I heard a story once about a wiseguy who was playing video poker heavily at a non-Nevada casino so much he moved from Las Vegas for a year to there just to play there. I knew this casino had 9/6 Jacks or Better at high denominations but only .1 cashback. So a mystery. He had a host and could eat anywhere and do things like play golf for free without using points. They thought he was a whale and comped him heavily. Still, the mystery persists because while those things are nice they don’t get you over 100% cash return. The answer is he was getting a stupendous amount of players club points thru special offers and perks given to whales and then using them in the gift shop to buy things like Rolex watches and then selling them for cash on E-Bay. So that is the thing about advantage play, you never know what somebody might be up to.

I’m going to guesstimate your theoretical loss. At 600 hands an hour (which seems like a reasonable assumption), you had $15,000 worth of action x 10 hours, or $150,000. Your theoretical loss was 0.27% of that, or right about $400. So the question is, did you receive more or less than $400 worth of goodies in return for your play? That’s the only relevant question, whether the ride required was a roller coaster or a slow train on a level track. You might say that the “thrill” is an intrinsic goal in and of itself, but the problem with riding the roller coaster is that you can easily wind up with an actual loss that far exceeds your theoretical loss. You were well bankrolled, but still…the goodies that should theoretically have cost $400 wound up costing $3500…and it was almost $8500.