35 Years of Advantage Play – Part 8
So…last week you read about my miracle jump from quarters to dollars at the Four Queens in August of ‘95, increasing our bankroll by $8000, and might be thinking that you would see me now talking exclusively about Brad’s and my exciting “big-money” adventures.
Not!
And if you are an experienced VP player, you will not be surprised that I will be talking as much about valleys as mountains! After we left the Four Queens, we moved down to the Stratosphere and immediately hit their dollar machines. And there, Lady Luck deserted us, and our losses were fast and deep. We stopped and regrouped and looked at the situation.
Although all our play at both denominations was at a positive theoretical expected value (EV), the high EV of our quarter full-pay Deuces Wild (100.7%) play was a high base for adding promotional benefits. Our dollar play was on 9/6 JoB (99.5%) and the promotions put us in positive territory, but not nearly as high a percentage place as the quarter Deuces. This is when, as Brad put it, I started worshipping at the altar of High EV, where I stayed for most of the time the next 24 years, until we retired last December.
Yes, there are other ways to calculate your advantage, the main one being what your per-hour theoretical win would be; it often was greater on the higher denominations. Many gamblers use that measure with good success. But it takes an extremely larger bankroll, and I saw too many of our acquaintances run into financial problems using it. Brad and I were building up our bankroll rather quickly but in ’95 we wanted to keep our risk as low as possible, and that meant choosing the highest EV we could find and that was mostly on the quarter level. Sometimes we could find a 50-cent machine, which was a more comfortable level for us, but mainly we stuck with quarters for the next couple of years.
The only exception was a period when we played a lot at the Frontier. They had 50-cent full-pay Deuces Wild (FPDW) which we loved. We hit that $2000 royal 3 times. There was also a 6-coin quarter 9/6 JoB multiple-progressive near the deuce games and we would watch when one – or more – of the progressives was high and race over to claim a seat. Brad loved that machine. We hit many of the smaller jackpots, and Brad hit big on it twice, one for $1571 and another for $3803.
A big draw for a lot of the players was the short time in late December of ‘95 that the Frontier put in dollar FPDW. I was so excited; Brad not so much so.
“I really want to play it,” I said.
Brad and I always discussed these decisions, and we usually wanted to play side-by-side. But this time he resisted, “I’m quite happy playing the 50-centers.” He saw my disappointment. “But you are quite welcome to go play them.” And he gave me a big wad of hundreds from his pocket. “You’ll need them!”
So off I trotted further back in the casino where they were beckoning me. Again, like at the Four Queens back in August, I don’t remember how I was doing at first, but it was not a long time before I drew to 3 and a royal filled in. While I was waiting to get paid, I ran back up to where Brad was playing to share the news. He smiled and said, “You better just keep playing.”
About an hour and a half later, some man who seemed to know us rushed up to Brad and said that “his little woman” had gotten a royal. Brad didn’t recognize the man, but being polite just commented that he had known that.
“You don’t understand – you have to come see, “insisted the man. “She just got another one – and it was dealt to her!”
What a way to end 1995!
’95 and ’96 were heady years for us, spending almost 300 days “living” in a casino, mostly in Vegas, but with trips to the riverboats in Illinois when we were back home in Indy. We hit 24 royals – mostly $1000 on our quarter play but a few higher ones when we went up in denomination or played a progressive. We were seeing a modest profit and covering all our expenses, which were becoming much lower because our heavier play was generating major room and food comps. And we were having almost more fun than we could stand!
Stay tuned when next week I will report some changes when we traveled onto our 1997 pathway.
Much later than when you’re talking about–I believe it was about 2003–I started seeing .25 FPDW drying up, and the casinos that offered it were starting to slash players’ club points and mailers for play on those machines. It was also the beginning of the time when video poker APs were being actively hunted down and snuffed out. So I went to a different strategy of playing dollar 9/6 JOB at pretty much all of the big Strip casinos that offered it. I wanted to see if the goodies I got would produce an ultimately greater positive return than the $9 an hour I was earning at .25 FPDW (plus meager benefits).
The first positive was that I was able to earn players’ club points at rates like not 0.1% or worse, but 0.2%, 0.3%, or even better. The second was that while I was playing a negative EV game, JOB isn’t volatile, so I rarely suffered the “I lost half a royal” bloodbaths that were so common at FPDW. The third was that the mailers were good–really good. NYNY sent me $500 a month free play for six months, for instance.
The common thread was that the burst of goodies was usually short-lived, as they ultimately realized that I wasn’t going to be the cash cow their metrics said I would. Generally, I stayed away for a year after a given casino dried up–and then I could repeat the cycle all over again. And sometimes, stuff would come in the mailbox out of the blue–I learned that this often happened when a casino changed slot hosts.
This situation stayed profitable for the next 5-6 years, even as inherently positive VP withered and died all over town. Of course, now, all the machines are garbage and they won’t give you a stale donut for playing them. Those were the days.