In last week’s column (available a few clicks away), I started to tell you about a slot machine promotion I played at the South Point. The story continues:
The promotion ran Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — from 3:00 a.m. to 2:59 a.m. I didn’t understand that it started on Friday, and so I played only on Saturday and Sunday. I arrived just after 3 a.m. Saturday, September 29. The room was empty and I had my choice of machines.
I decided to play stand alone $5 slot machines — each requiring two coins. There were two of these side by side and I sat down. I placed Shirley’s card in one of the machines and my card in the other. The South Point allows play on a spouse’s card, and I take advantage of that rule.
I loaded up each machine with $2,000 and started to play both machines simultaneously. When I reached 300 points on either machine, I stopped to play the bonus game. It took awhile to figure out how to do it. It required three separate button-pushes to spin the wheel and two more to exit. I was expecting hundreds of spins and five button-pushes each time didn’t make me happy. Later, I figured out that if I never exited the spin program, I only needed two button-pushes each time.
From my first bonus game on each machine, I received 2,500 points on one machine and the other one gave me $10 in free play. These were the smallest possible prizes and likely the most probable as well. I had brought a sheet with me on which I would make tick marks to keep track of each award. I made vertical lines for the first four awards of a given size, and then a diagonal line across them for the fifth. At the end of the day I would count these “groups of five.” It’s an old method of keeping track of a count, but I’m not a young guy and this method worked well for this application. I did get a few W2Gs, but not big ones. The ones I got were in the $1,200-$2,400 range.
I had a 10 a.m. “gym date” with a workout buddy, so I left the South Point at 9:30 or so on Saturday morning. By this time, I was several thousand dollars behind, but I hadn’t added up all my tick marks and I didn’t know how much I had earned in free play and slot club points. After the gym, I went home, took a nap, and then returned to the South Point later.
At this point I shifted to $10 machines. I know the fallacy of using a “double up to catch up” betting strategy and that wasn’t the reason I switched. The reason I switched was that I felt I had a 2% advantage and with $10 machines, I could get twice as many dollars through in an hour as I could with $5 machines. Whatever the financial swings were, I figured I could afford them.
I ended up playing $111,600 coin-in and losing $15,400 on the play before I counted the benefits. I won $2,850 in Free Play and $3,037.50 in slot club points, while earning $334.80 in regular slot club points. The nuts and bolts of the data are below:
My average spin turned out to be $15.83 rather than the $18 I was expecting. That’s an $800+ shortfall. But with only 372 spins, it’s not so low that I believe the original estimate was wrong. It might have been, but I don’t know yet.
The big discrepancy in what I was expecting came in the amount of loss. At 4%, I was expecting to lose about $4,500. Instead I lost at a 14.28% rate. One possible conclusion that some would reach is that the machines were MUCH tighter than I thought they were. Another conclusion is that the machines were in a “too tight” cycle and I should have changed machines as soon as I realized this. Both of these explanations are hogwash!
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is the machines return approximately what I thought they do and I failed to hit any of the larger jackpots. Simply put, I ran bad. As a video poker player, I know all about running good on some days and bad on others. Over time the numbers work out. On any particular day, the numbers could be all over the place.
Fortunately for me, Shirley doesn’t always follow the day-to-day of the gambling ebbs and flows. She knows that I’ll most likely come out ahead by the end of the year, but the numbers in the meantime can be not-so-nice. So I don’t tell her my scores unless she asks. And when she does, I tell her how I did that day and what our year-to-date score is.
She asked that particular Saturday night. I gave her a thumbnail account: “I lost $16,000 on the play, won $6,000 in slot club points and free play, and earned another $1,000 in regular slot club points with better mailers down the road — for a daily total of about $9,000 in the soup.” These numbers were accurate enough for that conversation. More precision wasn’t required. That was quite enough ‘precision’ to upset her.
Then came the questions and accusations: How do you know the machines are fair? How do you know the machines only hold 4%? This is outside your regular field. How come you think you’re an expert on this too? What if your estimates are wrong?
Had I won that particular day, there would have been none of those questions. I get these things only when I lose. (And when I publish this, I’ll get many of these same questions from readers of the column, although most players who end up ahead at video poker will agree that I probably had a pretty good bet here.) Shirley told me the bottom line is that I lost and so I should quit. I told her the bottom line is that I still thought it was a good play and I’m the one who makes gambling decisions in the family. She finally backed off in grudging agreement. She knows we make a good living going with my gambling decisions. But that doesn’t mean she has to like all of them as they happen.
I didn’t have a lot of time to play on Sunday, but my results turned out to be “more of the same” and I lost again.
I had only a third as many spins on Sunday as I did on Saturday. It turned out that my Sunday spins were worth even less than the day before and I lost at an even faster rate on the same machines. It wasn’t fun.
My last chart simply adds up the previous two.
This promotion didn’t turn out well for me. I still think I had the best of it. Had I hit a $20,000 or $40,000 jackpot I’d be doing fine. Although the value of the spins turned out to be 5.3% in my almost-500-spin trial rather than the 6% I was expecting, it was still juicy enough to yield a profit against machines that only hold 4%. (Players who played penny slots that have a 10% house edge lost their money roughly half as fast during this promotion, but the house still had a big edge on them.)
Playing off 247 separate free play bonus amounts wasn’t fun. It took four hours. For each download, I needed to hit a button to activate it, wait, enter my password, wait, enter the amount I wanted to download, wait, enter a button that said I realized that this was free play that needed to be played off, and then wait some more. As is true at many casinos, not all of the keypads worked well. Some would reject passwords that I was sure were entered correctly. There were a variety of other problems as well. Although I eventually got all of the money I was entitled to, what was theoretically a $100 per hour promotion became, in reality, a $70 per hour promotion once I included the time it took to actually collect the free play.
It’s a safe bet that the casino will run one or more Spin 2 Win promotions in the future. They’ve invested in the software to do this, and now that they have it, they are going to use it. Each time may require a different number of points to qualify. Even if the possible values of the spins remains the same, the casino can make the average value of the spins higher or lower — and it doesn’t have to tell you. Using the data here to help analyze next year’s version of this promotion is probably not a smart bet.
To determine whether it’s a good bet or not, you MUST have some sort of reliable estimate on what the average spin is worth. Tediously collecting data on the spins and then analyzing that data (or having someone whom you trust do this) is the way to go. If you don’t do this, you’re not playing with an advantage — you’re simply gambling. There are folks who love to gamble. I’m one who loves to play with an advantage.