Category: Video Poker

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Free Money is Always Good — Sort of

Bob Dancer

Derek Stevens, along with his mostly silent brother, Greg, owns Circa, the D, and Golden Gate casinos in downtown Las Vegas. The three properties share a slot club and the same ONE player’s card may be used at all three properties.   

Circa checks everyone’s ID every time using a hand-held device about the size of a cell phone. I assume they capture the information on your Driver’s License in the process, but I don’t know that for a fact. The D checks your ID on weekend nights — but not always all three doors. The Golden Gate, by far the smallest of the three properties, rarely has anybody checking your ID as you enter.

Sometimes the checking is done by regular security officers. Sometimes the checking is done by what appear to be temporary employees.

Strangely, on a midweek day in mid-November, a man in a tuxedo was checking IDs at Golden Gate. I produced mine and he asked if I was there for the promotion. I read mailers fairly closely and was pretty sure that no mid-week promotion was advertised for that casino, so I asked, “What promotion?”

He told me that if I sign up for a card at the players’ club, I’d receive guaranteed free play for some amount between $5 and $1,000. I told him I already had a card, and he replied that all I had to do was to show the card and I’d get the free play.

Free money is always good. 

On the way to the machines I wanted to check, I glanced over at the players’ club. There was a line of about 25 people and it wasn’t moving very fast. I didn’t see how many booth attendants were servicing the front of the line, but clearly not enough to make the line move very fast.

I figured it would take me 30-45 minutes to get to the front of the line. If I knew I was going to get $200 or more, such a wait would be tolerable. While I don’t know the distribution of the free play amounts for this particular promotion, historically in Las Vegas it goes something like 50% of the time it’s $5, 25% of the time it’s $10, 23% of the time it’s $20 or $25, and 2% of the time it’s higher than that. If those percentages held true for this promotion, my EV for standing in line for a long time was less than $10.

When I first moved to Las Vegas and was scrounging to make enough money to be able to stay, I would have stood in line. Not anymore. Today I have a bankroll, and my earning power is more than $10 per 30-45 minutes. So, I passed up the line and checked the machines I wanted to check.

Perhaps I should modify my “Free money is always good” statement to something like, “No money is totally free. Whether it’s good to get depends on what you have to do to obtain it. Correctly evaluating this is part of what makes a gambler successful or not.”

Also, please note that in no way am I criticizing the Golden Gate for their promotion. Clearly a lot of people were capitalizing on it and I would have done the same 30 years ago. It’s just that for me at this time in my life, no thank you.

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Winding Things Down

Bob Dancer

Every end of year presents decisions tax-wise. If you have accumulated cash back or free play at casinos and withdraw it, it’s a taxable event and is hence reportable. Many players, possibly most, don’t report such income, but that’s tax evasion — which is a crime. My goal is tax avoidance, which is different.

Usually, my decision comes down to whether I am ahead or behind for the year. While I’ve usually had positive annual results, there have been exceptions. In 2024, for example, I had a seriously-negative year. In December of that year, I emptied most of my slot club accounts.  This reduced my loss for the year and since losses aren’t carried over year to year, was a better strategy than if I collected the money from the slot club accounts in a year I was ahead and would have to pay taxes on it.

In 2025, I’m ahead and will not be clearing out accounts before December 31. Because of the new tax law that is going into effect January 1, I’ll be quitting most of my gambling at that time, so my slot club accounts will be cleaned out in January of 2026.

There are some cases, however, where I will not clear out my slot club accounts, because of the idiosyncrasies of the particular slot clubs. Some of my readers have accounts at these exact casinos, but many of you have accounts elsewhere where the same logic might apply.

South Point — When the South Point reduced its slot club from a 0.30% return to 0.15%, I quit playing. All video poker there now has a house advantage. The mailers competent video poker players receive are pretty paltry, so there’s no reason for me to play there anymore.

Telling people that I’ll no longer be playing at South Point (knowing that others might follow my example and also quit playing there) is not easy for me to do. Over the years, I’ve been a very strong advocate for that casino.

 Michael Gaughan and the South Point have been very good to my career and to me personally. The South Point was the major sponsor of my Gambling with an Edge podcast, and I taught classes there for many years. When Shirley, out of the blue, decided our marriage was over back in 2012, the South Point gave me a free room there for a few weeks until I got my feet on the ground again. Many competent players have been removed from the South Point slot club, but I was allowed to stay because of my relationship with Michael Gaughan.

 But the policies of that casino have changed. The slot club has been cut in half, and many monthly promotions are smaller now than they used to be. While I’ll always be grateful to Michael Gaughan, I won’t be a player there any longer. So why not close my slot club account there?

Because on Mondays, the South Point offers 50% discounts to seniors for food and other things if you use your accumulated points — and for about two weeks before Christmas every year everybody gets the 50% discounts using points. Since spending my points like this isn’t taxable, and I get twice as much in food as I’d get in cash, it makes sense to me not to clear out the account at this time.

