35 Years of Advantage Play – Part 19– Q+A

Q:  Love the financial details. However, I would be curious about just one year. What, if I may ask, was your final result the year you won the 250k? I would be happy just to know if it was more or less than 250k. The exact number isn’t really important. Special congratulations would be in order if it was more!

A:  We were running hot that whole year we won the Caesars Million Dollar tournament.  Even without that cash bounce – 250K after we split the 1/2 million with our tournament partners – our bottom-line result would have put us in our Top Five “best years.”

Brad holding the trophy, flanked by his two favorite girls at the Caesars  tournament awards dinner.

Q:  Were any of the games you played in your early days still around by the time you finished your gambling journey?

A:  9/6 JoB has always been available to us for our 35+ years of play, but for many of the early years we had stuck mostly to the higher-EV Full-pay Deuces Wild, which was widely available for our quarter-play level.  When we went to dollars, we often found strong enough extra benefits and promotions to make JoB a better per-hour choice.

In fact, our last big play, in early 2019, was on the 9/6 JoB Fifty Play at Harrah’s Tahoe.  I forget the exact promotional details, but the edge – maybe 2-3%? – was the best marketing offer we had come across for several years, worth a plane trip from Vegas.

I will confess that the heavy play that we would need to put in for this offer scared me a bit, because we were facing theoretically a possible huge loss that we probably could not “smooth over” by other big plays in the future.  Single-line $1 NSUD – the best play it seemed we were stuck with in Vegas – would never make up big losses.  But we decided to take the risk.    Disappointingly, we didn’t score the big win amount that the theoretical edge promised. But we knew from long experience that the edge math figures were for long-term play.  However, we didn’t lose;  in fact, we came home with a couple of thousand dollars trip profit, very happy –and relieved! – for the “good luck” on this short-term risky endeavor.

I remember another time many years earlier when we did a risky short-term play and the end results weren’t so lucky.  Harrah’s Laughlin had put in $5 Double Bonus (100.17 % EV) during the time that there were few positive games at the higher denominations; one usually needed to find the best-available negative game in a casino where the extra benefits boasted the play EV over 100%.  We pounded that DB game for many hours a day over a whole weekend.  I forget what edge we had but with the extras  it was what we considered a good play at the time.  We had a very substantial bankroll and had already started playing some at higher levels, but the 20K we lost that weekend gave us an emotional shock.  We should not have been so surprised since we had been playing Double Bonus at the $1-$2 levels for years and knew it was a very volatile game.   But losing so much so fast reminded us that although VP math was an undeniably trustworthy guide, it was only for a long-term journey.

However, this incident many years ago was different than the situation in Tahoe I described earlier, one  that made us fearful.  We knew that we would have many more opportunities to play at similar high levels so it didn’t make us change the way we played.  We kept playing, even at higher levels when we found an opportunity where we would have a good advantage.  And although it is never “fun” to lose, we were learning to accept the inevitable losses, even the big ones.  The longer we played it helped that we could look back at our records and be reminded of our positive long-term results of the past and keep the faith in the math for the future.

Q: What is your favorite casino?

A: I’ve been asked this question for 20+ years – and the answer has always been the same:  The one with the best advantage play at the moment!

Why won’t I give specific casino names?

For one thing it depends on when you asked the question.  If I mention where I will play on Monday, it is very unlikely that where I play on Saturday will be the same. If you asked me that in 2000, the casino I mention may likely not even exist today – perhaps blown up and its ashes in the wind.

Another reason I avoid specifics is that sometimes other players take my information as recommendations.  But if I am playing dollars at a particular casino, it might have no good opportunities for quarter players.  I might be playing at a Vegas casino that markets to locals and it would not give any advantages to out-of-town tourists or visa-versa.

Looking back over our 35+ years of visiting and playing in casinos all over the world, no one casinos stands above another – just a flood of happy memories from all over!