Whom Do You Trust?

About fifty years ago Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon had an afternoon television show entitled “Who Do You Trust?” I remember years later Johnny saying that correct grammar would have been “Whom Do You Trust?” I’m going to trust that Johnny was correct.

For two weeks in mid-to-late December, the M Resort had an invitational point challenge where the winner received a 2011 LandRover LR4. I wasn’t sure who was invited and who was going to take the competition seriously, but I thought it was worth a shot.

As I mentioned in last week’s column, I strategized that if I played $2.5 million in coin-in at the start of the contest, perhaps everybody else would “give up.” Assuming the car could be sold for more than $40,000, this was a 1.6% promotion. I was hoping it didn’t take $10 million in coin-in, but even if it did, a 0.4% bonus on essentially an even game isn’t a bad deal.

The first Friday had a “Royal Treatment” promotion, worth 99.97% including cash back on 50¢ Fifty Play 8/5 Bonus. I played $1.8 million. My expected loss was about $540. My actual loss was $30,000. The next day I played $700,000 on $25 9/6 Double Double Bonus with a 0.90% slot club because it was 3x points. My expected $840 loss turned into $35,000. I was now down $65,000 — and I wasn’t even guaranteed to win the car. Shirley was not happy about this.

I was told that the lady in second place, “Joyce,” played $900,000 before I even started. I checked every day to see if she (or anybody else) was playing, but nobody seemed to be challenging me. Which was fine. I’d take the car, sell it at a loss, but still end up the calendar year in pretty good shape.

The promotion ended on Wednesday, December 29, at midnight. On Tuesday afternoon I got a phone call from somebody saying that Joyce was playing again. I didn’t want to hear this. Joyce was playing a $25 single-line game and could easily play $100,000 coin-in per hour. I had a 16-hour lead on her, but I’ve known her for years and she has sometimes played for more than 24 hours straight when motivated. Winning a car might be sufficient motivation.

So I drove over to the M and spoke quietly with Joyce. I told her that if she continued to play, so would I. I told her that I was prepared to start playing again to “protect” my position and that I didn’t believe it was possible for her to win.

She told me she didn’t want the car and that she was only playing to guarantee her the $12,500 second-place finish. This didn’t quite ring true. She was playing $25 9/6 Triple Double Bonus, and frankly the $12,500 win for second place was not a very big jackpot on such a machine — and you lose really, really fast between jackpots.

She had been playing for a few hours by the time I got there so I figured my lead was down to 12 hours. She told me she was leaving in a few hours. I told her to do what she wanted, but that I was going to be playing until she quit. So I sat down and started playing 50¢ Fifty Play 8/5 Bonus. There was no special promotion that day and the machine is limited to single points. Still, a 99.47% game should cost me only $530 per $100,000 bet, on average, and seeing me play might get her to stop playing a little faster. So much for averages, I dropped an additional $15,000 before she quit. Damn! (And I can’t know for sure whether she would have quit if I hadn’t been there maintaining my lead.)

When she left, she told me she wouldn’t be back the next day — but the slot department locked up her machine “in case” she wanted it back. Although we know each other and are somewhat friendly, I didn’t know whether or not to believe her. She could be just saying that as gamesmanship. If she could sneak back and start playing undetected, she could still win the car.

I didn’t want that to happen, of course, so what should I do about it? I have some friends who may have been willing to “stake out” the high limit room for, perhaps, $100 for the next 24 hours, but my friends don’t know Joyce. So I decided to get a room at the casino and come downstairs every four hours to check whether she had come back. If she played, so would I. If she didn’t, I wouldn’t either. It was a very boring way to spend a day, but I had my computer in the room and worked on some articles and it wasn’t that much different from what I’d be doing at home anyway.

Joyce didn’t show up. I won the car. When I saw her a few days later at the casino’s New Year’s Eve party she told me, “I TOLD you I wasn’t coming back. You should have believed me!”

It was easy for me to agree with her AFTER the fact. But BEFORE I knew the final outcome, I believe it would have been foolhardy to take her at her word. She might be a very honest woman, but I didn’t know her well enough to trust that.