Caesars Sports Book — I am not a significant sports bettor, but Caesars Sports Book offers monthly promotions if you have Caesars Seven Stars status. My current Seven Stars status remains in effect until January 2027, so I’ll continue to opt into the monthly promotion until then.

Although the promotion has changed before and can change again at any time, currently it goes like this: If you make a monthly $100 or higher bet using real money (which includes money deposited or earned and not withdrawn), you get a $150 free bet. Free bets do not return as much as regular bets, but they are free and, obviously, I win some of them.

While I generally make my $100 bets at around -200 (meaning I will win approximately 2/3 of them), I lose some of them. My free bets are made on underdogs, so I lose more than half of them. So, it is possible that my overall balance decreases periodically and I’ll need some money in the account so I can continue to make my required $100 monthly bets. I’ll probably leave $500 in it and clean out the rest in January. Over time, though, I’m a huge favorite to win during this promotion.

Four Queens — I have a current comp dollar balance of several thousand dollars. Bonnie and I like to take people to Hugo’s Cellar periodically, so I want to keep that balance active. That means I will continue to play a little at that casino to keep the food comps from expiring. So while I’m “giving up gambling” in the main, there are a few exceptions, like this one.

I will not be receiving meal comps at casinos in 2026 because I’ve stopped playing, so in addition to going to Hugo’s Cellar sometimes, we’ll probably eat at their Magnolia’s coffee shop much more often than we do today. The casino has an accumulated points balance, separate from comp dollars, and we’ll probably zero that in January.

There are other year-end things I will do. Bonnie and I each get five $100 meals at Caesars properties because of our Seven Stars status. We still have some that won’t expire until January 31. We’ll spend those in January — because we have other “free food” until then. It’s possible we’ll get more meals at Caesars next year simply because we’re still Seven Stars. We’ll see.

It’s possible that the new tax law will be reversed sometime in the future — and depending on when that happens, I might start gambling again. I will certainly look at what casinos are offering and make a judgment as to whether I can get up to speed again and how long that will take me. 

If this happens in, for example, 2030, I’ll be 83 years old by then and will not have played for five years. It’s fair to assume my skills will have greatly deteriorated in that time period. And who knows if there will be any games worth playing by then? 

While presumably I’ll be able to get up to speed again in video poker, if there are any games worth playing, I’ll have to start over again at advantage slots. While I know how to beat several dozen different kinds of slot machines today, new games will continue to be invented and any of the games I know today will likely either be non-existent or perhaps “everybody” will know how to play them so my information today will be worthless then.

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Week Two Aboard the Norwegian Bliss

Bob Dancer

In last week’s blog, I told of Bonnie and I going on two back-to-back Sunday to-Sunday Mexican Riviera cruises. I was still aboard the Bliss when I started the last blog post. I’m already home before I’m starting this one. Some of what I previously wrote needs amendment. Not because I intentionally lied to you, but either the host in the casino gave me bad information, or I misunderstood what was said.

I earned 1,000 points each week, entitling me to $500 off my next NCL cruise. I needed to make cruise reservations using these certificates within 60 days, and the trips needed to be completed within one year. So, two days after we arrived home, I called NCL’s Casinos at Sea department to make the arrangements. I wanted to use these certificates to pay for the port fees and possibly gratuities on the same cruises we earned by obtaining Seven Stars status at Caesars.

No can do. The certificates are only good for the cabins themselves — or an upgrade. We could upgrade to a “Club Balcony Suite,” for an additional $360 per person, but I could only use the certificates for my part of that, not Bonnie’s. So, If I wanted to use my certificates at all, we’d have to pay an additional $360. We would get a bigger room, bigger balcony, and a bottle of sparkling wine. For $360. For each of two weeks.

We decided to do this. It might end up being our last cruises (all of our cruises so far have been largely subsidized by casinos — paying retail for cruises doesn’t sound attractive at all — and I’m giving up gambling effective January 1, so we won’t be getting any more cruises “for free.” Paying retail for cruises goes against my frugal nature, and with the casino no longer attractive to somebody who has given up gambling, there’s far less reason to go.)  

When I said in last week’s blog that the certificates were worth 5% if you played video poker and 10% if you played slots, that’s only true if the certificates are useful to you — like if you didn’t get highly discounted cruises from Caesars or other casinos and were willing to pay retail for them.

There were 30 or so guests cruising back-to-back like we did — presumably, there’s a similar number every week. But somehow the Bliss has a computer glitch that kicks in on back-to-back cruises.

Usually, you use your stateroom key card as a slot club card in the casino. I went to the casino about 2 a.m. on Monday morning for my first visit of the week. The machines are largely available at that time, and I was optimistic that the new passengers would have left unplayed multipliers on the Ultimate X (UX) machines and also left some of the (relatively few) persistent slot machines in an advantageous state.

The first slot machine I checked was Rich Little Piggies (RLP). At home I rarely check these machines because a high percentage of machine pros know what to look for and they are checked regularly. But on a cruise ship, when there aren’t too many machine pros, this might be worth checking. When these machines aren’t being played, what shows on the screen is the 1¢ 75-coin game. While this is a low denomination that isn’t of particular interest to me, the screen showed the blue piggy at 25 with a fat yellow piggy. 

