Betting on Bob
The February mailers at South Point this year indicated there would be 2x points for video poker for three separate days: Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and Leap Day, February 29. These mailers were prepared by the South Point sometime in early January.
In the middle of February, Michael Gaughan decided to offer 3x points from noon to 9 p.m. on Leap Day. At the time he made this decision, he had forgotten that the mailers already said there would be 2x all day the same day.
I’d heard rumors about the 3x points before they were officially announced, so I called Gaughan to confirm. Since the South Point is one of the sponsors of the radio show Gambling with an Edge, it was important to get the news correct. I knew the mailer already said 2x points and it didn’t occur to me to make sure Gaughan remembered that. I just figured it would be 2x between midnight and noon, 3x between noon and 9 p.m., and 2x for the last three hours in the day.
The best machines in terms of expected dollars per hour on a multiple point day there are the Quick Quads machines. But there are only four of them. So to get them from noon to 9 p.m. you had to be on them much earlier than noon. I was willing to do that, except as it happened, I was teaching that day between noon and 3 p.m. at the South Point. What to do?
Asking the casino to lock up the machine was out of the question. Most casinos are willing to do this for good customers — except on high-volume days — and a 3x day was likely to be the highest-volume day of the year. Even if they would do this for me, the resentment this would cause between me and other players would be bigger than I wanted to deal with. No thanks.
What I came up with was a plan for sharing the machine. I knew a guy who was planning to get there at midnight and leave at 6 a.m. to go to work. I called to verify that he hadn’t promised his machine to somebody else. He told me he’d give it to me if I was on time. But if I was late, no promises.
My plan was to get there a little before 6 and play for four hours at 2x points. At 10 a.m. I was to be relieved by “Joe,” who’d play 2x for a couple of hours and then 3x until 3:30 or whenever I got back. Meanwhile I’d go teach my class, have lunch with the team who helps me during class, and then finish off the day playing Quick Quads. This was a good deal for Joe, who didn’t normally figure to get a machine if he showed up as late as 10 a.m. — and a great deal for me.
I showed up at 5:50 a.m. and my guy said he was on schedule and would leave in 10 minutes. Another player there I knew told me that they were only getting single points. What’s this? We all knew the mailers said 2x points. All the slot supervisors said they were told it was single points except during noon to 9 p.m., when it would be 3x points.
Single points on 9/6 DDB Quick Quads isn’t terrible. The game returns 99.65% by itself, when played perfectly, so adding 0.30% to that means the game returns 99.95%. For many players that is “close enough.” For strong players, this is WAY too little. If the game doesn’t return more than 100%, it’s just not worth playing.
And the numbers presented presume you play perfectly. Most players don’t. Especially on Quick Quads, which isn’t on readily available software.
But there’s some place-holding involved. We all wanted to be there when 3x points started. So playing a quarter Triple Play version at only 99.95% ($7.50 her hand), slowly, would reserve the opportunity to be playing a dollar Ten Play 100.55% ($60 per hand) game for nine hours later. “Investing” in a 99.95% game at relatively low stakes in order to have the opportunity to play a 100.55% game at stakes 8 times as large is good investment strategy.
So I sat down and started feeding bills into the machine. Slowly. I planned to create four $2,500 tickets. When you get W2Gs they are going to pay you in cash. I didn’t want to be feeding $100 bills during 3x time, so creating tickets beforehand made sense to me.
Prior to showing up at the machine I had taken out a $10,000 marker at the cage. I prefer not to be carrying large sums on me since I am a well-known “high-roller.” So at most casinos where I play, I take a marker when I get there, and use their money to play with. At the end of the day I pay off the marker if I can — and if I’ve won a lot I frequently leave money on deposit at the casino. It takes a few extra minutes but it’s much safer. If I get beat up and robbed, they’re not going to get much money. And hopefully they’ll be caught on camera and prosecuted.
At about 6:05 a.m. the slot shift boss came by and politely but firmly asked us all to get off the machines because they had to do some maintenance. Oh dear. This didn’t figure to be good.
We watched while they slowed down each of the four machines — it took less than a minute per machine — and then they locked the machines up and went away.
This wasn’t all terrible. We now didn’t need to play any to hold the machines. We assumed/hoped they’d be back up before noon.
Meanwhile I sent an email to Michael Gaughan explaining that the mailers promised 2x points and they weren’t being awarded. I appealed to his sense of “doing the right thing.” Gaughan is somewhat old school business-wise and doesn’t check his email very often. I was later to find out that he didn’t get this email until 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
There was some worry that they would change the pay schedule. Changing the game from 9/6 to 9/5 would have made it unplayable — even with 3x points. I was pretty sure this wasn’t going to happen. My understanding is that except for emergency fixes, a machine had to have the same pay schedule for the entire gaming day — which at the South Point is 3 a.m. to 3 a.m. They didn’t have to bring the machines back up, but if they did, the pay schedules would need to be the same.
Three hours later they were still down. I checked with the slot shift boss and she said there were not going to be making any other changes but they had to get approval to bring them back up. She thought that could be at any time — but she wasn’t sure.
I called Joe at 9 a.m. to tell him what was up. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” I told him. “First of all they shut down all of the Quick Quad machines.”
Joe replied, “That’s terrible! What’s the good news?”
“That IS the good news!”
Joe started laughing hysterically. This didn’t sound like good news at all to him. And if I thought that was good news, then the bad news must be truly awful. After he calmed down he asked me to further elaborate.
I told him the bad news was that we were only getting single points until noon. So since the game had a negative return under single points, surely it was good news that the machines were shut down. I was very optimistic that the machines would come up before noon. But I couldn’t know for sure.
Okay. Joe promised he’d be there by 10 and hung up. By 10, the machines were still not up. One player had bailed, but the other three of us were still there waiting. I left the machine to Joe and went off to get ready for the class.
At 11:30 I came by to see the status of the machines. All were up. They were definitely slower, but if you slammed the button while the credits were accumulating, they would go almost as fast as before. It was more tiring to play than it used to be, but the coin-in remained about the same.
Two players were playing quarter Triple Play and two were firing away at $1 Ten Play. I asked them why? If they are only getting single points why were they playing so much?
“We’re betting on you, Bob,” was the reply. “If it stays single points, we’re only losing 0.05%. But if you can talk Mr. Gaughan into adjusting our scores to reflect double points, we have a 0.25% advantage. We figure if you’re successful more than one time out of six, it makes sense for us to play for the maximum now.”
I couldn’t fault their logic. I figured my chances were better than one out of six as well. Of course if these players were only playing a 99.8% accuracy, I needed to succeed more than half the time for them to be making money on this early play. I have no idea how accurately they play. Nor can I accurately assess my chances with Gaughan.
I went off to teach my “Secrets of a Video Poker Winner” class. And I got back to the machines about 3:30. The rest of the saga is interesting as well. I’ll tell you about that next week.