Bonnie, my wife of almost eight months, knows very little about intelligent gambling. Although she has assisted during a few semesters of my free video poker seminars, she concentrated more on running the projector accurately rather than evaluating what I had been teaching. Learning about gambling is simply not a priority to her.
After we returned from our cruises on December 14, I decided to start sending her text messages showing every jackpot I hit that was more than $8,000. That was a number picked somewhat arbitrarily–although it’s a target hit with some regularity, it’s still rare enough to be special.
On one night during the last week of December, I was playing dollar Ten Play Double Double Bonus Ultimate X at the Palms. (They have since restricted these machines from earning points, but at the time of this article, they were unrestricted.) For that week (Monday-Friday) they were giving away free play at a rate of 0.20% — limited to $190 free play a day, which took $95,000 of video poker play to earn. You could save up your points until the end of the week, so long as you didn’t exceed the $190 redemption rate per day. If you had “extra” play at the end of the earning period (usually two weeks, although in this case it was only one week) you got no extra value out of the play.
Often the Palms gives away gift cards. The maximum number that you can earn and the rate at which you earn them varies from promotion to promotion. Six months ago, the rate was regularly 0.25%. Then it got lowered to 0.225%. Currently it’s 0.20%. Players hope the rate will not continue to go down. For the last week of December, playing $475,000 earned me the maximum amount of free play.
On that particular night, I didn’t know how long I would play. I would get my $475,000 coin-in done sometime during the week, but it wasn’t critical that I complete it that night. How long I would play was going to be determined by my alertness, by the presence of any smokers or obnoxious players in the room, and by how I was feeling in general. So I told Bonnie before I left the house that I didn’t know how late I would be.
Playing beyond $475,000 for the week was not a consideration. During the previous two weeks I had played $950,000 coin-in on virtually the same promotion (except it was cash instead of free play — which is a much worse promotion from my point of view. I’ll discuss that later in this article.) So I already had enough play to get me a good mailer and the only reason I’d play more was if the promotion was attractive. Free play is attractive to me. TJ Maxx or Albertson’s gift cards, not so much.
I started out with a few small jackpots, which quickly got swallowed up by the $100-per-hand game. I was slightly ahead after one hour of play. In the next two hours, the video poker gods smiled on me. On a game that has regularly cleaned my clock in the past, I received a jackpot of $9,660 (started with 333, and ended up with quads twice, once with a kicker, both with nice multipliers); a jackpot of $8,250 (starting with 4-to-the-royal and ended up with one royal on a 2x line); $12,000 (dealt 3s with a kicker); and $17,200 (dealt aces without a kicker). These “large” jackpots were in addition to several smaller “usual” jackpots.
I was alert, playing well, and there were no smokers. So I intended to play more. I don’t need to “ask permission,” to stay later, but Bonnie likes to know my schedule. Texting allows her to communicate if she’s awake and ignore the messages if she’s not. Plus, many of her senior citizen friends don’t know how to text, so Bonnie enjoys being more “with the times” than her friends are.
I texted Bonnie at this point telling her that I couldn’t afford to come home early. This, of course, was complete rubbish. How my score was over the past couple of hours was a very poor predictor of what would happen over the next two hours. (As it happened, I dropped $5,000 over the next two hours — but it was still a very impressive score for the evening.)
But even though I knew my explanation of why I wanted to continue playing was ridiculous, it made perfect sense to Bonnie. She’s a believer in the “if good things are happening, keep playing” theory of gambling. And since the jackpot pictures I sent here were large and numerous, it didn’t surprise her at all that I would want to keep playing. So I got to do what I wanted to do, and she was happy about it. Never mind that my reasons for wanting to continue playing had nothing to do with the reasons she thought I used.
I mentioned earlier that I preferred receiving $190 in free play to $190 in cash. In many ways, they are the same. But it takes the booth workers longer to fill out the voucher for $190 than it does for them to put $190 of free play on my card. And then I have to go across the casino to the cashier, stand in line, show ID, and get paid. It’s not a terrible burden to go through this, but I’d prefer not to have to spend the extra 5 minutes each time in collecting the money. On a two-week promotion where I did this ten times, it meant killing almost an hour for no benefit.
The value of the free play is the same as cash to me. Playing $1 million of coin-in a month there, I’m going to be inserting a LOT of money into the machine. It’s a lot easier to do it with free play than it is to actually put the bills in.
There are some casinos that don’t give you slot club points when you play off your free play. (Fortunately the Palms isn’t one of them.) Playing $190 in coin-in earns you 47.5¢ at the Palms. If the Palms didn’t allow you to earn points on free play, it would be that much more profitable to pick up cash than free play. Except that it costs five minutes to earn that extra 47.5¢. Not for me.
But, of course, many other players prefer cash to free play. So it probably makes sense for the casino to sometimes offer cash and to sometimes offer free play.