Simply put, this machine was in a positive state and lots of players had walked right by it since it was last played. This was a good sign because at least a portion of the UX vultures would recognize this RLP game as being good to play. And if they hadn’t found this game right out in the open, there were probably multipliers available on the UX machines ripe for the plucking!

Except my card wouldn’t work.

I went to the casino cage. They looked at what they could see on their computers and told me that my account was in good standing, and I should not have a problem. The slot attendants had gone to bed, but some of the table game dealers filled in for them. One of them tried my card and agreed it wouldn’t work and he had no explanation as to why.

I passed a man in a suit with an NCL employee badge on, and I asked him if he was in the slot department. No, but he was the overall casino shift manager and wanted to know what my issue was. I explained that my card worked last week and wouldn’t work now. He told me they sometimes had a problem on the first few days for a back-to-back cruiser. He thought the problem had been fixed, but they had a workaround that they could use. He told me he could get one of his slot people, who was currently off duty, to come and help.

“You’re going to wake somebody up?” I asked. “I can wait until tomorrow.”

“No,” he replied. “If you’re in the mood to play now, we want to help you. My slot guy should be here in ten minutes, so please wait over here,” and he pointed to some empty seats.

I did and about 15 minutes later I had another card. It was for the casino only and wouldn’t work to open my cabin door. It had a different design on the card so I could easily tell the cards apart. We tested it and it worked, at least on the machine we tested it on.

When I went back to the RLP game, the new card wouldn’t work. The guy who had been woken up to help me had left the casino. There was no way I was going to get him called back again. I’d just wait until tomorrow.

I was a little concerned. At this point I thought the promotion was worth between 5% and 10% and I didn’t know how many opportunities I’d get. It would depend on how much competition I had at UX vulturing — which I couldn’t know yet because the ship had just sailed 10 or so hours earlier. The good numbers on the RLP machine were an indication that I’d find plenty of opportunities to get my points, but it was just an indication, not a certainty.

As it turned out, I got the new card fixed the next day and had no problem finding enough plays to earn 1,000 points. But I didn’t know this when I returned to bed Monday morning at about 3 a.m.

The back-to-back problem also affected my internet package for a few days. It eventually got fixed but I missed something on Sunday that I really wanted. We were going to do a special Gambling With an Edge podcast on the recent Blackjack Ball, and we planned to tape it Sunday afternoon when we were still in the port of Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, my name wasn’t recognized when I tried to set up the internet account for the second week. It would be fixed a few days later, but Richard Munchkin had to tape the GWAE episode without me. He did fine, of course, but we both wish I would have been able to participate.

I don’t understand why the Bliss had computer glitches affecting back-to-back cruisers. The ship is about six years old, there are dozens of ships in the fleet, and dozens of back-to-back cruisers every week. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to fix the glitch, whatever it was.

The attitude of the employees was excellent — but somehow the system didn’t work properly. I don’t know if this affects other ships in the fleet or not.

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New Promotion on Norwegian Cruise Lines

Bob Dancer

As I write this, Bonnie and I are spending two weeks aboard the NCL Bliss having set sail Sunday, October 26. We tour the Mexican Riviera (Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán) on back-to-back cruises. This is our “go to” itinerary for three reasons.

First, I have extended family near our departure port, so after a 200-mile drive from Las Vegas, we get to have a place to spend the night before, a place to park the car while we’re cruising, transportation to and from the port itself, and a chance to visit family I don’t see very often. In exchange, I buy everybody dinner Saturday night — and many of my family members accept this bribe.

Second, the Bliss has a Texas barbeque specialty dining option. While Bonnie and I are not barbeque fans, Texas-style or otherwise, the venue also has a country-western band playing every night next to a nice dance floor. And we are fans of that. We are better than average dancers and Bonnie never tires of compliments we receive from other passengers.

Our third reason will resonate with more of my readers than the first two. The last time we were on the Bliss, in the fall of 2024, the casino offered a sizeable number of persistence slot machines, many of which I knew how to beat. There are many fewer of these slots than there were a year ago, but there are still 11 Super Star machines which include Ultimate X (UX). 

These UX machines have three games (Double Bonus, Double Double Bonus, and Deuces Wild), in Triple Play, Five Play, and Ten Play configurations. Each of these come in five different denominations, yielding 45 different combinations per machine.

Since cruise ship gamblers tend to be less sophisticated gaming-wise than those found in Las Vegas, these UX machines may frequently be found with unplayed multipliers. I don’t seek unplayed UX multipliers in most casinos I frequent because several casinos remove players who do so. I do look for those unplayed multipliers aboard the Bliss because it is both lucrative and if I get kicked out of the casino, it’s relatively small potatoes. Especially since I plan to give up gambling in a few months anyway.

Plus, the casino’s smoking section is behind sealed glass which makes the rest of the casino relatively smoke-free. Not completely, because some smoke escapes whenever one of the doors between the smoking and non-smoking areas is opened, but it is far less smoky than many casinos. Which is a huge plus for me.

