On Saturday November 3, I was at the Palms for a special drawing. This was not the typical 7 p.m. weekly drawing open to everyone. This was a special invited guest drawing where fewer than 200 people (based on previous play) had been invited to receive a free cruise — and this group would have a special drawing at 9:30 p.m. where $20,000 in cash, free play, or cruise credit was to be given away.
Play after midnight Wednesday counted for both the regular Friday/Saturday drawings plus the special invited-guests-only drawing. Since these were the rules, I played a total of about $500,000 on Thursday and Friday, figuring it would give me a decent chance at all three drawings. This would basically be my play for the entire month at the Palms.
For the cruise drawing, it didn’t matter on which denomination of machine you played. All video poker games generated drawing tickets at the same rate. But for the regular Friday/Saturday drawings, it mattered a great deal on which machine you played.
For the weekly drawings at the Palms, you receive tickets based on the lowest denomination available on the machine you play. The formula differs a little each month, but basically if you play on machines where 5¢ or lower denominations may be found, you get one ticket per $100 of coin-in. If you play on machines where 25¢ is the lowest denomination, it takes $250 coin-in to earn a ticket. If you play on machines where $1 is the lowest denomination, it takes $500 coin-in to earn that same ticket.
The players who wish to obtain tickets at the lowest-price-per-ticket generally play 25¢ Five Play or Ten Play 9/6 Jacks or Better. This is the loosest game that is eligible for promotions. These machines have 5¢ games on them, so they earn tickets at the highest rate. Playing the Ten Play machine allows you to play at a rate of about $7,000 per hour. Unfortunately, playing $500,000 of coin-in over two days is impossible on these machines.
If you’re going to play more, the best game is 25¢ Hundred Play 8-5 Bonus Poker. This game is quite a bit tighter than 9/6 Jacks or Better (99.17% versus 99.54%), but you can play $60,000 coin-in per hour. Players who play this game are sacrificing considerable EV on the game, but are hoping that the extra chances in the drawings make up for it. (Or, at least, that’s my logic.) Even if you decide to play this game, there is one bank of machines that include 5¢ – 10¢ – 25¢ denominations and another bank where 25¢ is the one and only denomination you can play. If you’re aware of the way they run their weekly drawings, you’ll know that one of these machines creates drawing tickets 2.5 times as fast as the other — for playing the exact same game.
With a 99.17% return for the game and a 0.25% slot club, the total nominal return is 99.42%. This means my expected loss per $100 of coin-in is 58¢, which is a $580 loss per $100,000, or a loss of $2,900 if I play through $500,000. I felt it likely that I would do well enough over the three drawings to recoup that loss. Not to be ignored is the fact that $500,000 play in a month should generate a mailer totaling $450 or so per month for a couple of months.
Anyway, that’s the theory. Anyone who gambles knows that there are swings. I’ve played similar amounts before, lost $15,000 on the play, and then wasn’t called in the drawing. I’ve won big on the play (rather than lose the expected $2900) sometimes as well. It’s the average that’s important to me — not the results over a specific weekend.
This time I did pretty well. I lost a total of $200 on the play, won the last-place prizes in the weekly drawings on both Friday and Saturday–James Bond 50th Anniversary Blu-Ray DVD sets retailing at $350 apiece. (It’s Shirley’s job to figure out who will receive them as gifts, but since her son was named after Sean Connery, I’m pretty certain that I know where one set is going.) I also won $5,000 in the cruise drawing. This was a better than average result (this time) but that’s not why I’ve written this article. At least one person had more tickets than me and was shut out on all three drawings. I’ve been on that side of it too.
Before the cruise drawing, I was chatting with a lady named “Charlotte.” Shirley and I have been friendly with Charlotte and her husband for more than ten years. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen her recently at the Palms. She told me she didn’t participate in the weekly drawings because she never won, but this time she had played heavily and hoped that her luck would be different.
I asked Charlotte how much she played. She told me that she had played $160,000 coin-in on the $2 9/6 Jacks or Better machines. You can play about $10,000 coin-in per hour on these machines, so that means she played two days in a row for eight hours each day. Indeed, that was a lot of play. For the cruise drawing it didn’t matter which denomination you played, so these machines were a decent compromise. They earned more tickets than the 25¢ Ten Play version of the same game and anyone who earned more tickets than Charlotte had to have played a tighter game.
She hadn’t shown up for the 7 p.m. weekly drawings because she “knew” she never won — plus she wasn’t even aware that there were the weekly drawings that weekend. I told her that the machine she had played was not very efficient for earning weekly drawing tickets. The reason she hadn’t won any weekly drawings in the past was partly because she was playing the wrong game/machine mix. Players who intelligently go after winning the drawings there make other choices.
Charlotte then told me that she thought it unfair because no one had told her these things. She was talking to the wrong guy about this. I suggested that if she read the rules, or read my columns, or listened to my radio show, or came to my classes, she would know these things. I told her that Jean Scott and others have written about this as well. She said that she was too busy to do any of that sort of stuff, but still, somebody should have told her. I told her that I just had.
There are relatively few teachers ready and available to instruct you at the exact moment you’re ready to receive the message. No one else knows exactly what you don’t know or don’t remember. And anyone (like a parent or spouse) who is constantly trying to teach you stuff is often tuned out.
Gathering information is an active process. Learning about drawings (or slot clubs or other promotions) is every bit as important as learning how to play the games well. Some folks find learning the games more difficult — some folks find learning about slot clubs and promotions more difficult. But the bottom line is winning players need to learn all of this.
It’s a mistake to think that you can stop learning about all of this and still do as well as those who keep up on it. Some things stay constant in this game (such as how to play a particular hand in a particular game). But a whole lot of things keep changing.
And Charlotte getting angry because other people have passed her by in relevant knowledge is fairly typical. People who struggle to get to the top (as Charlotte and her husband did a decade ago) often want to stay at the top without continuing to struggle to learn stuff. Their feelings are easily understood. But life doesn’t work that way.
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