Farewell to Dotty’s — Part I of II

There are hundreds of 15-machine Dotty’s outlets throughout Nevada, along with a few larger facilities. I have played at Dotty’s for the past few years and have written several articles about this.

Although they still have far looser video poker than most 15-machine outlets, the games have been tightened sufficiently that I find them no longer playable for me. However, it’s still interesting to see how they ran their W-2G promotions.

Before I start on this, let me preface it by saying a W-2G promotion requires playing for significant stakes. Some of my readers, including the undisputed biggest troll on gamblingwithanedge.com, are quarter players who get annoyed when I discuss bigger stakes. Such players should consider skipping this week’s blog.

The way the promotion works is that on 10% of the W-2Gs, players receive a 10% bonus. For a $4,000 jackpot, in the following week you have a 10% chance of getting a $400 cash bonus. To calculate the value of this, I assume you get a $40 bonus every time. On average it comes out the same.

In the first example let’s look at NSU Deuces Wild, which existed at Dotty’s until the end of 2016. Consider the following data, which comes from WinPoker, although the last two columns were added by me:

The important numbers are the base return for the game, 99.728%, and the addition to the return (“Promo”) as stakes are increased. You could play $1, $2, and $5 machines from five to fifty coins and receive the proper payout for all pay-schedule categories.

If you played $5 per hand, you got a bonus only on the royal — and it took the return from 99.728% to 99.746%, because the royal bonus adds only 0.018%. If you increased your bet to $6 (by playing six coins on the $1 machine), you also brought in the four deuces bonus, which added another 0.037%.

You can get the maximum bonus at $120 per hand and higher – e.g., 24 $5 coins – which brings the bonus to 0.205% (0.018% + 0.037% + 0.048% + 0.050% + 0.051%). When you add this to the return of the game, it becomes 99.951%.

The game comes with a 0.20% slot club if you play during the right hours. The cash back mailers range between 0% and 0.4%, depending on your score recently, and they have a variety of other periodic bonuses worth 0.1% or so. It was a positive play. But you needed an impressive bankroll to play it.

I played $125 per hand and whenever I hit a royal ($100,000) or four deuces ($25,000), I’d stay away for four months so my cash mailers could regenerate. It seemed as though they used my last four months of results to determine how much free play I’d get.

If I had been losing recently, my 4-week mailer would come back something like $205, $294, $363, and $481. The numbers were always “weird” amounts and they increased over the month. If I had hit a $100,000 jackpot in the past few months, my free play mailer would become $1, $1, $1, $2. They always remembered to give me more the last week of the month!

Due to a number of $100,000 royals by me and others, they finally decided the game was unprofitable. The best games now were 9/5 Super Double Bonus (99.695%) and 9/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (99.642%). I’ll let you work out the SDB amounts for yourself, but here we have the numbers for BPD.

Although this one was just as lucrative as NSU if you played $135 a hand or more, there were additional factors. A jackpot of $5,000 or more required special procedures and every jackpot of $10,000 or more required the supervisor to come in from elsewhere. At $135 a hand, every 4-of-a-kind paid $10,800. These jackpots come around every 424 hands on average, which is more than once an hour. I figured this would cause way too much “excitement,” and would number the days the game was still around.

So, I played $60 a hand, meaning 4-of-a-kinds returned $4,800, which was just underneath the $5,000 excitement threshold. This brought the game return up to 99.642% + 0.019% + 0.006% + 0.189% = 99.856%. With the other promotions this was positive. While less than the 99.951% that NSU paid before the other promotions, it didn’t knock me out of business as often. Now only a $48,000 royal flush (every 42,000 hands) would shut me down for four months. The downside is that playing only $60 per hand instead of $125, even with the same return, would cause the total to be cut in half due to the lesser coin-in.

Another problem at Dotty’s is that each outlet had a limited number of $100 bills, perhaps $50,000 to $100,000 per week or so. If you hit enough $4,800 jackpots (plus other players were hitting jackpots as well), you began to be paid in $20 bills. And then in $5 bills. It was a bit of a problem to handle these.

I’d go in dressed in cargo pants and often come home with my pockets stuffed with twenties. One way to recycle these twenties was to take them to other casinos where I played enough and then use them to buy ‘purchase tickets’ to use during my play. That is, I would take $20,000 in twenties in and they would sell me four $5,000 purchase tickets that I could insert into the machines.

If you’re not a big enough player at a casino with this technology, you’d have to manually insert the money into the machine. The Dotty’s machines would take up to $3,000 at a time. Obviously, it took five times as long to insert 150 Jacksons than it did to insert 30 Benjamins. (If I had a choice of machines, I’d pick the one under a light so I could read while I inserted the bills into the acceptor.) Whether or not this is worth putting up with depends on what other opportunities you have to play positive games for interesting stakes.

Eventually that game was pulled as well. Possibly it still exists in some stores, but I’ve looked at more than twenty of them. It lasted longer at the Hoover Dam Lodge (25 miles away from my home) than it did at other properties, but eventually it was pulled from there as well.

They still have 9/6 Jacks or Better there. Even though it sounds like it’s only a tenth of a percent tighter than 9/6 BPD (99.544% compared to 99.642%), the W-2G bonus affects the games differently. You can work it out if you like. I’ll tell you more about it next week, along with another way that some players chose to play this promotion, until that too was countered.