In the casino, you earn points for your play. One point for every $5 coin-in for slots and one for $10 coin-in for video poker. The points are redeemable for free play, at a miniscule yet non-zero rate. As near as I can tell, it’s 0.01% for video poker and twice that for slots.

Starting in early October, they began a fairly lucrative promotion called “Points to Paradise.” According to the slot club boothling I spoke to, this promotion is valid on most NCL ships, and they plan to run it indefinitely. 

If you earn 500 points, you receive $250 off your next cruise. One thousand points gets you $500 off, and 2,000 points earns you a free cruise. After you earn these benefits, you must book a cruise within 60 days and sail within a year or the benefits evaporate. If you stay on the ship for two or more weeks back-to-back, insofar as this promotion is concerned, and you end up with, say, 450 points on the first week, those points do not carry over until the following week.

For the mathematically challenged, if you are planning on, or at least willing to, cruise again on NCL within a year, playing on slots gives you a 10% rebate, and playing video poker gives you a 5% rebate — assuming you stop playing when you reach exactly 500, 1,000, or 2,000 points.

If you play nothing other than vulturing UX machines, it’s unlikely that you’ll earn 500 points. You are, after all, only playing one hand at a time whenever you find a good situation. And the number of good situations you find largely depends on how many other UX vultures there are on the cruise. There are some persistence slots which earn points much faster than vulturing UX, simply because you often play a lot of hands on such machines until it becomes unplayable, so I’ll end up with close to 1,000 points each week. I’m writing this in the middle of our first week of cruising, so I’m not sure what my balance will be.

The best non-UX video poker I found was single-line 8/5 Jacks or Better in denominations between 50 cents and $10 — which returns 97.3% if played correctly. I don’t think I’ve ever played 8/5 Jacks or Better before, but I know 8/5 Bonus Poker perfectly and that strategy is “close enough” to play for a few hands. A a machine with a casino edge of 2.7% paired with a promotion that returns 5% is definitely playable. If I end up with, say 800 points by the time the cruise ends, I’ll earn the remaining 200 points by playing $2,000 coin-in worth of 8/5 Jacks or Better, with an expected loss of $54. This will allow me to receive my second $250 discount for the week. I plan to do this for both weeks. If the competition for unplayed UX multipliers during the second week of our cruising is greater than it is the first week, I might end up with only $250 in cruise discounts for the second week.

Bonnie and I have already qualified for our highly discounted NCL cruises for 2026 that we’ve earned by maintaining Seven Stars status. I may well not be gambling after January 2026, but I will be cashing what I earned prior to that. We’ll probably reserve two back-to-back Mexican Riviera cruises on the Bliss again next fall.

While we won’t have the casino as a reason to go on the cruise, I’ll still have family in Southern California and there will still be country-western dancing on the ship (we hope). Those two reasons are sufficient.

I won’t make the mistake of picking dates during the World Series like I unwittingly did this year. I’ve been a Dodger fan since the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958, and if they’re in it again next year I’ll want to watch the games at night in preference to going dancing. Which won’t be to Bonnie’s liking.

While the Dodgers are longshots to make it back again to the 2026 World Series, they probably have better odds than any other team. And we can just as easily go the week after the Series.

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A Look at Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, by Tim Grover

Bob Dancer

The book Winning was recommended to me by a friend. Since I think of myself as a winner, at least in my most confident moments, I thought I knew most of what the book was about. I was wrong. Whatever winning I do is junior varsity stuff. The winning this book talks about is World Championships!

Tim Grover is an athletic trainer, trained in kinesiology, who, when he was 25 years old, sent letters to all the Chicago Bulls except Michael Jordan applying to be their personal trainer — an uncommon position in 1985. Jordan saw the letter in the locker room, had Grover checked out, and hired him for 30 days as a sort of tryout. 

Jordan had played one year in the NBA at that point, done really well, but was bullied by the bigger, stronger players. He knew he needed to bulk up without losing his speed, quickness, and other skills, and was willing to give Grover a chance to help him.

Grover was with Jordan for 15 years, through six world championships, and a not-so-successful two-year stint trying to be a professional baseball player. After Jordan retired, Grover helped a number of other players, including Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Charles Barkley, and others. Most of you know these were top basketball players of their era, and Michael Jordan is largely considered to be the GOAT – Greatest of All Time. Today Grover mostly consults with business CEOs.

This book doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you how to think and how to approach winning. If you’re not already motivated to succeed, this book won’t help you. The book is about adding that critical extra edge to people who are already successful.

Grover lists 13 steps to winning — all of which he labels number 1 because they are all necessary. I’m not going to go through all 13, but I will mention a few.

  1. Winning is not a marathon — it’s a sprint with no finish line.
  1. Winning takes you through hell — and if you quit, that’s where you end up.
  1. Winning makes you different, and different scares people.
  1. Winning makes war on the battlefield of your mind.
  1. Winning is selfish.

