing exactly 200 hands, I had $945 in cash, well within any reasonable expectation. In $100 chunks, it went like this:

Free-> Cash
100 -> $40
200 -> $130
300 -> $215
400 -> $330
500 -> $475
600 -> $660
700 -> $770
800 -> $835
900 -> $880
1000 -> $945

Terrible pay tables!! Not even remotely competitive with other downtown properties. How do they expect to attract customers??

don-----I agree-----used to go to the lady luck when they had fpdw with coins at the bar at the 25c level---stayed there 4 or 5 times with comp rooms----liked the place even though a bit tacky---- now no reason to go there unless passing bye and need to use the rest room---

Yes, the math is clear. Downtown Grand's VP is stingier than its competitors downtown. No getting around that fact.

But is it really that terrible? Imagine your game is quarter JoB. If you hunt around, you can find it downtown paying 9/6, which is 99.54% payback. At the DG, you'll only get 8/6, which is 98.39%. But how bad is that really?

Well, at $1.25 a play, you'll lose an extra cent and a half every game playing 8/6 instead of 9/6. At that rate, it'll take you quite a while to lose an additional $20 at the DG. 1,391 hands, to be exact. That's at least 3-4 hours of intense play for most people. Plus, at DG you can play it at a nice bar and get good drink service. Other than possibly Main Street Station, you may not find 9/6 at a bar downtown. Over the course of 3-4 hours of intense play, could good drink service and the nice, relaxed, upscale atmosphere of DG be worth $20? Maybe, at least for some.

Now, I'm the cheap sort and don't value fast drink service very highly, so I probably am going to find that 9/6 machine at a dumpier downtown casino and play it instead.

But really, in the great scheme of things, it's not brutally expensive to play 8/6 JoB at the DG.

Looks like you walked away with a nice chunk of the $1000 they gave you. Congrats, dude!

I liked the Grand. I didn't play much VP there but the table games were perfectly fine...and the slots seemed just as loose as anywhere else downtown. It will be interesting to see how VP plays out going forward there. Golden Nugget has seemed to do just fine with gaming revenues despite having crappy VP. I wouldn't put the Downtown Grand in that same echelon of property but they seem to be getting along so far.

Keep in mind there are plenty of people who have no clue how to recognize full pay VP. They're just happy to sit at the bar and get their drinks comped while they play whatever is in front of them. I suspect newer, shiner places have more of these types of people.

Thanks! I'm not much of a gambler, so when I have a win of any size it usually has to come via my incessant promotion mining or some such.

My next hope at DG is to win DG's casino credit promo.

VP 9/6 is 99+% with perfect play. So are a few others.
I would prefer to play "live" BJ over video at $1 per hand. Or $5.