Bob Dancer and I are back doing a Gambling With an Edge episode. We interview attorney Bob Loeb about the recent trend of legal, regulated sportsbooks stealing people’s money.
Podcast – https://www.spreaker.com/user/7418966/loeb12-22-23final
Now through December 25th, you can buy a $500 Southwest gift card at Costco for $430.00. LImit 5 and you can use up to 3 on a reservation. It’s not too often you get 14% off airline, plus whatever promotions the airline is running plus any credit card bonus you might have.
If you are paying for your Southwest flights, this is a great deal.
Analysts from that curious subculture known as Wall Street descended upon Durango Resort for its opening and liked what they saw. J.P. Morgan‘s Joseph Greff pronounced himself “impressed,” in views that will be synopsized later today in CDC Gaming Reports. He wasn’t alone. Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli, like Greff, started with the property’s aesthetics, “right on par with Red Rock, a premier LV locals destination resort.” He observed that foot traffic was steady all day long (although he was there on a Monday) and that Station Casinos expects Durango to be profitable from the get-go. Station execs said they were “pleasantly surprised” by the younger player cohort, with the 25-35 demographic seen in force both on the casino floor and in the restaurants.
Continue reading Durango: Wall Street raves
In Nevada, there are a large number of bars/pubs with restricted gaming licenses that permit them to have up to 15 machines. I haven’t counted these pubs, but I believe there are more than 100 of these in Clark County alone, a large chunk of land in the southern part of the state, which includes the two most populous cities — Las Vegas and Henderson.
In 2022 and 2023, a number of these pubs had a promotion where if you bring in a W-2G from any casino, the pub would give you up to 10% of that, usually up to $500. Although each pub had slightly different rules, if you hit a $4,000 jackpot at South Point, for example, you could take that W-2G to places that would give you $100 in free play today, and tomorrow would give you an additional $300.
You had to bring in the W-2G within 24 or 48 hours, sometimes loosely defined. Some of these pubs limited this to once a week. Some once a day. When they found out how slammed they were getting, some limited the promotion to only jackpots earned in to pubs, which for me was no problem because I played at Dotty’s. Sometimes you could cash the same jackpot at two or more pubs.
I’m not sure what the bar managers were thinking. Perhaps it was some version of, “These players will have $4,000 in their hands, and if we can just get them in the door, perhaps they’ll leave a good part of this here.” That must have happened some of the time, of course, but most of the time this was a losing promotion for the house.
Since I play at Dotty’s where you get rewarded for W-2Gs, I can generate as many jackpots as I like. It’s already a positive play at Dotty’s to play $10 9/6 Jacks or Better where I get a W-2G every 400 hands or so. Extra money for a promotion that was already positive is a good thing. My problem was: How do I milk these promotions? I know they’ll eventually stop the promotion or kick me out, because I’m definitely not the kind of customer they are trying to attract.
When a bar would let you cash a W-2G once a week, I’d limit myself to once every other week. When a bar would let you cash the W-2Gs once a day, I’d never cash more than two in a week, and then I’d take at least a week off. I’d rotate the times I’d show up to all three shifts, so bartenders didn’t know how often I was cashing these. If the bar had several outlets around town, I’d vary where I’d go to pick up the money.
Usually, the best game was 6-5 Bonus Poker, a horrendous game worth less than 97%. Whenever I came in, I’d play about an hour at quarters. That meant maybe $1,000 through the machines, which cost me $30 in EV. There were slot clubs and bonuses such as wheel spins for certain 4-of-a-kinds, reducing my expected loss to perhaps $10 — which meant a profit of at least $90 because the casino started me with at least $100.
Sometimes I’d come into each place and play for an hour or so without cashing any W-2G. I wanted my record to show that I was a “regular player,” not one who would just show up to cash a W-2G.
In the earlier example, when I brought in a $4,000 W-2G and received $100 today and $300 put on my card tomorrow, I downloaded the free play as soon as I could. There was no doubt that eventually I was going to be removed from the promotions, and when that did happen, any unclaimed free play might well be forfeited.
I tipped the bartenders at least $5 or $10 each time. I knew the managers would kick me out eventually, but I didn’t want the bartenders suggesting that I be eliminated.
Eventually all of these promotions ended – at least for me. I’m actually surprised they lasted as long as they did, at as many different places as there were. I guess it was a copycat effect where, “That casino is doing it and seems to be getting more business. Maybe we should too!”
I ended up more than $10,000 ahead over all of these properties. Not a lot, and it required driving around some, but there was basically no downside. Yes, I could lose more than $100 in a specific day collecting the money, but over time it was guaranteed I would come out ahead.
And when establishments are giving away non-trivial amounts of free money, I’m the kind of guy who takes it. And if I learn about another bar with this promotion, count me in!
That whining sound you here is Atlantic City casino executives for whom hundreds of millions in revenue is never enough. They’ve been complaining that gambling winnings aren’t what they were at brick-and-mortar casinos before the Covid-19 pandemic … even as online-casino takings hit a record level. These guys wanted Internet casinos, they built them and now they’re put out that it’s impossible to grow online and terrestrial win simultaneously. Hey, consumers only have so much with which to gamble, so maybe Big Gaming should count its money and keep quiet. Nobody’s buying them crying towels.