I could discuss what Grover says about any of these points, but I’ll just look at the last. If you’re going to win, you have to go all in. This often means lack of balance in such things as family and relationships. We’ve all heard of people who work too many hours, and their marriage suffers. Grover says that if you want to be a winner, this is par for the course. 

Grover strongly dislikes motivational cliches such as “You’ve got this!”, “You’re crushing it!”, and “Play hard until the final whistle blows!” These are junior high expressions, in his mind, and every competitor already knows these things without having them yelled at by a coach. True winning is much different.

There are lots of anecdotes in the book, especially about Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, on how their will to succeed was far beyond that of most people. But this will to succeed is what it takes to be a winner.

Grover says four things are needed to be a winner: talent, intelligence, competitiveness, and resilience — and the most important of these is resilience. This is what makes you get up and keep going after you’ve fallen on your face. 

And falling on your face is definitely going to happen. Nobody has clear sailing to championships over and over again. It’s very hard work and there are always setbacks.

Nobody wins all the time and when you do win, as soon as it’s over you start from scratch and have to work hard to make it happen again. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect to succeed. You have to come back better because your competition will have analyzed what you have done and will make adjustments to counter what you did before.

I found this book inspiring. Perhaps I would have had more success in my life had I come across this book earlier.

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If I Could Do It Over Again

Bob Dancer

I’m approaching the twilight of my life and career, and I sometimes reflect on whether I could have done it better. My readers are, for the most part, younger than I am, and at least some of them would like to pursue successful gambling as a career. Perhaps there are some lessons for others in my musings.

For the sake of today’s blog, I’m going to take it as a given that I became a successful gambler, writer, and teacher. This ending was never a foregone conclusion. That’s just the way it turned out. 

Education:

At the time I stopped going to graduate school in the mid-70s, I had never heard of video poker. While I was reasonably proficient at games and just beginning to play backgammon professionally, I didn’t envision my life turning out the way it did.

I studied a lot of math and economics in school, which was a good choice. Gambling is mostly applied math, especially probability, and the more I knew about that the better. When I attended UCLA, economics was taught as logic applied to the real world. That’s a perfect background for a gambler.

Today I wish I knew more math and computer programming. There were many video poker games that arose which needed to be analyzed by computer programs. Commercially available computer software came of age during my career, but there were many problems these software programs couldn’t solve. Sometimes I hired others to do the programming for me, but I could have addressed these games more efficiently had I known how to program myself.

I had no idea I was going to be a writer. Somehow, I went all the way through school while never having to write a term paper. I never completed my Ph.D. dissertation, largely because I didn’t know how to write well. Today I get my blogs edited before you see them.

The irony of this is that if I had been a competent writer, I probably would have completed the dissertation and become a professor of economics — or at least started out that way. Others have gone from academia to the world of gambling. Perhaps I would have too.

I took some public speaking classes along the way, including debate. This was valuable training for teaching classes. Debate teaches you the principles of argumentation. There have been a lot of disagreements with casino players and other players. Knowing how to present my case clearly has led me to have a better-than-average results in these arguments.

I’m fortunate that my career included both teaching and writing. I wouldn’t know the subject nearly as well as I do without all the study required for these two activities. 

Consulting: 

I consulted for a variety of casinos and game manufacturers — although I haven’t for several years. The effects of this were both good and bad.

On the good side, I was paid well to look at casinos and their inventory all across the country. I wrote reports to the casinos that hired me to do this, but I also learned so much while I did this. Plus, getting paid well was a nice cushion when my gambling activities weren’t going so well.

On the down side of consulting, there were a lot of players who were very uncomfortable with me doing this. Basically, they wanted me to “pick a side and stick to it.” If I were going to write for players, fine. If I were going to write for casinos, that’d be okay too. But writing for both led to a lot of mistrust because they didn’t know where I stood. Many believed I was doing something shady or detrimental to players’ interests. I don’t believe I was doing either of those things but convincing some players of that proved impossible for me.

I took a lot of abuse from a large number of players over the years. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people using pseudonyms anonymously criticized and ridiculed me on video poker forums. I tried responding, but when the abuse is coming from several different directions with many choosing to believe the worst about me no matter what I did or said, it became an impossible situation. The only available response for me was to shut up and try to ignore it. No fun at all.

Love life:

My love life has been nothing to brag about. While I believe that humans should mate for life, I haven’t been able to manage that. By a long shot.

Still, for some reason, I ended up okay. Bonnie and I have been happy with each other, and we didn’t get together until we were both senior citizens. I’m used to the debate concerning “skill versus luck” in gambling. Finding Bonnie when I did was definitely good luck.

Podcast:

I was interested in doing a podcast at the same time Frank Kneeland was. Unfortunately, Frank and I were not a good fit together, and we lasted only six months before I asked him to bow out. 

Richard Munchkin was a miraculously good replacement. He gambled successfully for decades at table games — which is different from my expertise. He knows tons of people in the gambling world and is universally well-respected. At his first stint as co-host, he still lived in Southern California. He felt the podcast was better if he did it in person, so he drove four-or-so hours each way each week. Understandably that got to be a drag and he asked to find a replacement for him after a while.

