I wasn’t interested in low stakes games. I wanted $5 games or higher if they had them, or maybe something like $1 Ten Play. In the High Limit slot area, the best I found was $5 8\/5 Bonus Poker (99.17%). While this was a positive play with a 1% slot club, an advantage of only 0.17% on a $5 machine wasn’t that special. Several casinos around town offered better opportunities.<\/p>\n
Suncoast has two long horseshoe-shaped bars in the center of the casino. At the curve of one of the bars, I found $5 9\/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe (99.64%). These games are listed on vpfree2 today, but they weren’t back then. They weren’t obviously $5 games. They were multi-denom machines where you could play anywhere between 25 cents and $5. Other than a few machines around the curve of the horseshoes, the rest of the machines on the bar went between 25 cents and $2.<\/p>\n
On these $5 games, I would get W2Gs on all straight flushes ($1,250), quads ($2,000), and royal flushes ($20,000). W2G hands should occur, on average, about every 400 hands or so. How many hands per hour I could get was partially dependent on how fast they would pay my W2Gs. I can usually play between 800 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 1000 hands per hour, but with long waits that number would shrink dramatically. Even averaging only 500 hands each hour, I figured this promotion was going to be worth more than $300 per hour. Definitely worth going for. My personal opinion was that for Suncoast to allow such a lucrative opportunity, the casino was very poorly managed. It did not take somebody with my experience and knowledge to recognize the profit potential of these games. A lot of players could understand that this was a good deal — whether they had the skills and bankroll to exploit the deal or not.<\/p>\n
There weren’t many $5 machines that offered 9\/6 Bonus Poker Deluxe and I figured they’d all be taken during the promotion. So I arranged for a friend, Arthur, to get there at 8 p.m. or so and try to get a couple machines. Until the promotion began, Arthur could play for low stakes at only a small disadvantage (he was Emerald so he had a 0.30% slot club before midnight) plus he would make each of us five $2,000 tickets. I was told that Suncoast paid you in cash rather than tickets or key-to-credit, and so we didn’t want to waste time inserting $100 bills into the machine when our time was worth $300 per hour. I planned to arrive at midnight, we would play together for a while, and then Arthur would leave before returning in the morning.<\/p>\n
I spent an hour or so learning the strategy cold. The trickiest hand is when you are dealt an unsuited ace-jack. Usually you hold both cards but sometimes you only hold the jack. And when a ten is in the hand the rule is different than when a ten is not in the hand. It took awhile to figure this out and create my own 100% accurate strategy. If I had the opportunity to play the game in the future, I wanted to be able to use my time to practice rather than having to work out the strategy again from scratch.<\/p>\n
I called Arthur up on my drive over to the casino and he told me that there had been no need to arrive early. Nobody else was interested in the $5 machines. This was very surprising to me. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why this was the case, but now I know. Simply put, most locals who would otherwise play these machines had been kicked out of the casino or knew others who had been. Since I hadn’t played there for years, I had, to that point, escaped the purge. I wasn’t aware of how risky it was to play these machines.<\/p>\n
I got lucky early. At 12:05 a.m. I hit a 4 of a kind for $2,000 and at about 12:15 a.m. I hit another. When I was paid at 12:20 a.m., the shift supervisor was accompanied by four or five security guards. I didn’t figure I was going to like this.<\/p>\n
I was paid, told I was done for the night, and that I could never play again on a 10x point day. I asked to speak with the slot director. Not allowed. So I left. I was ahead something like $3,500 but I had been hoping to play a lot longer and maybe earn a lot more.<\/p>\n
I was amused that they chose to use that many security guards as back-up when they gave me the bad news. I was 63 years old at the time and had no history of fisticuffs. But amused or not, I was out of there.<\/p>\n
Over the next month or two, Suncoast offered 10x points weekly. I stayed away. In fact I didn’t even go into the casino for more than a year after that.<\/p>\n
That changed when the radio station that hosts my Thursday night Gambling with an Edge<\/strong> <\/em>program shifted their studios to an office building near Rainbow and Sahara. That’s about 4.5 miles from Suncoast. At that point, any Thursday promotion became potentially interesting since I was going to be in the area anyway.<\/p>\n For a time, Suncoast was offering 7x points for seniors every Thursday. I figured playing $2 BPD was safe enough. I would only receive W2Gs on a royal — which is a once in 50 hours event, assuming I could play 800 hands an hour. This was only a $19 per hour opportunity, but mailers added more.<\/p>\n I finally returned to Suncoast to play in the spring of 2012. In addition to the 7x points, there was a promotion going on—for something like 600 points, I would receive a free dinner buffet. I played my points and went to the kiosk to swipe and get my buffet ticket. The kiosk said my card wasn’t recognized. Oh dear. I figured this meant that although I was only told I couldn’t play on 10x point days, presumably being unrestricted at other times, someone had made some sort of entry into the computer restricting me even further. I didn’t want to go to the booth and ask for details. I figured it was better not to know.<\/p>\n I’ll continue my tale next week.<\/p>\n I haven’t played a lot at Suncoast Casino in the northwest Las Vegas valley — mainly for geographic reasons. While I was with Shirley, we lived near Green Valley Ranch Casino which was perhaps 20-25 miles away from Suncoast. For me to go to Suncoast, I had to pass up dozens of other casinos on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/96x96\/facebook.png\" "\\"Follow")
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