The SLS Casino opened up at midnight on a Friday the week before Labor Day, 2014. Half a day later, Saturday afternoon, I visited to check it out. I wanted to see if there were any games worth playing.
In the High Limit room I ran into Scott McDermott. Scott had been some sort of slot department manager or shift boss at the Palms for perhaps 10 years. He knew me well. He had seen me hammer $5 Five Play or $25 single line games for hours and he knew I was “Bob Dancer.” I went up to him, shook his hand, and found out that he was in charge of slots at the SLS.
It was good information to have. It was now safe to assume that my video poker history was known or would be known to all SLS upper management. I told him, “As far as I know I’m welcome to play here.” He told me as far as he knew that was the case. Very good. I started looking at pay tables.
Being a slot director requires considerably more knowledge and skill than being a slot shift boss. Several casinos have opened up “too loose” or “too tight” simply because their new slot directors didn’t have the experience to find the right balance. While I like Scott and hope he does well in this job, I was hoping his original pay schedules were too loose.
Turns out they were. The pay tables in the High Limit room were MUCH looser than they were at any other High Limit room I’ve visited in Las Vegas. (Similar, actually, to what I saw at the Viejas Casino, east of San Diego, when I last played there a few years ago.) The best two games at SLS in the High Limit room were 8/5 Super Aces Bonus (99.939% — variance 63) and 10/6/40 Double Double Bonus (99.958% — variance 42).
There were numerous other good games as well, but these were the loosest. I would have strongly preferred that they were Triple Play, Five Play, Ten Play or similar versions, but they were offered only in single line. The games were available in $25 and $100 denominations. I’m not positive now, but I seem to recall the $10 and lower denominations having lesser pay schedules — unless I wanted to go all the way down to 25 cent games.
Of these two games, DDB was more attractive for three reasons. The most obvious reason was that DDB had a slightly higher return. In reality, that issue was largely irrelevant. I expected to cycle about $200,000 or so through the machines during my play and for that amount the difference in EVs was only $38. While not a trivial amount, when every hand is $125 or $500, $38 is just “background noise.”
The second reason DDB was more attractive than SAB was variance. The difference between a variance of 42 and 63 is significant. If this turned out to be a one-time play (I fully expected the pay tables to be lowered before I played a second time), I didn’t want these machines running bad to be the defining play of my year.
The third reason is that I already knew 9/6/50 DDB strategy perfectly. I had the 10/6/40 strategy worked out and in a Word file on my computer, and I could master the nuances in 10 minutes or less. While 8/5 SAB is an easier strategy and one I had played before so that I could get up to speed relatively quickly, DDB got the nod.
Then there was the cash-on-hand factor. I keep relatively small amounts of cash at home and have a couple of different safety deposit boxes around town where I keep more. How much cash I have available at any one time is something that fluctuates depending on recent wins and losses and how recently I’ve either withdrawn or deposited into a bank account. At that particular time, I only had $20,000 handy and my bank was closed until Monday. To play one of these machines, $20,000 is nowhere near enough. I would need to play on credit.
I didn’t recognize any of the hosts, so I picked one at random to get some additional information. She told me the slot club points weren’t worth anything (which had to be nonsense, but at the time, I didn’t know for sure), but mostly she was helpful. I checked to see if I could get a line of credit set up quickly. Since I’ve been a credit player for decades in Las Vegas, my credit history is on file with Central Credit, a Las Vegas based company that most casinos here utilize. Information such as whether I have casino lines of credit elsewhere, if those lines of credit are currently active, what the limits are for my credit lines, whether any casino needed to go after me to collect, and the amount of my outstanding balances is all available to a casino with one phone call. Perhaps much more information is available as well, but I’m not sure.
Casinos typically want evidence of a personal checking account with a balance bigger than the line of credit requested. This is harder to check on a Saturday than it would be on a Tuesday, but since I have a history and other lines of credit as large or larger than I was requesting, the casino inferred that I had such an account.
I asked what kind of grand opening promotions they offered big players. She told me that they would match any current cash-or-free-play offer from any other casino. Oh really? I had some offers for $2,500 from a casino with MUCH tighter machines. Without going into exact numbers, at a casino which gave me $2,500 in free play, I might play to the point where my expected loss would be between $1,500 and $2,000. (Obviously sometimes I’m going to win and sometimes I’m going to lose $10,000 or more in the process, but how much I play is based on EXPECTED loss, not ACTUAL loss. Over time, they come out close to the same.)
Even without a slot club, my expected loss on playing $200,000 on the DDB machine at SLS was $84. And I would be paid $2,500 to play the game? Sweet! I decided that a $25 single line machine would be quite enough. I could play $200,000 in a couple of hours, depending on how fast they paid off the W2Gs, and there was no need to fade a game where the ups and downs would be four times as large.
My host set it up so that everything was ready to go by 8 p.m. Sunday evening when I told her that I would return. I filled out a credit application online after I went home later on that Saturday. On Sunday when I was ready to head back to SLS, I grabbed my $2,500 offer and also my checkbook so they could make a copy of my account information. I knew that I would still need to sign some papers when I arrived at SLS, but everything was, as promised, ready and waiting for me.
