For the three days of Labor Day weekend the Gold Coast offered 7x points for video poker and 25x drawing tickets. It’s not always the case at that casino, but usually point multipliers are limited to 10,000 base points. And there’s an official maximum of 10,000 drawing tickets per day, which you’d reach after play 4,000 base points when the 25x multiplier for tickets was in effect.
Anyone smart enough to read the rules of the promotions would know these things. The smarter players who know the Gold Coast system well were able to predict that this was a situation where the casino might deviate from what the rules actually said.
The point multiplier is accurate in real time. That is, if you play 10,001 points, the first 10,000 points get multiplied by 7 (on a 7x point day) and the last point gets multiplied by 1, 2, or 3 depending on your tier level. Because I have an Emerald card (I think that is earned by playing a total of 250,000 points over all B Connected properties over a 6 month period), I get 3x every day so if I play 10,001 base points it translates into 70,003 points on my card. This happens essentially immediately.
The drawing ticket multiplier works differently. During the day, you can earn lots of drawing tickets and then sometime overnight they run a computer program which removes all drawing tickets in excess of the 10,000 daily limit. Since the 10x multiplier days are usually Tuesday and Thursday (they vary periodically) and the drawings are on Saturday (and sometimes Friday), this system works sufficiently well.
But on Saturday September 1 there was a drawing on the same day as 25x tickets were being awarded. And the drawing would be held BEFORE the program to remove the excess tickets was run. Therefore, players who realized this about the Gold Coast drawings could have a LOT more tickets in the virtual drum than players who figured the 10,000-tickets-per-day limit would be in effect.
I decided beforehand that this was my best shot at the September drawing. I planned on playing about $100,000 coin-in that day — earning 250,000 tickets. This would take me about 10 hours and I planned my day accordingly.
I arrived at the property about 6 a.m. Someone I know, “George,” saw me and asked me how many tickets I was planning on earning. I’m reasonably friendly with George but he isn’t a confidant. I didn’t want to let him know what my plans were because he might well call five friends who might each call three or four of their friends, who might each call . . . etc. The Gold Coast was going to call 5 people only at the drawing and each person drawn has an EV of about $1,100 for this particular promotion. I couldn’t possibly earn enough tickets so that I was a favorite to be called in the drawing. But my chances would be better if most people played their normal amount.
If George found out later that the tickets were unlimited, so be it. I can’t help it. But finding out later in the day might well restrict how many tickets he could play. He might well have other plans for the day. But letting him know 14 hours before the drawing might give him plenty of time to work out when to play. And I didn’t want the extra competition.
So I told him, accurately, that I didn’t know for sure how much I was going to play and that the rules limited the tickets you could earn to 10,000 per day. If George were a confidant, I would have told him more and tried to swear him to secrecy. But he isn’t, so I didn’t.
Whether I was right or wrong about the “unlimited 25x drawing tickets” I was going to play 10,000 points anyway. I know it was unlimited in the past but they may well have fixed this. I have no way of knowing other than by swiping my card at the kiosk to see how many tickets I had earned. So after an hour of play I went over to see how many drawing tickets I had earned for the day. Sure enough I had 25,000 more tickets than I had the day before. My plan was on track so I went back to play.
I had an errand to run during the day, so a little after noon I swiped my card again to make sure everything was on course. I had played 60,000 points so I was expecting 150,000 more tickets in the barrel than I had yesterday. It turns out I only got credit for 100,000 tickets for the day. My first thought was that some of my tickets might not have accumulated yet. But it wasn’t APPROXIMATELY 100,000 tickets. It was EXACTLY 100,000 tickets. That sounds like a programmatic limit. Unbeknownst to me there appeared to be a 100,000-point maximum regulator built into the computer program. So I guess it isn’t totally unlimited. Oh well. I learned something new about the Gold Coast slot club. And I decided I was done playing for the day.
I ended up with almost 125,000 tickets because I had almost 25,000 tickets from earlier in the week. I likely had more tickets in the drum than anybody else, but when they called five names to go up on stage, my name wasn’t mentioned. I suspect there were about 2 million tickets in the drum (which is more a guess than a calculation). If so, my tickets gave me almost $350 in EV given that a total of $5,500 was being given away and I had 1/16 of the tickets in the barrel. In drawings like this, an average of $350 means occasionally you’ll win $4,000 and lots of the time you’ll win nothing. This was one of the “lots of the time” zeroes.
There are a lot of gamblers who are results oriented. They would argue that since I didn’t get called in the drawing I wasted a whole day of playing. I disagree. The best before-the-fact decisions you can make come from following where you get the highest EV. If you continually do that, you’ll usually end up with a positive score at the end of the year even though there are a lot of ups and downs along the way.
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