Continue reading Atlantic City steady; Polistina waffles
Take a good look at that guy. Most likely you’ll find him hiding under a table. He’s state Sen. Vincent J. Polistina (D), champion of carcinogens in the New Jersey Lege. If you still find yourself breathing secondhand smoke in Atlantic City casinos, you’ll have Polistina to thank. After paying extensive lip service to a total smoking ban, Polistina finked out at the last minute, refusing to cast a crucial committee vote that would have advanced the fatwa to the floor of the Lege. Bastard.
Continue reading Et tu, Polistina?; Laff-riot in Lousiana
The VGK are grinding their way through the hardest part of their schedule: 10 games in 21 days.
They take trips through the Central time zone and western Canada and back-to-backs with travel, yet two things stay the same: They keep racking up points and leading the Pacific Division, Western Conference, and NHL.
Also, the VGK are nearly impossible to beat when the dads are in attendance.
Lindsey, Chris, and Eddie discuss the long and winding road and the VGK’s success after the (so-called) slump.
It’s here … and it’s an eyesore. Fontainebleau Las Vegas opens tonight, after 18 years in the making and untold billions in costs, plus more revolving owners than you could shake a stick at (if you’re into shaking sticks). The cost for Las Vegas‘ newest, fugliest resort is $3.7 billion. We don’t believe it. Resorts World Las Vegas cost $4.3 billion, Aria $4 billion and F-blue is bigger than either of them. Also, costs were running away when Jeffrey Soffer first pulled the plug on F-blue in 2009. Since that time, Carl Icahn stripped it for parts and Lord only knows how much Soffer has simply written off the balance sheet. We wish it every success, so long as we’re not obligated to praise its clunky architecture or accept at face value its preposterous budgetary figure. Enjoy the opening, dear readers, and report back to us if you have any Kate Beckinsale sightings.
Continue reading Fontainebleau opens; Detroit slumps
Casinos are in the business of making money. In theory, casinos offer games of chance where the odds are in their favor and invite players in to play games that are rigged against them.
Under this theory, there would be no such thing as an advantage gambler. But the theory is greatly simplified — primarily in two areas.
First, some of the games offered are games of skill. You’ve heard of poker, blackjack, and sports betting. There are many more. And skillful players will do better than players without the requisite skill.
Second, casinos make mistakes — of many different types. Many times these mistakes lead to opportunities for players. Today I want to look at types of exploitable mistakes that I’ve discovered over the past 30 years. Many times, I’ve taken advantage of them. Sometimes I passed intentionally. Sometimes I heard about it afterwards. Sometimes I heard about it in plenty of time but didn’t recognize it as the profit-making opportunity it was.
This list is nowhere near exhaustive. Most of these happened in Las Vegas, but I’m sure they happened elsewhere as well.
It’s been more than 25 years since I bribed a casino employee to give me extra scratchers or such. But at the time, I was very tight on money and “needed” the extra. Today I’m not tight on money, but millions of players are. When casinos make it easy for players and employees to cheat, they will.
One casino mailed out some “to be scratched off in front of a casino employee” cards, with daily prizes ranging from being worthless to 5x points (which could be worth thousands of dollars to the right player.) If you had a strong light, you could see the prize through the card. It could be a hassle to go back to the same casino every day — but if you know beforehand when it’s really worth it, you make trips at the correct time. In the case of midnight-to-midnight 5x points, you arrange your whole schedule around being there at midnight when it starts.
Another casino let you pull scratchers out of a bowl. You then scratched off at the booth to reveal your prize. On the back of the cards, however, was a number which told the savvy player what was on the card. A code ending in 55 might signify $5 in free play and a code of 82 might signify $100 in free play. Some booth employees realized what was going on, and held the bowl at the player’s eye level, telling the player to draw one without looking at it. Some players, of course, drew more than one, scanned them all, and apologized as they kept the best one.
Sometimes you see mistakes with multipliers. Like when the marketing director at Eastside Cannery decided 10x points was a good idea because that’s what a competitor offered. The competitor offered base points of 0.05% and Eastside Cannery offered base points of 0.1675% and looser games. There were people holding machines for more than twelve hours before the promotion started.
Just knowing that one casino offers 4x points on Tuesday while another one offers 2x points on the same day doesn’t tell you which is the better play. It depends both on the value of the game you’ll be playing and how much single points are worth.
I didn’t hear about this one until near its end, but I did play it for a while. Long enough to be “discovered” by one of my students who was aghast that I was playing 9/5 JoB rather than the nearby 9/6 JoB machines (which required 2½ as much coin-in for one Tier Credit and had a theoretical of 0.46%). This lady asked me several questions and I just smiled and said nothing. I’m sure she suspected I was a fraud whose actions were not the same as his words.
Video poker is a lot more complicated than just learning which games to play and how to play them.
Spinning as hard as they can, opinion makers in Las Vegas have been trying to paint the Las Vegas Grand Prix as a roaring success. Well, if they can cherry-pick anecdotal information to make their point, we can respond with some numbers. For instance, Caesars Entertainment had predicted a 5% boost in its annual cash flow from Formula One Weekend. But, according to Truist Securities analyst (and F1 booster) Barry Jonas, that’s not the case. He informed investors today that Caesars “consequently fell a little shy of its expected +5% or +$25M incremental Y/Y EBITDA lift.” It suffered from the fact that “properties away from the track and less high-end did not fully benefit.” Quelle suprise. We coulda told Tom Reeg that was gonna happen. Jonas predicted, without explaining, that future iterations of F1-in-Vegas would “have wider appeal.” We’d love to know how. And does “wider” include the put-upon Las Vegas community?
Continue reading F1 = flop; Adelson exposed; Shame on FanDuel