Too Good to be True

Somebody sent me this photo of what was undoubtedly a casino mistake. It was sent several weeks before the publish date of this article, so there’s no chance of it still being around. But it’s worth discussing anyway.

There is a bank of eight machines with a nickel 8/5 Double Double Bonus progressive poker game.  This is normally a 96.79% game before you include the progressives, which is fairly typical for a nickel pay schedule.

Except . . . the progressives on the royal and the aces with a kicker are appropriate for a 20-coin bet and you get these progressive amounts for a 5-coin bet. Playing it rapidly, you have a $30 plus per hour game while only betting 25 cents a hand. If you stick around long enough to get either jackpot at least once, it’s basically impossible to lose. Even at reset, you have more than a 12% advantage on this game, albeit for only twenty-five cents at a time. 

You must hit one of the jackpots, of course, to guarantee a win. If the play only lasts a couple of weeks or less, there will always be at least a small chance that you’ll not hit either progressive and you’ll still be behind, regardless of how many hands you play. Still, with a 12% advantage, I really like your chances of being ahead.

Sooner or later, enough players are going to notice this game so that every seat is busy 24/7.  When the casino looks at the huge coin-in (for a nickel game) and the fact that they are losing an average of more than $500 per game per day, they’ll look closer and figure out what the problem is. 

In all likelihood, at this point the casino will end the bonanza. They will probably make it a 20-coin game (which is how it was presumably designed). Once that occurs, winning players will stay away, and regular nickel players will play it.

The guy who sent me the picture was planning on sharing one seat with two other players. Each would play eight hours and pass it off to the next in line. He wanted to know if the casino would retaliate against these players for “taking advantage” of the casino.

It’s a good question. Casinos frequently blame players when players notice casino errors and play them heavily until the casino figures it out. Will this casino do that this time? Who knows for sure?

My guess is that the casino will let sleeping dogs lie and not kick out these players. The size of the error is fairly small. Even if the bank loses $4,000 a day over a week or so, that’s not a lot of money. Were this same error to happen on a dollar machine and the casino lost $80,000 per day, you can bet players would be kicked out left and right. (A dollar game, however, would create W2Gs on royals on straight flushes, so it would be a lot easier for the casino to be aware of these machines. On the nickel machines, the jackpots are less than the $1,200 W2G threshold, so they can remain relatively invisible longer.)

But even for nickels, the casino might retaliate anyway. For this reason, I suggest players should not use their cards when they play and should wear hats while in the casino. When they arrive at the casino immediately before their shift begins, they should be looking down at their cell phones so good pictures are harder to obtain. Use the same technique when exiting the casino, immediately after their shifts end.

When the play ends (and it will, sooner rather than later), avoid going into the casino for a few months. The casino will possibly have given up trying to figure out who played “those machines” by then and the players may well still be welcome there.

If players are already well-known at the casino, these subterfuge techniques won’t do any good. If you’re going to play in this situation (which I wouldn’t recommend), you might as well use your card. They’ll know who you are anyway (even wearing a hat and even not looking directly at the camera), so you might as well get some comps out of the deal. (Playing 1,000 hands per hour yields $250 coin-in per hour and $2,000 coin-in per eight-hour day on a machine that the casino rewards well. If you’re sure you’re well-known there, that’ll add up over a week or more of play.)

Then there are the normal problems associated with three players staying interested in these eight-hour shifts for the duration. One of the players learns of a better play. One has a dentist appointment. One has visitors over the holidays and isn’t always able to keep his shift. Running a “team,” even a small 3-person team that is only put together for one play and does not include any sort of money-sharing, is not trivial. 

Every additional person you tell about the game will make this bonanza that much better known. Eventually you’ll have people hanging out behind the machines waiting for players to quit playing. The casino would not be expecting this to occur on these particular machines and some employee may investigate. This would lead to the demise of the situation.