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 my drive there. It was very rare for Suncoast to have such a spectacular offer that I would have driven past all of those other casinos — at least a few of which usually had better offers — spending all of that time and gas to get to Suncoast.
However, one such spectacular offer did happen on October 10, 2010. The Suncoast was offering 10x points on 10-10-10, which meant 1% in cash back or free play. This was a well-publicized event and I knew about it several days in advance.
I made a trip out there to scout their video poker offerings. While the website www.vpfree2.com lists most of the better games at casinos, the listings aren’t always completely accurate. A 1% cash back offer might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (or so I thought at the time), so it was worth spending a couple of hours checking out everything.
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.
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.
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 – 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That changed when the radio station that hosts my Thursday night Gambling with an Edge 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.
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.
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.
I’ll continue my tale next week.