In last week’s column, I reprinted a seven-year-old article I wrote about Edward Thorp saying that gambling is a tax on ignorance, which I would amend to being a tax on the ignorant and the lazy.
Soon after I wrote that, John Chang (former long-time manager of the MIT blackjack team) appeared on GWAE and commented that while he agreed that gambling is a tax on the ignorant and the lazy, it also provides a scholarship for the smart and hard-working!
That’s exactly the way I look at gambling, although I accept the words “ignorant” and “lazy” as being relative terms and not absolute.
Simply put, beating a casino is difficult. You need to have some moxie. And even then, you need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to succeed. But that was largely what last week’s article was about. Today let’s talk more about what I mean by a “scholarship.” How do you get it? How do you keep it?
What I mean by scholarship is that if you do it right, the casinos pay you to come in and play intelligently. They do not do this on purpose. Their goal is not to support professional players. But that’s the way it works out.
Casinos do compete with each other and they do offer promotions to attract players. Some of these promotions are beatable. Some of the games are beatable. Play those!
Casino marketing people are not always savvy about doing the math on all promotions. This is a simplified generalization and not always true, but marketing types tend to be creative right-brained people while the ones who can figure out the math for promotions (for casino employees AND players) are left-brained people. When the promotions are developed by the right-brained marketing people, that is the time for you to play!
Casinos basically recycle money from the losing players and give it to the winning players, while keeping a small percentage to cover their own expenses and profit. If the casinos have enough losing players, they can afford to have a few winning players.
Why knowing this is important is that if you want to win, you have to treat the losing players with respect! They pay for your golden goose! If you go around insulting them because they are playing 8/5 Jacks or Better when there’s 9/6 Jacks or Better a few aisles over, you’re jeopardizing your scholarship!
(Yes, I know that my teaching others to identify good machines and play well hurts the players who already know how to play, and wish to keep the “secrets” to themselves. Whether anybody likes it or not, this is one of my chosen missions in life and I plan to continue on that mission indefinitely.)
The casino needs to make its profit somewhere. If nobody played the bad games, they would find it wasn’t profitable to offer the good games. If losing players got insulted when they came to the casino, that would take a lot of their pleasure away. It’s already an expensive activity for these players. If it isn’t fun, many will stop donating to your scholarship fund.
One key to keeping your scholarship is to not keep rubbing it into the casino’s face. There are players who keep playing until the casino kicks them out. For players who are comfortable being on the road all the time and always going to new places, that might be an okay procedure. But for those who want the golden goose to keep paying and paying, this is not a good plan.
This means that if you get significantly ahead, stay away for a while. If you win more than one drawing in a short period of time, don’t enter any more for a few months. This also means, if you’re a winning player, don’t be loud and obnoxious or otherwise a pain in the ass to the casino. They will put up with unpleasant behavior if you’re a loser. But if you’re a winner, this gives them one more reason to kick you out.
Video poker players have an additional edge over other types of advantage gamblers in that we lose most of the time! Royal flushes are relatively rare. The time between royal flushes will usually consist of negative scores. A video poker player who wins every day is largely unknown — unless something fishy is going on. That lets casinos believe that your royal flushes are mainly luck and you’ll give it all back. And it lets losing players have their memory of that one night in 2016 when they hit two royal flushes. These players will return over and over trying to catch magic in a bottle again.
Bob Said: “Why knowing this is important is that if you want to win, you have to treat the losing players with respect! They pay for your golden goose! If you go around insulting them because they are playing 8/5 Jacks or Better when there’s 9/6 Jacks or Better a few aisles over, you’re jeopardizing your scholarship! ”
Although this may be true in some instances, the opposite is true in others. If enough people are willing to play bad pay tables, because they think “pay tables don’t matter”, the casinos can begin watering down more and more of their pay tables until there is nothing left to play for the knowledgeable players. If no one played the machines after pay tables were watered down, the watered down pay tables would not exist for very long.
Although blackjack is not a direct analogy, I’ve always maintained that if no one played 6:5 blackjack it would not exist. OTOH, since many are willing to play it, it ruins it for the more knowledgeable players who can no longer find 3:2 blackjack anymore for reasonable minimum stakes.
I get what you are saying that bad players provide scholarship money for the good players, but it is less so the bad games that are being offered make it better for the knowledgeable players: in fact in most cases the bad games (at the expense of good games) make it worse for the knowledgeable players.
Case in point: Ellis Island just got rid of all VP games with perfect play with paybacks of 99% or higher. How does that provide scholarships to the knowledgeable players?
I have found that your slot host can become your biggest fan. I have had hosts who are actually pleased when I win over a long period of time.
its my understanding that a slot host gets paid based on the volume of dallars being gambled not onyour winning or losing and if you win you will then most likely play more good for the host’s totals
Speaking of ignorance, full-time pursuing royal flushes on a VP machine has to be one of the most ignorant, unenlightened and unenlightening careers in the entire pantheon of dumb ways to waste your life.
I’ve often heard that on their deathbed, no one ever says, “I should have spent more time at the office.” Similarly and for the same reason, I’m confident that on their deathbed no video poker advantage player ever said, “I should have spent more time playing 9/6 Jacks or Better. machines.”
Most players don’t give a $#!% about pay tables. All they’re interested in is hitting either aces, deuces on DW games (or any quads for that matter) and royals. Just last night saw a lady be dealt K9K9K on 9/5 DDB STP and toss the 9’s. They just don’t care!!
Your casino host KNOWS what you play and how much. That is their job.Based on the numbers that they see,they decide if they want your play. It’s all about coin in and the duration of play,not your wins/losses. A valuable asset to the casino is you,if the host feels like it. Yes,play good games and play smart.
On slower nights,they will approach you and offer freebies!
Your players card is the ticket to free stuff: Comps,food and other goodies. They want you to be there.