In this weeks video Anthony and Andrew talk about records being broken, some awesome steak deals, a $1.6 million dollar casino giveaway, and more.
LAS VEGAS ADVISOR WEEKLY UPDATE – EP 143
Missouri, Motown & cretins
Gambling revenues held the line in Missouri last month, flat with last year. The $155 million tally was also 8% better than in June of 2019. At $25 million, Ameristar St. Charles continued to dominate, up 4.5%. River City edged sister property Hollywood St. Louis $21 million to $20.5 million. River City was up 4%, Hollywood 1.5%. Horseshoe St. Louis, despite its downtown presence during the height of baseball season, plunged 17% to $11 million.
Continue reading Missouri, Motown & cretinsHave I Lost My Touch?
As of July 1, I’m down about $150,000 for the year in video poker, mainly on $5 and $10 single-line games. (I’m ahead a modest amount on slots. Nowhere near the size of my video poker deficit.) Some casinos, where I would happily play with just their normal promotions, have offered me “show up money” so I will come in and hopefully, for them, continue my losing streak.
Casino employees have seen me use a walker both before and after my hip surgery at the end of last year, and the next time they see me, I’ll be in a sling. I look like a 77-year-old man with significant health issues — which is what I am. Recovering from the orthopedic ailments means the quality of my sleep isn’t what it used to be — so my normal level of alertness is there far fewer hours in the day than it was previously. This is probably obvious to anybody who closely observes me. I don’t look like any sort of a video poker guru that casinos should fear.
So, what’s going on? Is this a normal losing streak or have I lost a significant portion of my gambling mojo?
Possibly I’m not the best one to ask, but I’m betting that it’s more the former than the latter. And by ‘betting,’ I mean I’m continuing to play the same games and doing the best I can.
Whenever I go through a losing streak, and there have been several in career, I carefully review the game I’m playing, its strategy at the 100%-accurate level, and the parameters of the slot club and various promotions that make me believe this is a game I should be playing.
I look at my bankroll and verify I have enough to consider playing. At my age, I’m extremely conservative in my bankroll estimates. The option of landing a good-paying job is not available to me. I’m not going to inherit anything. I don’t have a Rembrandt hidden away that I can sell. I do have some relatively small revenue streams coming in, which helps ride out the storm. What I have is what I have and if it goes, it’s gone.
In terms of video poker competence and playing within my bankroll, I’m I confident I’m still all right. In last week’s blog, I referred to the Kelly Criterion that says, approximately, that if your bankroll decreases, you should bet less. I’m still fine betting the stakes I am. In fact, I could still afford $25 games were they available with the same promotions. But they’re not, so I don’t even need to worry about $10 games.
I do have some advantages over other players — namely I’ve been through losing streaks before and they’ve ALWAYS ended and eventually I’ve made up all the lost ground and set a new personal high. I believe wholeheartedly that if I continue to play games where I have the edge, good things will happen. I believe it’s mathematically inevitable.
This confidence cuts both ways, of course. There could easily come a time when I’m no longer mentally competent and what I calculate to be a 99.54% game actually becomes a 98.82% game when I’m hitting the buttons. If (when?) this happens, I could be in a situation where I’m playing a negative game, and no amount of confidence will enable me to ride it out. While I’ve taken several readings and find myself still a competent player, this could happen.
I’ve experienced this kind of situation at a fairly close and personal level. My father, who wasn’t a gambler but had several varied business investments, became less cautious and less competent when he got into his 90s. His children could see this, and we tried to warn him about it, but he was convinced we were all wrong and he was as sharp as he ever was. He blew away 90% of his wealth in the last decade of his life. “Fortunately,” he died at age 96 before he lost it all, but it could have happened. We would have had to get a court order to prevent this, against his kicking and screaming, and that wouldn’t have been fun no matter what the end result was financially.
This isn’t a blogpost asking for your sympathy. I’m fine, have an enviable bankroll, and will recover. It’s meant to be a message saying these types of things happen to all players — even the pros. Most or all of you have experienced something similar. Perhaps lower dollar amounts because you play for lower stakes, but you’ve endured long losing streaks that weren’t fun at all.
