Too Good to be True?

Casinos are in the business to make money. They don’t intentionally make mistakes. Still, sometimes mistakes happen that smart players can exploit. You don’t need to be a pro. You just have to be alert and savvy — and find one of these mistakes. It also helps if you have the requisite knowledge and bankroll — but that’s not necessary. If someone brought the following to me and nobody else knew about it, I might well have paid a $1,000 finder’s fee.

Consider the following announcement from “Casino City Times”:

Plaza Hotel and Casino to ‘pay your taxes’ on April 18

4 April 2016

(PRESS RELEASE) — It may have recently been April Fools’ Day, but this is no joke: the Plaza Hotel and Casino will pay winners the amount of taxes they owe in free slot play on all taxable jackpots up to $20,000 on tax day, April 18.

Jackpots of more than $1,200 are subject to federal taxes. The Plaza will pay a 28% bonus on all taxable winnings over $1,200 and up to $20,000 in free slot play on Monday, April 18.

To be eligible, players must be members of the Plaza’s Royal Rewards Players Club. There is no limit on how many jackpots a person can win and receive the bonus. Additional details on this and all of the Plaza’s gaming offers and tournaments are available at the Plaza’s Royal Rewards center.

The question became: What was the best way to hit this promotion? What it said was that W2Gs got a 28% bonus — so a $1,250 jackpot was actually worth $1,600. Dollar games basically only get W2Gs on royals (or maybe four aces with a kicker) and those are pretty rare hands. But $5 games where quads receive 250 coins or higher get W2Gs on every quad, straight flush, or royal flush — or about every 400 hands. Now we’re talking!

I went to Video Poker for Winners and found out that this bonus added about 6% to Double Double Bonus games or 5% to Double Bonus games. It added much less to Bonus Poker and Jacks or Better games because most quads in these games only return $625, which is not enough to trigger the W2G premium. Even 8/5 Double Double Bonus (normally 96.8% and totally unplayable) became a game with almost 3% advantage on a $5 machine. Quite acceptable indeed!

I checked out www.vpfree2.com for the best games at the casino and sure enough, they had 9/7 Double Bonus and 9/6 Double Double Bonus at the $5 level. The latter gave the player a 5% advantage — plus slot club benefits, plus mailers. If you could play $20,000 an hour through the machine, that’s an EV of $1,000 an hour. Not bad!

Okay, so what to do? The news came out two weeks before the event. I assumed that a number of pros heard about it. I also assumed that all of us thought a $1,000/hour promotion was worth playing. If they had 50 machines (clearly they wouldn’t have that many), there were enough pros (or semi-pros) in town to cover every seat for the duration of the promotion. The casino would lose $5 million or so. This was a very unlikely scenario.

If there were two or four machines (far more likely), it was a guess how early I would have to show up. Was twelve hours prior to the start early enough? How about eighteen? How about twenty four? In the good old days, I could stay alert for 40 hours straight. So I could show up 16 hours early and last the entire 24 hours of the promotion. Those days are about two decades behind me. I can now efficiently play 12 hours straight (barely) but that’s about my limit. I could play six hours, rest six hours, play another six, and let somebody else finish off the promotion.

So, if I was going to get a spot on the machines, I would need to team up with one or more people. Although I know a lot of players, I have no “partners” (except Bonnie, who’s a life partner and a non-player). But I have enough names in my contact list that I was confident I could come up with a sufficient number of temporary partners once I worked out a game plan. Since I was working out the plan, I was planning on selecting the hours for myself that worked best for me and finding other players to fill in the rest. That was the plan anyway.

First I needed to check out the machines a day or two before the promotion started. Casinos sometimes change machines just before a promotion starts, so information gathered too far in advance can easily become outdated.

When I checked 48 hours before the event was scheduled to start, I found that there were no $5 poker machines at all! They did have $2 9/5 Double Double Bonus. No thanks.

I looked around for games like dollar Fifty Play or Hundred Play. Nope. No such luck. The games that they offered were not interesting to me at all.

They could have had roulette machines. If you played something like $600 on red, $600 on black, and $35 each on zero and double zero, you would end up with a W2G every hand with no risk whatsoever. You would pay $1270 each hand and always get back at least $1536. I didn’t look for such machines. Surely if they existed the casino would have figured out quickly that they couldn’t possibly win and they would have removed the machines (and/or the players) from the promotion. So I didn’t even check for them.

So, as it turned out, I didn’t play. Whether the promotion was poorly designed or not at the outset, it was “fixed” before it began so the casino didn’t suffer — and the players didn’t benefit. (Possibly the plan all along was to remove the $5 machines before the event started. I don’t know.)

After doing my “due diligence” I would not have paid a full finder’s fee. A finder’s fee would have been contingent on me finding the promotion acceptable to play. But possibly I would have given $200 or so for bringing it to my attention. I WANT to learn about good deals. This would have qualified as at least something I wanted to check further.

It didn’t pan out this time, but that’s part of the business. You don’t know until you check things out. But if you wait until somebody else figures things out and tells you after the fact, you’ll miss whatever opportunities are there.

Maybe next time they won’t fix the mistake before the promotion starts.