When I got there, before I went to see the host with my $2,500 offer, I went to verify that the DDB game was still there. It was. I actually didn’t need to do this. Even if they had slashed the pay tables, I still would have been willing to take the $2,500 and play some. If the games were lousy I wouldn’t give them much action, but at least I’d take the free money first. Mama didn’t raise no fool!
I asked to speak with someone from the slot club and my host arranged for such a person to come and talk with me. The slot club representative gave me numbers that told me it was a 0.2% free play slot club when I played video poker. How much play was needed to get a mailer or other offers was not yet known. They had opened up less than 48 hours previously and some things had yet to be decided.
So I asked for a $20,000 marker in four $5,000 “tickets” after verifying that such tickets would indeed be accepted into the machines. While they were completing their paperwork for my marker, I downloaded the $2,500 free play and started in. After about 10 hands, I hit four sixes and the machine locked up for $6,250. Good start.
While still waiting for the $5,000 tickets and also to be paid for my first jackpot, I slid over to the adjacent machine and inserted $1,000 cash. Five hands later I hit a $1,250 full house. Full houses come around every 90-or-so hands in this game and having the machine lock up so often for such a small jackpot is more of a nuisance than a good thing. If the full house only paid 45 coins instead of 50, that would be a $1,125 jackpot instead of $1,250 and the machine wouldn’t lock up. But if I played $200,000 coin-in, the lesser amount for a full house would cost me about $2,000. There are worse things than putting up with a nuisance.
When both jackpots had been paid off (key to credit–meaning that once I’d signed the log for the jackpot the credits would still be on the machine), I still hadn’t received any slot club points. I didn’t know whether this was a glitch in their system or if I simply didn’t get slot club points for playing off free play. Since I needed to play 20 hands to play off the $2,500 in free play, and I hadn’t played that many yet, I decided to wait for another 10 hands or so and see what happened. Sure enough, I started receiving slot club points after a few more hands.
The $20,000 marker I started with didn’t last too long. It was a little more than an hour after I started that I needed another $20,000 marker. Although I had hit a few $6,250 jackpots and quite a few $1,250 full houses, the bigger hands of $10,000 (2s, 3s, and 4s), $20,000 (2s, 3s, and 4s with a kicker or aces without a kicker), $50,000 (aces with a kicker), and the $100,000 royal flush had so far eluded me. Since it is basically an even game when I get my fair share of such jackpots, it is no surprise that I lose rather rapidly when I don’t hit these hands. So I took my second $20,000 marker.
Somewhere along the way I decided to play considerably more than $200,000 coin-in. I was at least a small favorite and possibly a big favorite if my play generated large mailers. If I was ever going to play through a lot of coin-in during one session, it was probably going to be that night. SLS Casino keeping this game available for very long wasn’t too likely. Plus some of the employees mentioned that the night before, a guy who was playing the $100 version of the same game hit aces with a kicker for $200,000. I didn’t know his final score, but it was very possible that even if I lost $70,000, the casino would still be a loser for the weekend on these machnes. Things like that cause machines to be removed.
Certainly my score at that time had nothing to do with me deciding to play more than I had originally planned. I was losing. I had obtained a $50,000 line of credit and had brought another $20,000 with me. I was willing to go through all of that if things stayed bad. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but I didn’t spend too much time dwelling on my score. Playing every hand perfectly takes concentration (at least for me). Worrying about money or other irrelevant things can distract me from playing correctly.
The High Limit room at the SLS is large and rectangular. Table games of various sorts are in the middle of the room. Slot and video poker games are along the outside walls. There were not a lot of customers in the High Limit room that night, but the tables were completely staffed. At times I was the only player in the room, along with more than 20 employees. There was nothing for the dealers to do, so many watched me.
At one point, near midnight, I was down $34,000 on the evening and had $1,250 jackpots on two side-by-side machines essentially back-to-back. (I wasn’t physically playing two machines at once, but when one would lock up I’d slide over to the other.) While the slot staff was attentive, it took at least a few minutes to be paid on every hand-pay (sometimes longer if another player in the room or elsewhere in the casino also had a jackpot) so I stood up and stretched. One of the blackjack dealers (perhaps 15 feet away) told me he had never seen a player as lucky as I was, hitting jackpot after jackpot. He wished he could be so lucky.
I smiled and didn’t say anything. A $1,250 jackpot looks big if you play quarters and almost never get a W2G. If it’s an every-eight-minutes situation (when it comes on full houses and higher), you get a lot of them. Unless you’re close to the machine, you can’t really see the difference between $1,250 hands and $20,000 hands. So yes, I’d hit a couple dozen jackpots but I was also losing quite a bit. I hardly felt like the luckiest guy in the world. When they came to pay me for the jackpots, I gave them $15,000 in cash I had brought with me and asked them to bring me three more tickets.
I will continue this story next week. Spoiler alert: I did end up hitting a $100,000 royal flush later in the session. This is not the main thrust of next week’s article.