Bobby Vegas: Winner Winner Free Steak Dinner
If you missed the Rolex, the Vegas Aces courtside-seats, and Rod Stewart concerts giveaways, you have another round through July 31 and the prizes are still great.
Three winners will win a pair of Sphere tickets for Dead and Company. Four will enjoy a BBQ feast for eight at Rainbow. And at Emerald Island, four winners will get a pair of tickets for the Saturday Nov 9 show starring Bill Joel and Sting.
That makes 11 total chances to win. Each entry is just 200 base points at $1 per point. And it’s a small barrel.
May I suggest you do this in any of their 25 x multiplier sessions spread throughout the day. (See BobbyVegas.com for more details.)
You won’t earn points at full-pay Double Double Bonus, but you will on just about every other VP game. And adding 1.67% (25 x) onto any game in the house, you’re playing at a positive expectation. Mutiplier points go toward excellent food comps at Triple B Diner at Rainbow or Emerald Island. My calcs don’t include progressives. Check your VP strategy guide for the breakeven on those and if it’s not at BE, even a partial adds to your total return.
Checking VPfree2, every game down to 8/5 Bonus Poker (99.17%) turns into 100.84%. Not too shabby while winning tickets for any of the above, plus food comps galore and gifts or cash.
A note on reading VPfree2: Just using the browse feature, the games come up looking like they’re only for pennies, nickels, and dimes. Not true. The quarter and higher games are anywhere from 10 line to 30 line, so it’s possible to play $3 and $5 VP during these multiplier periods and the comps add up very fast at 25x level.
Only your base amount counts to concert and other monthly prize drawings, but still …
There are also a host of local Water Street restaurants, brew pubs, etc., where you can spend your comp dollars.
Did I mention the 50x, 75x, or 100x periods ? Those are insane, adding 3.74%, 6%, and higher. Those super-high earning periods are often short or at an odd hour, but again, you’re earning comps like crazy, plus the drawing tickets. And every day they give out hot dogs, donuts, pizza, ice cream and more.
The thing about Rainbow and Emerald is they have so many daily wheel and other cash giveaways , it’s hard to keep up. But hey, it’s free money.
And why do I say free steaks for dinner? Well, the rib eye and shrimp with steak are the most expensive items on the Rainbow Triple B Diner menu and top out at $20.
Did you use your LVA MRB for 2-for-1 or half-off, even with points?
There it is: Winner winner free steak dinner.
If you spend 30 to 60 minutes, you’ll have more than enough points for several of ’em.
Short takes: Illinois, Maryland and sleaze
Casinos in the Land of Lincoln had something to celebrate last month, as they actually improved same-store results by 3%, although they still lagged 3% behind 2019 figures. (Blame it on the thermonuclear proliferation of slot routes). The overall haul was $138 million. The bulk of this was logged in the northern tier of the state, where Bally’s Casino (above) in Chicago pulled in $10.5 million, about par for its course. Despite being down a point, Rivers Des Plaines grossed $44 million and is staving off new competition rather impressively. Speaking of which, The Temporary at American Place vaulted 33% to $9 million.
Continue reading Short takes: Illinois, Maryland and sleazeIMPACT OF ADVANTAGE VIDEO POKER PLAYERS – A COMPLETE REVIEW
This post is syndicated by the Las Vegas Advisor for the 888 casino group. Anthony Curtis comments on the 888 article introduced and linked to on this page.
AC says:
The play-analysis software discussed in this article has been around for a while; I wrote about it last August in the Las Vegas Advisor. “Is this a doomsday development? Not for 99% of players and maybe not for anyone. There are lots of questions. How many casinos will buy it? How many casinos will use it rigorously and properly? And most importantly, who will it really hurt? It could hurt the hardcore pros who play specifically for profit, but they can move around from place to place. There’s more danger for comp hustlers who’ve built up their comp profiles at a few specific casinos. If their cover is suddenly blown, like the pros, the hustlers will have to move on to other targets. These two groups comprise the highly skilled players, of which there aren’t many. The fact is, most don’t play as well as they think they do, so an analysis won’t affect them.” Most of these views are shared by this article’s writer, and I agree with him that it will take some time to see how this affects the current status quo.
