Last week I went through the basics of playing NSU Deuces Wild for $75 per hand and using the Double Up feature every hand until it was either at least $1,200 (generating a W2g) or reduced to zero.
I never played this personally. I didn’t believe the promotion would last, and so I let others do it. But, for today, I’d like to discuss my method of figuring out how much it was worth.
Betting $75 a hand is like playing with $15 tokens, five at a time — except $15 tokens are non-existent. Still, you can use commercial software to analyze the game.
Adding 1% to each of the payouts (because 10% of the W2gs receive a 10% bonus), basically adds 1% to the total payout, or it would if NSU were a 100% game. But since NSU only returns 99.728%, the addition is a mere 0.99728% rather than a full 1%.
I wanted to prove this to myself. And I also wanted to see if there were any strategy changes between regular NSU and the NSU game with the W2g bonuses.
My choice was between using WinPoker or Video Poker for Winners. I could have used either subject to the following parameters. WinPoker requires all payouts to be integers. Video Poker for Winners requires all payouts to be integers divided by 5.
Betting $15 per hand, flushes return $45. No problem with either software. But when you add 1% to that, you get $45.45, which becomes a problem. Neither software can easily handle that.
After looking at all the numbers, I decided to multiply all of the returns by 120 and use WinPoker. That will make all the 5-coin returns integers.
Here is what I got, after deleting a few columns in the WinPoker analysis:
The first column is the name of the hand. Columns 2-4 give the results for the base game. Columns 5-7 give the results for the game where all returns are multiplied by 1.01. At the bottom, I divided the returns by 120 so as to bring them into perspective.
By comparing the payouts between the two games, you can see how I added 1% to each payout. Once you see it done, it’s easy to conclude that this was an easy adjustment to make. And it was.
As expected, the return of the game increased by almost 1%. (The slot club paid 0.2% during certain hours and there were other promotions as well.) A 1% edge on a game where you play $75 a hand is pretty big. Playing for stakes that size, most video poker players have to make do with much smaller edges.
I didn’t expect there to be any strategic changes since everything went up by 1%, but it was comforting to see it in the numbers. WinPoker says full houses, for example, occur every 38.29139 hands in both games. That’s a lot of decimal places. If there were strategy adjustments, the frequency of the hands would be different. Since the frequencies didn’t change, the strategy stayed the same. Many promotions change the strategy. This one didn’t.
Kudos to those players who figured this out in real time. I wasn’t one of those players. After the fact, had I figured it out earlier, I may or may not have decided to play it. Yes, it wasn’t going to last for long. But it was a bountiful promotion while it did.
After all the years of playing , NSUD has been the game that fascinated me the most. Of course it was always great to play FPDW, but now that Station Casinos apparently eliminated that game from the floors, it’s getting harder and harder every day. The fine nuances that Mr Bob Dancer explains on this weekly column show how tremendously important even small percentages become once you play for significant amount of money. Hope remains that conditions will not get much worse than they already are. Station and Boyd put the point value in half when they doubled-up the requirements to earn points ( 2 Dollars coin-in for 1 point). This really put a hole in the dent so playing on regular days at Boyd has become useless because of their VP restrictions anyways, and on multiplier days it is a bit better. The beauty of NSUD is that you get a long play for your money. And then, once in a light year, a great promotion such as the one above occurs and that’s when all the sharks come out. It’s obvious that the promotion didn’t last long. Other places in Vegas have been with their promotions policy for years and it’s still great to play there. I can only do remote checks at this time and cannot fly into town due to the pandemic, but I see that some casinos are still offering great play, even for the recreational player. It only takes a little time to investigate, and you can still find great places to gamble up your money.
From Switzerland
Boris
O/T – IRS Form 1040 Instructions allow deduction of gambling losses not to exceed winnings on Schedule A Itemized Deductions. But, this is not true for recreational players. There are many tests that IRS applies before someone can be considered a professional gambler. These tests make it almost impossible for a non-resident to qualify for deduction of gambling losses. It would be interesting to read some accounts by gamblers who have been audited by IRS or have struggled to prove they are professionals.
That’s interesting, indeed. So then if a Las Vegas based regular player is not listed as a pro he might get in jeopardy if he’s not making provisions for future taxes. Can anybody tell me please what’s the standard tax rate in Las Vegas for slot jackpots? Based on incomes under 100,000 annually. Does anybody have a percentage ready please? This would be interesting to know.
Many thanks and best regards from Switzerland
Boris
0 no state income tax in NV.
Hi Bob, isn´t it wrong to add 1% on all the payouts ?
Because we hardly ever make it to 1,200 USD by doubling up for example a 3 of a kind.
A Straight Flush we only need to double once to get over USD 1,200 a 3 of a kind we need to do that 4 times.
So how we can add 1% value to each payout ?
Big Fan of your work 🙂