I talked Michael Shackleford into being a co-host, and that worked pretty well for a while. Michael was far more mathematical than I was, and the guests he knew — game designers, other mathematicians, and sports bettors — were a change-up from the guests Richard and I attracted. Which wasn’t a bad thing.

After a year and a half, Shackleford became bored with the podcast. Richard had moved to Las Vegas by this time and was willing to resume cohosting the show. I was delighted.

For more than 10 years, we aired more than 50 podcasts per year. We attracted professional gamblers and wannabe professional gamblers as an audience. I was preparing for the podcasts more than playing video poker — which was good.

I learned details about winning at other forms of gambling — especially blackjack and sports betting. 

For whatever reason, I started being criticized less and respected more.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ll take it. My best guess is that many of the people who previously criticized me had not met me but had merely heard things about me. Now they heard me on the podcast and figured out I wasn’t the monster I was portrayed to be. 

My detractors will never go away completely. My style/personality/sense of humor rubs some people the wrong way. I am what I am.

Health and Diet:

For the most part, I’ve been good at this — with some lapses. I struggle to keep my weight under control, but it’s not terrible. I’m up to date on my vaccines and hope I’ll always be able to get them regardless of whomever is in charge of the CDC.

I’ve done a lot of study on longevity and believe I’m doing things that will give me a decent chance to reach my 90s or maybe beyond. We’ll see.  

Conclusion:

Yes, I could have done things differently, but I’ve had a good life and a good career. And my writings will leave a legacy of sorts behind me. Not such a bad result.

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A New Book?

Bob Dancer

I’ve written recently about retiring from gambling when the new IRS rules for gambling become effective on January 1, 2026. While I’m a senior citizen and retirement is what many people my age dream about, that doesn’t sound very attractive to me. I’ve always taken great pleasure in using my brain and figuring things out. So, what am I to do?

My current best guess is that I’ll write my second autobiography, tentatively entitled Million Dollar Video Poker — The Next 25 Years. The story from my original Million Dollar Video Poker ended in 2001, with me getting kicked out of MGM Grand and Venetian after having a lucky six-month period when I netted more than $1 million.

In 2001, I had my 54th birthday and was still in my prime gambling-wise. While there is no doubt that gambling at video poker was much more lucrative in the 1990s than it has been since, I have still found numerous opportunities every year since then, and have made more money from gambling after 2001 than I made up to that point.

Most of the opportunities I found are no longer around. Do players really want to learn about this history? Do they want to know what kind of mistakes casinos were making in 2004 and 2015 and 2023? I think yes. While there are an infinite number of ways for promotions to be structured, the same types of mistakes by casino marketing people keep happening over and over again. At a minimum, the book will give players examples that just might be relevant down the road.

Good games remain today. After the pandemic. I had good years along with an expensive 2024 — but they added up to more than a half-million dollars net win for me. Some of the games I profited from are gone, but many remain.

I think, though, that the most useful thing I can write about is how I attacked whatever came along. The actual solutions I came up with may not be relevant in a changed environment, but the approach I used to come up with those solutions is still relevant.

Would Anthony Curtis publish this book? Probably. Depending on how good it is. And part of his role as a publisher is to help make the book better. If the first draft weren’t quite good enough, that wouldn’t necessarily be a showstopper.

Part of the problem is my memory isn’t as good today as it was during my first book. And the events I would describe would be 20 years ago, whereas most of the action in MDVP was from two or three years prior to when I wrote about it. We may have to include a disclaimer like what is found at the front of many movies, “Based on a true story.”

Another problem is that some of the juicy promotions are still going on today, and writing about them and how to beat them would be tantamount to killing the deal. That’s probably not a showstopper because it’ll take three or four years to work through the Huntington Press queue, and by that time the promotions would be killed off by others.

Before announcing this project, I wanted to be certain I could see it through. So, beginning in August of this year, I began drafting several chapters for the new book and also making a list of things I wanted to talk about that I haven’t written yet. While it is nowhere near completed, perhaps the first draft of 20% of the final book has been finished. I’m convinced it’s a worthwhile project and I can keep going.

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What Will Casinos Do?

Bob Dancer

I’ve written a few times that starting January 1, 2026, the tax law will be changed drastically for professional gamblers — especially those who get W-2Gs or have a significant paper trail, such as those who bet big amounts in sportsbooks or play in large casino tournaments of any kind.

Blackjack players and poker players who don’t play in tournaments have largely been on the “honor system” to report their wins and losses. These players can apply a “fudge factor” to their scores and generally be all right, despite the new tax law. 

I’m neither suggesting nor condoning they do this, nor am I happy with the fact that they can do this to their taxes and I can’t, but I’m sure it will be done in several cases.

Players who receive W-2Gs and the casinos which send this information to the IRS are hard pressed to find a way around the extra tax. While the IRS threshold for issuing a W-2G is said to be increasing from $1,200 to $2,500 or some other number, and maybe 1099s also (nobody is too sure), these will have a minor effect. A large percentage of W-2Gs are for bigger amounts.