This article was written by Jerry Stich in association with 888Casino.
IMPACT OF ADVANTAGE VIDEO POKER PLAYERS – A COMPLETE REVIEW
Aces Manufacturing based in Las Vegas produces “Video Poker Analyzer” capable of monitoring players expertise in playing correct video poker strategy. In the first quarter of 2024 they published a study that identified profits lost to advantage video poker players.
This article explores that article and make some observations.
LAS VEGAS ADVISOR WEEKLY UPDATE – EP 142
In this weeks video Anthony and Andrew talk about a local staple closing, room rates in Vegas, the WSOP, and more.
Going Broke
One of the risks of gambling is losing more money than you can afford. That happened to me in 1979, when I lost a lot at backgammon. After I bailed myself out of debt, I vowed to never let that happen to me again. So far, I’ve been able to keep that promise to myself. But nobody knows precisely what the future holds.
Video poker is one of the easier games to successfully avoid bankruptcy. I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was easier. The reason it’s easier is because you can learn to precisely measure how much a particular game returns and how much the slot club pays. Those are key elements in avoiding going broke. And games are nicely denominated. You can play for quarters, dollars, etc., and after a bit of playing, you know how bad the bad days can be at that denomination.
In games like live poker, it’s hard to precisely know how good you are compared to your competition. And even if you can accurately quantify this, the nature of “no limit” and “pot limit” games is that you can lose everything you bring to the table every time you sit down.
An excellent starting place in avoiding going broke is to never play games where the casino has the edge over you. If you insist on playing games that don’t meet this criterion, play games that are small in denomination compared to your gambling bankroll.
Easier said than done for some players. Most of the “fun” of gambling is playing for stakes where it hurts when you lose. If you’re a millionaire and always play for single-line quarters, no matter the pay schedule, you’ll never go broke. And you probably won’t have any fun either.
The Kelly Criterion, named after John Kelly, a theoretician at Bell Labs in the 1950s, is a method of sizing bets so that you will never go broke and, indeed, will grow your bankroll at an optimal rate. It’s defined as maximizing the logarithm of your wealth. For most of my readers, that definition is way too technical to be useful.
What it means in very simple terms is that if you lose a significant percentage of your bankroll, you cut back on your bets. If you’ve been very successful at a particular bet size, the Kelly Criterion tells you to increase your bet size.
Unfortunately, exact bet sizes in video poker are rather limited. While you can play $1.25 per hand, $2.50, $5.00, and $25 on single-line games, you can’t play $17.34 on one hand. Also, at a given casino, the return on quarter games may be very different than the return on $5 games. At one casino I frequent, on their multi-denomination machines, you can get 8/5 Jacks or Better if you bet dollars, 9/5 Jacks or Better if you bet $2 denominations, and 9/6 Jacks or Better if you bet at the $5 level. They have a similar breakdown for all games on the machine, including Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild, Double Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus Poker, and several others.
At this casino, you sometimes have the advantage if you bet the $5 game (i.e., $25 per hand), depending on various promotions, but you basically never have the advantage if you bet smaller than that. Playing $25 per hand is beyond the means for most players.
Video Poker for Winners has a bankroll calculator, but the program hasn’t been updated for several years and will not work on newer computers. Dunbar’s Risk Analyzer for Video Poker, available at Huntington Press, among other places, is probably the most useful tool out there for figuring out how much bankroll you need to play most games. It’s inexpensive and very useful.
When I was starting out playing $5 9/6 Jacks or Better (with 0.67% cashback and juicy promotions — those were the days!), it seemed to me that having a bankroll of 3-5 times the royal flush was a sufficient bankroll, assuming you were playing games similar to what I was. I published that “3-5 royal flushes” rule — and since then I’ve apologized several times for doing so.
