Michael Shackleford, my co-host on the Gambling with an Edge radio show, received an email from the slot director at the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas. The Riv was giving away $72,055 over the weekend of November 16-18 based on play from the prior ten days. In addition, play during November 10-12 would receive 5x points. The problem, however, was that there were five hourly drawings from 6 p.m. – 10 p.m. Friday; ten hourly drawings between noon – 9 p.m. Saturday; and seven hourly drawings from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. on Sunday. If you had a lot of tickets and wanted the best chance of winning some of the prizes, you basically had to hang out there all weekend.
The Riviera is off the radar for many players. I wasn’t sure how much competition there would be for the prizes, but it was definitely worth checking out. So I showed up there Sunday, November 11, ready to play. After checking, I found that I still had “Platinum” status (which requires $400,000 coin-in annually) from playing an earlier promotion. Platinum status awards 0.375% in free play. If you were a brand-new player, you only received 0.125%. The promised 5x points looked pretty sweet, even though the machines there are fairly tight.
I carefully read the rules when I got there. The rules, however, mentioned nothing about 5x points over a particular weekend. My host knew nothing about the point multiplier and her boss (head of Player Development) knew nothing about it either. But the email to Shack was VERY specific about this. It’s unlikely that the slot director was making it up.
Shack and I tried to get the slot director on the phone, but we were unsuccessful. I decided, however, that since he was so specific about the promo, perhaps he meant 5x entries for the early play. I couldn’t get it verified, so I decided to risk it.
For various denominations, the best games there are $1 single line 8/5 Bonus Poker (99.17%), $2 Five Play 9/6 Double Double Bonus (98.98%), or $5 Five Play 8/6/26 Jacks or Better (98.63%). I decided to play the $5 Five Play game. I didn’t have a lot of time and I wanted to get my play done before other players saw me. With cash back it was a 99% game and surely the promotion would be worth more than 1% (or so I thought at the time). And with a good probability of 5x entries, I would be sitting pretty.
So on that Sunday, I played $260,000 coin-in, figuring that was more than enough. On Thursday, Shack told me that the slot director informed him there would be no 5x anything. We discussed whether to talk about the promo over the air Thursday night, but we felt that the Riv was doing a sort of bait-and-switch tactic on us and we weren’t in the mood to help them out. Plus, of course, if we convinced others to play heavily, our chances would be reduced proportionately.
Shack also played a lot for this promotion, but not as much as I did. We decided to share results, proportionate with the number of tickets we each had. Although slightly modified along the way, for the most part I got % of prizes and he got 40% if we were both present when the winning name was called.
When we showed up for the Friday drawings, we saw that they were holding a Macy’s card promotion over the weekend. To get the top prize ($500 Macy’s card), you needed to play $130,000 coin-in. That’s worth almost 0.4%, assuming you treat the Macy’s card the same as cash. (I do. Shirley shops there sometimes during sales. She spends cash when she doesn’t have cards, so the cards are the same as real money to us. This does NOT mean I want to buy cards from others at face value — but I sometimes buy some at 75% of face value.) Given my calculation that the value of the drawings was 1%, adding 0.4% to an already positive game made it a no-brainer to go for it. I hadn’t planned on playing more for the drawing, but this promotion changed my mind. Both Shack and I played enough to get the top Macy’s card. So did a lot of other players. We had competitive numbers of drawing tickets but others had similar amounts of play.
On Friday night there were five drawings, each of which awarded $250 apiece to four people. We learned that you could only be called once each hour. That was definitely NOT what the rules stated, but management said “we’re enforcing our right to change the rules any way we want.”
I got picked in the first drawing. Good start! Shack got called in the second drawing. Also good! Neither of us got picked again all night long. In fact, nobody was called more than once on Friday. This struck us as VERY suspicious. There were some of us with LOTS of tickets in the barrel. Surely somebody should have been drawn more than once.
The boothlings swore that you could win more than once, just not in the same hour. So did the director of marketing. I was skeptical and made it a point to record names on Saturday so I could prove to Gaming that there were no duplicates — should I decide to pursue it later.
On Saturday, there were ten hourly drawings where two people received $500 each time. I was called at the first one. This would have been worth only $300 to me if Shack had been there, but he was somewhere else for the first few drawings on Saturday and I kept the entire $500. At the fourth drawing, we had our first duplicate winner of the day. It wasn’t me, but at least it was possible, so I stopped collecting names.
Shack got called at 4 o’clock and I got called at both 8 o’clock and 9 o’clock. We were doing okay, but Sunday was going to be the big day. There would be mostly $1,000 prizes, plus a handful of $5,000 prizes, and a grand prize of $22,055. Doing well on Sunday was far more important than doing well on Friday and Saturday.
After getting a better feel for how many tickets I had compared to other players, I thought it was a smart idea to play through another $200,000 in preparation for the Sunday giveaways. This had an EV of slightly more than minus $2,000 (playing 9/6 Double Double Bonus), offset by $750 in free play, but it seemed like a smart way to increase my chances of getting one or more of the bigger prizes on Sunday.
Problem was, I was almost out of cash on hand. Qualifying for the Macy’s card was expensive and now I only had about $3,000 in cash available. As you may know, Double Double Bonus is a “heaven or hell” game and my $3,000 disappeared in about 15 minutes. I had a room at the Riv and could have easily gone home (about 30 minutes away) or to a safety deposit box elsewhere (about 15 minutes away) and picked up more cash. But I was tired and cranky and wasn’t in the mood to do that.
Sunday we didn’t do well at all. I got called once for $1,000 and Shack was completely shut out. A disappointing result. Although extra drawing tickets might well have improved my results, I could have lost an extra $20,000 earning those tickets. We’ll never know.
For whatever reason, many of the employees of the Riv are not very knowledgeable. Whether we’re talking about the Player’s Club, the slot department, special events, or in the restaurants, the employees are definitely a notch below what you find in other casinos in Las Vegas. The player tracking system is probably four generations out of date. You also find older machines there, especially when compared with other Strip casinos. The entire place is rather shabby. It’s not my favorite place to play — but if a promotion looks good, I’ll play there.
I now have Platinum status there probably until October 2014. They might well have a good promotion between now and then when that status will come in useful.