Las Vegas Trip Report Part 3

In my last two posts, I didn’t talk much about the actual gambling. That wasn’t an oversight. You’ll remember that I said at the beginning that this wasn’t my usual working casino trip, but a fun vacation with my granddaughter, celebrating the finish of her thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t do any gambling. I mentioned in Part 1 about a long coupon run one afternoon. If you’ve been following my writings, you certainly know what importance I put on using coupons. In fact, in the early days I was called the Queen of KuPon before Dan Rather, on “48 Hours,” nicknamed me the Queen of Comps. Couponing is still one of the best ways to make a short-term profit in a casino, perhaps about the only way in the current tough casino environment.

We were a group of four on our run, using just the downtown coupons from the Las Vegas Advisor’s Member Rewards Book, so we could make this a walkable activity. Gambling is always an up-and-down ride and if you do a coupon run alone, there’s a possibility that you might lose in one session, although you should always win in the long term. This could even possibly happen with a team of two. However, if you’re using a fair number of coupons, teams of three or more will very likely come out ahead. The four of us had a litttle extra bad luck at some casinos, but even then, we managed to pull out a $51 profit for each of us at the end. And we enjoyed the bonus of visiting lots of different casinos while chatting with friends as we pulled together for a common goal; in short, you just can’t beat making money while you’re having fun!

Although Kaitlynn and I kept busy looking for exciting non-gambling activities, we often took a break to scout for slot machines that looked like they would be fun to play. Kaitlynn had read online about the classic Sigma Derby horse-racing machines; unfortunately, when we found it at the D, it was out of order. But Kaitlynn excitedly found the newer Konami Fortune Cup machine at the Linq. It’s not the old mechanical kind, but an electronic version where you can still watch the horses run around the track and cheer for  the ones you bet on. We found it an addictive group adventure as everyone around the machine was loudly rooting for their picks.

We did most of our gambling on the Strip at CZR casinos, since we were staying on one of their comped offers and I wanted to show at least some play there. One good thing about playing slots is that we’re considered more valuable by the casino than if we play video poker, so less play doesn’t negatively impact your play level as much. Most of the time, we played the lowest denominations we could find and when we hit even a little bonus or jackpot, we moved on looking for another machine. Kaitlynn inherited my frugal nature, so she buys into my play-low-play-slow slot mantra.

However, by accident, we stumbled onto a machine on which you collected Buddhas. I forget the exact name of the game, something about a “Jungle.” Every 10^th hand, all the Buddhas you collected on the first nine hands turned wild and you got a payoff from all the resulting completed paylines. Every spin had you looking for Buddhas, excited as you collected them, hoping you’d accumulate enough by the 10^th spin for some extra payoff, maybe even a big one. We didn’t want to leave that machine after the first sizable jackpot win, so we played longer than usual. I commented to Kaitlynn that the slot manufacturers are learning how to keep you playing longer; we always had that hope for a big 10^th spin.

If you’re a regular slot player, you probably wonder why I didn’t immediately realize what kind of machine I was playing. Remember, I rarely played slots for 35 years and have played very little the last couple of years. But eventually, I woke up to the fact that I was playing a machine that comes under the category of “advantage slots.”

I’d read some general information about these, but didn’t dive into the details before; I didn’t realize they’d become so available in the last few years. I knew these machines had a feature that you accumulated something or built up to something that got you to a short-term payoff point. Actually, I played a machine like that many many years ago, although we didn’t call it an “advantage slot,” just a “good” machine to play if you were an advantage player. It was the “piggy machine,” where you looked for a piggy bank that was almost full before you sat down to play it, knowing the bank would be breaking soon. There was another one back in those days where you collected firecrackers and it was good to play when a number of them were already visible on the screen. And more recently, a similar opportunity, I knew about Ultimate X video poker machines where some players did nothing but look for plays on those with bonus multipliers left by the previous player.

So, have I decided to concentrate on becoming an advantage slot expert from here on? Definitely not. This is very specialized gambling with complex mathematical calculations needed to know when you have an advantage. It’s also for someone who can constantly scout casinos (or hook up with a partner) and is happy to spend more time scouting than actually playing. And sad to say, this is the sort of thing that was a great moneymaker when not too many knew all about this good gambling option. Now, especially in Las Vegas, many knowledgeable players scout all the casinos. The competition may not be quite so tough in casinos outside of Las Vegas, but it will always take a lot of effort to find playable opportunities anywhere.

If you’re interested in this area of gambling, I suggest you search the Internet. Googling “advantage slots” will bring up a lot of information to get you started, but you have to be careful, since not all of it is mathematically reliable. You need accurate numbers about when to play. Figuring that out yourself takes very good math skills – or a good friend with them! You can find some very helpful information on advantage slots on LVA’s “Gambling with an Edge” podcast featuring Jimmy Jazz. In addition, a new edition of Michael “Wizard of Odds” Shackleford’s book Gambling 102 is coming out soon with a chapter devoted to accumulation slots.

However, even if, like me, you don’t want or are unable to add skillful advantage slot play to your gambling choices, you might find that this accumulating feature often makes a machine more exciting in your regular slot play. Kaitlynn and I found that out on our Buddha machine. We also loved the Ocean Grand machines. Watching those bubbles rise from the bottom of the screen is mesmerizing, as you hope to add more and more of them for a big jackpot.

I thought I’d finish up this Vegas trip report with this third installment. But I have more information and pictures and you all have asked more questions. So stay tuned for Part 4.