If you’re a big sports bettor with one of the major U.S. books, each sportsbook can report your wins and losses there to the IRS. Whether they will or not, I’m not too sure. My sports betting is very “small time,” and I don’t know how these books treat their bigger customers.

I, for one, announced a few months ago that I will quit gambling on January 1, 2026. Nothing has changed in the meantime to make me change my mind. How many other players will quit, or at least cut back drastically, is an open question. I have no way to estimate how much business in high limit slot rooms will evaporate, but I believe it will be a significant percentage.

There will be players who don’t know about the new law, or don’t think it will apply to them, or basically don’t care. While the profit motive is a major reason I gamble, and when the profit disappears, I disappear, many gamblers don’t care all that much about that. They want to win, but expect to lose, and if it turns out to be an extra $250,000 lost, well that’s too bad. No big for them, perhaps, but it would be for me and most others.

Some though, will put up with the extra loss for one year, and decide they can’t do it anymore, and by calendar 2027, the high limit slot rooms will be largely empty. We’ll see.

I expect casinos to come up with dollar video poker games where the royal flush returns $2,495. We’ve seen “tax free” quarter royals for $1,199, for the same purpose. Or maybe $5 games requiring three or four coins. You still get a W-2G for a royal, but you won’t for most 4-of-a-kinds.

If casinos lose a lot of their high limit slot revenue, you can assume they will tighten up pay schedules and promotions to make up for it. What they’ll actually do is unknown. But my prediction is that most readers of my writings will not like it.

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An Interesting Promotion

Bob Dancer

I wish I knew more about the promotion I’m writing about today, but I’ll share what I have surmised.

For the past several months, some Caesars Rewards properties have offered Next Day Bounceback (NDB). At these properties, if you play at least a minimum amount during a casino day (often 6 a.m. to 5:59 a.m. — but it varies), you get a certain amount of free play added to your account at approximately noon. The exact time can vary from casino to casino.

The percentage return can vary as well. I’ve seen it from 0.1% to 0.75%, depending on the casino. Some “expert” players get a lesser amount. At many of these casinos, the percentage amount returned is less today than it was six months ago.

Sometimes these casinos offer a multiplier to their NDB. At least one of the casinos offers a multiple NDB reward once a week (or sometimes once every other week). It’s at least 2x, and usually 2x, but sometimes more. You don’t learn if you received a 2x, 3x, or other multiplier until after the promotion is over. Another casino awards a 20x NDB multiplier weekly for two hours — but video poker is excluded from this promotion. There are daily limits for the amount of NDB you can earn — but this is only relevant for the biggest of high rollers. Well over 99% of all players won’t come close to earning the limit.

Usually, the casino won’t tell you what the percentage return is on the NDB promotion, so you have to figure it out yourself. Or ask a knowledgeable friend. 

To figure it out, you need to know how much money you received, and how much coin-in you played to earn that money. For example, let’s assume you played 500 Tier Credits (TCs) at video poker and received $20 in NDB. What percentage is that?

On most video poker machines at these properties, it requires $10 coin-in to earn one TC, so 500 TCs mean you played $5,000 through the machine. Your percentage return is $20 / $5,000 = 0.004 = 0.4%. 

At some of these casinos, it takes $20 or $25 to earn a TC on the loosest video poker machines. In these cases, 500 TCs mean you played $10,000 or $12,500, respectively. The percentage return becomes 0.2% or 0.16%, respectively.

Slot players at these casinos typically earn one TC for $5 coin-in, so if you’re a slot player, the return, in this case, is 0.8%.

The percentage you’ve received before does not have to be the percentage you’re going to receive today. While the percentage rate could go up, I suppose, I’ve only seen it stay the same or go down. 

While NDB becomes available at noon, it needs to be downloaded into your bank within a certain number of days (which varies by casino) and once it’s in your bank it’s good for 72 hours (or some other period of time). The Caesars Rewards booth at the particular casino you’re interested in will likely tell you these lengths of time.

At one out-of-town casino I frequent, NDB used to be good for 90 days after earning it, but now it is only good for 30 days. If I have to leave for my flight home before noon on my last day, this might mean I don’t play on the next-to-last day. That’ll be the day for sightseeing. If I leave for my flight after noon, I probably won’t play between 6 a.m. and when I leave because if I did, I would forfeit any NDB I earned. If I were a local, I wouldn’t worry about this because I know I’ll be back before my NDB expires.

On the last day of my stay, it could be that a promotion is in effect that dwarfs whatever I could earn from NDB, so I’ll keep playing after 6 a.m. even though I know that I won’t be able to collect the NDB (assuming I’m not planning on returning to this casino within the requisite time period.)

The expiration period for multiple NDB days does not have to be the same as the regular 1x NDB days. In fact, it usually isn’t.

