Assume you have more than $500 in your wallet. If it’s not true when you’re reading this, it has been true sometime before and you can do a “thought experiment” rather than a physical one. Reach into your wallet and pull out a $100 bill. Can you tell me when and where you got that particular bill? In most cases, the answer will be “no.” Yes we can imagine a scenario where one of the bills we got from the South Point had a ripped corner, and it just so happens that that was the bill you pulled out so you know where you got it, but that’s a pretty rare case.
And most of us don’t much care where we got our money — prior to the past month or so. That is, whether our wealth comes from savings, investments, inheritance, a divorce settlement, or somewhere else, the total is whatever it is. If somebody’s total is $50,000, he might know he got $30,000 from savings and $20,000 from a jackpot. But after he pays $1,000 in rent and the total goes down to $49,000, it’s not so easy to tell anymore. Did that $1,000 come from savings or from the jackpot?
The money we’ve earned over the past month seems to be in a different category. I was talking to a friend “TJ,” and he was bemoaning that he had a bad run at the M playing for their incentive program. He usually plays around $100,000 a month in coin-in, and he received an incentive package that if he played $200,000 during October, he’d receive an extra several hundred of dollars in free play.
He calculated how much this came out to be and decided that if he got a 3x multiplier on one of the “Mystery Multiplier” Mondays it would be a good deal. But he hadn’t played yet for the month and he’d need to play the entire $200,000 in that one day.
While he usually prefers to play smaller stakes, he had no chance to play $200,000 in one day at his normal game. So he looked in the High Limit area to see what the best game for him would be there. He looked at all of the machines and saw that the highest returning one was 9/6 Double Double Bonus. This is a 98.98% game (when played perfectly). By itself it is a tighter “best” high limit game than you can find at many other casinos. But if you include the bigger mailers, the regular multipliers, and the incentive program, TJ figured it would be big enough. I agree with him. Including everything, the M is one of the places I play every month.
He played on the 25¢/50¢/$1 Fifty Play machine. He didn’t play all fifty lines. Even at the 25¢ denomination that would cost $62.50 per play and that was WAY outside of his comfort zone. I think he probably decided to play 20 lines at a time. Even $25 per play was a stretch for TJ, but he needed to play $200,000 in one day. TJ could have played $1 Five Play on the same game for the same $25 per play. But he knows that the variance on the “twenty play” would be less — and so he chose the “smoother ride.”
“Smoother” doesn’t mean “smooth.” TJ lost a bunch right from the get go. Double Double Bonus is a “heaven or hell” sort of game, and that particular day TJ ended up on the side with the red pitchfork. He lost $12,000 or so (I don’t know the exact number) and he bailed. He called this a “good idea that went badly.” He quit for the day and went home mad and full of self-loathing. He probably got mad at me because he knew I would tell him he should not have quit.
I asked him the next day how much he was down for the month. He told me $3,000. I was shocked! I knew this guy had wins and losses bigger than that on a regular basis. For a 4-week total, $3,000 in the soup is no big deal. I know of dozens of daily scores he’s had bigger than that. And for the month, this was a fairly normal swing.
“But I was dealt a royal this month on quarter Ten Play,” he told me. “That’s ten grand. Any month you win that big you should never get to be $3,000 in the hole. You should be ahead! And I’m not.” (To me this is irrelevant. I don’t believe that your money has a time-stamp on it.)
TJ has had similar-yet-opposite experiences from time to time. That is, he was down $7,000 since the first of the month and hit a $4,000 royal flush. He was still down $3,000 for the month, but now he feels pretty good about it because momentum is in the right direction.
When you’re adding up your yearly totals, minus $3,000 in the first case is equivalent to minus $3,000 in the second.
TJ wasn’t thinking of this as minus $3,000 in a month, of course. He was thinking of this as minus $12,000 in eight hours. And he was so upset he made a very poor decision because of it.
TJ completed his $200,000 of play later that month to claim the incentive, but he did the last $60,000 or so of it on tighter games when the multiplier was 2x instead of 3x. This cost him $200 or so in EV. Had he known he would be playing this much under these conditions, he probably wouldn’t have started the incentive program in the first place.
TJ apparently felt that since he’d already lost $12,000 that day, it was foolhardy to keep playing because he would probably keep losing. The $200 EV was small change to him after losing twelve grand. I believe very differently.
I don’t know if he would have “made a comeback” or not on that particular day. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. Nobody can predict that accurately. But I believe that by far the best way to decide which game to play is the return on the game plus the slot club plus the promotions. Giving up that game on a 3x day because he was losing — only to play a few days on a tighter machine on a 2x day — is not intelligent gambling.
You need to concentrate on the future when you gamble. What are the percentages? What are the odds? Concentrating on the immediate past scorewise (whether it was plus or minus) is not the smart way to go.
A month or two down the road, when TJ gets another incentive package, he will very possibly be playing the same Fifty Play machine 20 lines at a time. He will have forgotten the instant pain of the loss and will be (correctly) concentrating on the future again. But immediately after his big loss, he couldn’t think straight. And this improper thinking cost him $200.