The actual bankroll depends on how big the variance of the game is and how much of an edge you have. For the same return, a Double Double Bonus player needs considerably more bankroll than a Jacks or Better player does.
Today, the slot clubs are considerably tighter than they were 30 years ago, so you need considerably more bankroll to play the same games as you used to.
How much bankroll you need also depends on your age and your other responsibilities. I’m 77 years old now. If I go broke, there are very limited employment opportunities available to me. When I went broke in 1979, I was 42 years old. I was able to find a fairly lucrative job and was able to rebuild my bankroll. That option isn’t available to me today.
Your income stream, from whatever source, also affects how much bankroll you need. Possibly you have a job, or Social Security, or a pension, or an inheritance, or royalties of some sort, alimony, or whatever. Some players have none of these things. Everyone has a different income stream, which is why there is no “one size fits all” answer to “how much bankroll do I need.”
Avoiding going broke should be a strong priority to all successful gamblers. If you don’t pay attention to this, you may well end up in a position you don’t want to be in.
Bally’s 45th; Buckeye State bonanza
Bally’s Corp. is usually a subject of fun in these pages, so let’s flip the script and congratulate the company on the 45th anniversary of Bally’s Atlantic City. Above you see the buses full of gamblers pulling up at what used to be Park Place Casino and has been through more incarnations subsequently than you can shake a stick at. In Monopoly, Park Place will set you back $350 and is one of the blue-chip properties in the game. In recent years, Bally’s picked up the erstwhile Park Place Casino from Caesars Entertainment for what seemed like only $350 and if it was ever a premium spot on the Boardwalk those days are long gone.
Continue reading Bally’s 45th; Buckeye State bonanzaWing Lei (Wynn Las Vegas)
When you think about Las Vegas’ most acclaimed restaurants, Wing Lei at Wynn Las Vegas probably doesn’t come to mind, but it should. It’s received 5 Diamonds from AAA, 5 Stars from Forbes, and was the first Chinese restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin Star. In 2016, John Curtas named it one of Las Vegas’ “Essential 50” restaurants in Eating Las Vegas. So what took us so long to try it? Well, mostly because it took this long to get a comp. Just kidding. The real reason is we plain overlooked it. We had occasion to try Wing Lei last month and it was fantastic.
5 Stars
A lot goes into becoming a 5-Star restaurant — food quality and service, obviously, but ambience is a big part of it, too. This place has a great feel. For example, since plates are usually shared, every seat has two sets of chopsticks, one for grabbing food from the communal plates and the other for eating it off of yours. That makes so much sense, but the over/under on how many attempts before you forget, or get them mixed up and serve yourself incorrectly, is 2.5. You get the amuse-bouche (free appetizer) to start, mini-pastries you didn’t order for dessert, and a box with cookies to take with you. First-class all the way. You a foodie baller, bro.
Order the Duck
We asked an F&B director we know what to order and he said, “You gotta go with the duck,” as in the Imperial Peking Duck. Same advice from John Curtas in Eating Las Vegas. And before we ordered, our dining partner announced that he’d already ordered it ahead. Yep, the word’s out on the duck. We’ve had Peking duck before, but this one was better. The glistening cooked duck is wheeled out, presented, then carved tableside in a little show of its own. Then the server prepares a few Mandarin crepes (so you get a clue about how you’re supposed to eat them) and leaves the rest to you. This dish is $131.88 and, with some appetizers, it was the only entrée needed for our party of three. Those appetizers included a sampler for $53.88, a mushroom combo for $29.88, and potstickers for $28.88 (8s are lucky in Chinese culture). Beers — Lucky Budha and Yanging China — were $10 each.
The Verdict
Chalk up Wing Lei as another primo dining experience at the Wynn. This is a first-rate splurge and not an overly expensive one at that. Appetizers are mostly in the $20s, so an app or two and that $130 duck will get you out at around $100 per person. And it can be less: soy sea bass is $53.88, General Tao’s chicken is $41.88, and Cantonese chow mein is $27.88. We didn’t try them, but it’s -300 that they’re excellent. Check it out, and good luck with that chopstick challenge.