How Do You Figure?

I receive a lot of mail addressed to [email protected]. These are primarily from podcast listeners who hope I can answer one of their questions.

A recent email went as follows: “There is a casino that is offering a bonus only to their top level players- if you have the top card and hit a dealt royal at 1 dollar denom or better you will win 100k on top of the payout. I know it’s a great promotion but do you know what it’s worth per hour- I am already the top level so that won’t factor into it.”

Go ahead and try to tackle it yourself if you like. The rest of this blog will be here indefinitely while you work it out.

More than just the answer to the question, I found there were a lot more considerations to think about.

1. I assume we’re talking a 52-card deck. Dealt royals occur, in round numbers, every 650,000 hands.

2. How fast do you play? If you play 650 hands per hour, it will take you 1,000 hours on average to earn your $100,000 bonus — which comes out to $100 per hour. One thousand hours is about six months of 40 hours per week.

3. Playing faster or slower will decrease or increase your hourly rate accordingly.

4. Notice that it doesn’t matter whether you’re playing for $1, $2, $5, $25, etc. It’s still an increase in $100 per hour — assuming W2Gs are paid instantly. If it takes 5 minutes or so for each W2G, then higher denominations (where more W2Gs are earned) receive less of the bonus per hour than the lower denominations.

5. This doesn’t mean you’re going to be ahead $100 per hour unless you are playing an even game. If you’re playing a game where you usually lose $80 per hour, this means you’ll net $20 an hour in profit — long term.

6. This is an average of $100 per hour — but it doesn’t mean that if you play 10 hours you’re going to receive $1,000. The $100,000 will be all at once — if at all.

7. Notice that it doesn’t matter what game we are playing, so long as we’re talking about a 52-card deck. Jacks or Better has a royal cycle of 40,000. Deuces Wild has a royal cycle of 45,000. Double Bonus has an even longer royal cycle. None of that matters. Dealt royals are unaffected by cycle-length.

8. With a cycle-length of six months, it can be a very lengthy process. Going three or four cycles without success isn’t that unusual.

9. There is no guarantee that the casino won’t end the promotion before you get the dealt royal. They might pay off a couple of the $100,000 bonuses and decide that this doesn’t make much sense for them to continue. (They just might be right about that!)

10. You have to be able to support yourself until you collect the $100,000 — if you ever do. Let’s say dollar 7-5 Bonus Poker game (98%) is the best game they have. At 650 hands per hour, you’re going to be losing $65 per hour. If you play 1,000 hours and you don’t get dealt a royal, that means you would be out $65,000. For many dollar players that would be a disaster.

11. Playing until you get the dealt royal means you’re playing a LOT, and you MUST play, play, play so you collect the bonus before the offer is withdrawn. This will pay havoc with any personal relationships you have. If you try to do this in addition to a regular job, this often means your job performance would suffer.

Earlier I received an email asking about a somewhat related subject. The listener wanted to know how high a deal royal progressive or a sequential royal progressive had to be in order to attract my play.

In round numbers, basically I never chase these things. The only time I intentionally chased a “pays double on a dealt royal” promotion was when the game itself was worth playing. In around 1998, the Orleans had a bank of $5 Triple Play 10/7 Double Bonus (100.17% off the top, plus 0.25% cash back, plus mailers, plus comps — those were the days!) This game was worth playing 24/7 if you had the bankroll.

One month they added a dealt-royal-pays-double promotion, which adds about 0.12% in the very long turn. On top of a pretty good game, that was enough to encourage Liam W. Daily and myself, along with our wives, to play those machines a lot — with all monies split equally, except that whoever actually hit it got more because he had to deal with the taxes. We were down $30 grand before Liam’s wife Catherine was dealt a royal in hearts. A normal $60,000 jackpot became worth $120,000. It absolutely didn’t have to happen. We probably played 40,000 hands between us and were not favorites at all to collect on a 1-in-650,000 jackpot.

But a game like 7-5 Bonus with a HUGE progressive for either a dealt royal or sequential royal wouldn’t be attractive to me at all — especially for large stakes. I have a sizeable bankroll, but one of my not-so-secret secrets is to always play when I have the edge in the relatively short run. Playing a game like 7-5 Bonus for large enough stakes could be very costly to my bankroll. No thanks.

I suppose a game like 8-5 Bonus, which starts out at 99.17%, with a HUGE progressive might be playable. With slot club, mailers and comps worth a half percent or so, I’m only at a relatively slight disadvantage. I could see me throwing a maximum of say 5% of my bankroll at that kind of promotion, (assuming the progressive was so large that I had a 2+% advantage), but I’d stop after a while. I would not be interesting in continuing to chase it forever. The long term, when you’re talking about a 650,000 hand cycle, is quite long indeed.