For most players, they’ll learn to stay until after noon on their last day in order to collect their extra money. This means they might stay longer than they used to. For most players, NDB means they’ll lose less money because of this “rebate,” although many will simply play more and it’ll all come out about the same.

These casinos have multiple promotions and NDB is just one of them. Often, you’ll have multiplier days for TCs or Reward Credits (RCs), which are different. Sometimes if you play a certain number of TCs you get extra benefits. Sometimes you earn benefits that are hard to quantify (such as 100x drawing tickets). These casinos have monthly mailers and for big-enough players, they’ll receive a certain amount of free play based on how much they played.

As best I can, I try to add up the value of the benefits with the return of the video poker machine I’m playing. Sometimes I can get it pretty precise. Sometimes it’s sort of a scientific wild-assed guess based on the best information I have. 

When I play slots, it’s hard to get the precise percentage return. I might know that it’s positive-equity to play a certain machine when the mini meter is above 22 or the minor meter is above 30, but if I find a machine when these numbers are at 21 and 29, I assume I have the advantage but I’m unsure how much. While both numbers are slightly below being positive in and of themselves, the combination is surely a good one to play.

Also. when I play slots, I usually only play when one-or-more meters is above a certain level. When it’s no longer that high, I move on and try to find another game in a positive state. On each machine I check, it could be there are 50 different amounts to check, ranging perhaps from 50 cents to 50 dollars. Any of these could be positive and I won’t know before I go check which one(s) will be that way. In video poker, on the other hand, I’m usually playing one particular machine and I know going in what denomination I’ll be playing and the return on the game.

I don’t know how much longer NDB will last. The fact that the return rates have been decreasing leads me to conclude that they will be down to zero in the relatively near future — at least at some of these properties— but I could be wrong. 

When the new tax law kicks in on January, if enough players quit or cut back, these casinos might increase NDB in order to lure players back. For me this won’t work, but it might for some other players.

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I Wanted to be Henry

Bob Dancer

From about 1975 through 1993, I played a lot of backgammon at the Cavendish West Club in the West Hollywood part of Los Angeles. I probably played 60 hours per week in the 70s, went broke, and starting in 1980, had a full-time job — which cut down on my backgammon hours.

In about 1984, I started to teach myself how to count cards in blackjack and would fly to Las Vegas periodically to play that game. I learned about special deals at casinos where if I played so many hours at $5 or higher blackjack, I’d get some food vouchers and a certain amount in bonus chips. Trust me. Blackjack is easier if you get bonuses to play.

At the Cavendish West, good players from Las Vegas and other cities would occasionally come by to play. This is where I first met Richard Munchkin. I also saw a man named “Henry,” who would play the Cavendish’s best players for $100 a point (a sizeable stake) and usually beat them. 

At some point, Henry became Richard Munchkin’s roommate, and I learned that Henry was a highly-rated chess player and an excellent card counter, in addition to being quite good at backgammon.

I played some chess when I was younger, was getting better at blackjack, and was trying very hard to become good at backgammon. He was miles ahead of me at all three games. 

I figured if I became as good as Henry, my gambling future would be secure. I tried to figure out just how he did that.

I concluded Henry was ahead of me in some combination of three different areas. First was raw brain power. The last IQ test I took was more than 50 years ago while in graduate school, and I was rated well into the top 1% in IQ. With a US population of 215 million in the mid-70s, if 1% of the population was smarter than I was, that’s more than two 2 million people. It’s no wonder that I would run into some of them at a place where intelligence was rewarded. (Today, I believe I’m still in the top 10% IQ-wise, but I’m not sure. As I age, brainpower, among other things, is diminishing.)

The second area where Henry might have been superior to me was in the amount that he studied — or the amount he effectively studied. I studied a lot — but perhaps he studied more or did it in ways that I didn’t. Just having Richard Munchkin as a roommate, if he and Henry discussed various aspects of the games, that was more than what I had. Computer programs, primitive though they were, started to become available in the 1980s. I didn’t get them. Perhaps Henry did.

The third area where Henry might have surpassed me is in aptitude for games. It’s not your raw IQ that counts — it’s the type of IQ. Top chefs, architects, and interior decorators, among many others, probably have high IQs, but that doesn’t mean they have an aptitude for games. Some people are much better strategic thinkers than others. Some people can grasp the overall concepts of a game almost instantly, whereas in the games I mentioned, I needed to learn from what other people had figured out and written.

Whatever the combination of brains, study habits, and aptitude — he had more of what I wanted than I did. So, I wanted to be him.

Obviously, I never became him. After I moved to Las Vegas, I got to know Henry and we became friendly. By the time this happened, I had become successful at video poker and would see him playing that game in some of the casinos I frequented.

I once told him I had wanted to be him in the mid-80s, and he was amazed. He didn’t figure his skill at games was worth all that much. It hadn’t helped him much in the real world. I remember thinking that casinos were the real world.

Today, I have no desire to trade lives with Henry — and I suspect he has no desire to trade lives with me. We each made our way through life the best we could and have generally been successful at this. Although there are some overlapping interests, we really are quite a bit different from each other.