Several years ago, I wrote an article which stated that successful video poker playing required a juggling act of sorts. Pretend that one ball is getting the right pay schedule; another ball is knowing how to play each hand; another ball is understanding the slot club and promotions in effect and not playing unless the combination is high enough; another ball is playing while rested and sober enough so that you’re at your best; etc.
You have to keep all the balls in the air at the same time. If it’s a great game but you don’t know the correct strategy, it’s not so good. If you have the choice between playing on Tuesday or Wednesday, but one of those days offers some sort of a multiplier and the other one doesn’t, you need to be playing on the correct day. Being able to keep all the balls in the air is not a trivial feat.
Someone recently posted online that the royal flush at a particular casino was shorted in some situations and he didn’t realize this anomaly until after he’d hit a royal. After the fact, when the error blaringly hits you in the face, it’s easy to say you should have seen it beforehand. It’s a totally different thing to find it in real time. Unfortunately, I’ve been bitten by this a number of times in my career. I assume you have too. My latest incident happened recently at the Palms.
At the Palms, they have a strange way of determining how many drawing tickets you earn. It depends on whether you play video poker or slots. This happens at other casinos as well. At the Palms, it also depends on the lowest denomination available on the machine you are playing.
That is, if you’re playing a quarter game on a machine which also offers nickel games, you get 2½ times as many drawing tickets as you do if you’re playing the same game on a machine where quarters are the lowest denomination. It’s a strange system, but some of us who play there have learned to deal with it and tried to capitalize on it.
Currently, if you play on Friday and Saturday nights between 8 p.m. and midnight, you receive 5x drawing tickets for the upcoming Friday and Saturday drawings. On other days, you get other benefits (such as Visa cards), but only single drawing tickets. Playing heavily on Saturday night (so you get tickets for both of next week’s drawings) is a calculated risk that the additional drawing tickets you earn will offset the lower return that comes from not earning Visa cards for the same amount of play.
The “best” game to play for any particular person depends partly on which stakes he plays, which games he knows how to play, and also whether or not he’s able and willing to attend the drawings. And since the games change periodically, that can also affect the choice.
My choice in November was to play 25 cent Hundred Play 8-5 Bonus Poker on Saturday night. I could play $200,000 coin-in over the four hours that offered 5x points and I figured the 10,000 tickets I earned would give me about an 80% chance of being called the next Friday and a 70% chance of being called the next Saturday. When I looked at the expected loss from playing the game and the expected return from the drawing, the play made sense.
As it turned out, I was called both nights — once in 9th place out of 10 and the other time on the redraw after somebody didn’t show up. Whether the estimates of my chances to win were accurate or not, I’m not sure — but they were at least reasonable. To determine whether or not it’s a good play necessitates some sort of estimate like this. Being called had an EV of $1,500 and so having a strong expectation of being called twice was worth playing for.
In December I planned to play the same way. However, Bonnie and I were on a cruise from December 7-14 — with an important-to-us Christmas party on the evening of the 14th — so December 21 was the first Saturday I got to play.
I went ahead and played through $200,000 coin-in and checked my drawing tickets. I was expecting 10,000 but instead I only received 4,000. I went to the booth to inquire and they told me the machine I was playing was listed as a quarter machine in the system. I went back and looked, and sure enough, they had removed the nickel and dime games from the box. I was only earning 40% as many tickets as I thought. I would not have been playing the game had I realized it before I began — but somehow I missed it. It was nobody’s fault but my own. I had checked my points, the pay schedule, and I had verified there were going to be 5x tickets. But I didn’t notice certain denominations were missing from the box. With only 4,000 tickets, my chances were probably less than 30% each night for being called — and not surprisingly I didn’t get called either night.
This is not a case of “casino screws the players.” The casino was still giving away the same prizes that it said it would. If one group of players earned fewer tickets, it just gave other players a better chance. I have no inside knowledge of why they did this, but it wouldn’t surprise me that they felt the players who were playing like I did were winning the drawing too many times and that was bad for the morale of the other players. So they changed some of the machines to address this.
The Palms has recently undergone a management shake-up. The January drawing structure is completely different from what they had in the past. There is now a 100-ticket-per-day maximum with respect to tickets being earned. This makes the now once-a-week drawing into a low-roller crap shoot which is fine for some players but not something that interests me at all. If I don’t have a significant chance to win at a drawing I don’t show up. Offsetting this is the mailers are bigger — at least in January. So now I’ll need to examine whether the new combination of (game return + slot club + promotions + mailers) is good enough to play now that the drawings are worthless to me. I suspect the answer will still be “yes,” but it’s not as strong of a play as it has been in the recent past.
In addition to having to juggle lots of balls to do well, sometimes the balls change sizes and shapes while in the air, and sometimes things change and nobody tells you. It can be frustrating, but learning to live with it and deal with it is simply part of the game. If you fail to analyze these things reasonably accurately, you’ll find yourself playing at places where you have no realistic chance to win and/or avoiding places where you have a much better chance of winning.