{"id":3834,"date":"2016-07-12T17:09:08","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T17:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamblingwithanedge.com\/?p=3834"},"modified":"2016-07-12T17:09:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T17:09:08","slug":"is-it-guaranteed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blog\/is-it-guaranteed\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it Guaranteed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently published an article on quitting when you\u2019re ahead which may be found here<\/a>. The article referred to a particular $100,000 royal flush I hit at Dotty\u2019s and why circumstances at that establishment led me to quit gambling there for a few months after the jackpot. Some of the follow-up comments about the article were, to me, very strange and irrelevant. I wouldn\u2019t call them stupid questions. I would call the questioners uninformed.<\/p>\n

a. Are you going to post a picture of the jackpot? If not, how do we know you really hit it?<\/i> No I\u2019m not going to post a picture. Even if I did post a picture, someone could say, \u201cHow do we know it was actually you who hit it and not somebody else?\u201d It was hardly my purpose to \u201cprove\u201d to anybody that I actually hit this jackpot. My purpose in the article was to illustrate an exception to my normal rule of \u201ctoday\u2019s score doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

b. Are you ahead at Dotty\u2019s lifetime? <\/i>The answer to this is \u201cYes,\u201d but I don\u2019t see how this is particularly relevant to anybody else. My individual results have ups and down. I\u2019m ahead at many casinos — sometimes by more than could be predicted simply by EV and sometimes by less. I\u2019m behind at other casinos even though I\u2019m playing a game where I believe I have the advantage.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s virtually never the case that I\u2019m \u201cspot on\u201d with exactly the right number of royal flushes at a casino. When I\u2019ve played enough to \u201cdeserve\u201d 11.5058 royals at a particular place if everything happened exactly proportionately, but I\u2019ve actually hit 9 or 14, that\u2019s not valuable information to anybody else for deciding whether they should play.<\/p>\n

There will always be people over-royaled and others under-royaled at any given casino, while at every other casino, the mix will be different. Nobody who plays a lot is over-royaled everywhere. Nobody who plays a lot is under-royaled everywhere. If you play a lot, you pretty much end up with what you deserve score-wise, factoring in your game choice (including promotions), skill level (including taking advantage of promotions), and alertness when you play.<\/p>\n

c. If you quit there for four months, what will happen to your accumulated free play?<\/i> I\u2019ll go in and pick it up! Dotty\u2019s is a casino that actually gives cash for your slot club benefits and weekly mailers. By quitting for four months, I\u2019m just referring to playing my \u201cusual\u201d $50,000 coin-in a week — an amount I\u2019ve chosen somewhat by calculation and somewhat by feel. (Perhaps I\u2019ll discuss that decision at some other time.) If there are sizeable amounts of money to pick up, I\u2019ll do it. I\u2019m not boycotting the place. There are probably 10 Dotty\u2019s within 10 miles of my house, so stopping by one of them wouldn\u2019t be all that inconvenient. I\u2019m simply avoiding playing \u201cbig money\u201d there until conditions are better.<\/p>\n

d. Is the money guaranteed? <\/i>If not, everything is random and you\u2019re just lucky!<\/em> Well, I do believe the machines are fair (in Nevada, at least) and that over time things work out pretty much like they should. I\u2019ve played probably 500,000 hands at various Dotty\u2019s over the past several years and with their promotions (which do vary — but are reasonably consistent) I have an estimate of what I think my edge is. (I\u2019m not interested in publishing that edge or discussing here how I determined it. You may choose to believe me or not. I don\u2019t care.) I used Video Poker for Winners<\/i> and determined that if someone competently played that many hands on that game with those promotions, that person would be ahead approximately 90% of the time.<\/p>\n

I am on the \u201c9-out-of-10\u201d side — meaning I\u2019m ahead. You could call that \u201clucky,\u201d I suppose. I wouldn\u2019t. I think of it more as \u201cnot unlucky.\u201d A guarantee would be 10-out-of-10, and that\u2019s clearly not the case here. Every hand I play on that game has a 1-in-43,456 chance of becoming a royal. Being up or down a cycle or two has some non-zero probability which may be calculated. I\u2019ve been on both sides of the over-or-under equation. Over time, it comes out about right.<\/p>\n

I do believe the games and machines in Nevada are random — but possibly what I mean by random is not what you mean by random. What I mean by random is that on each hand (both the deal and the draw), every unseen card has an equal chance of appearing next. If this is true, you can predict within certain confidence intervals exactly how often something will occur.<\/p>\n

When certain other people speak of being random, often they mean \u201ctotally unpredictable.\u201d I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case at all.<\/p>\n

e. If you were behind instead of ahead, would you quit? After all, if 9-out-of-10 people would be ahead and you\u2019re not one of them, doesn\u2019t that tell you you\u2019re just not good enough or lucky enough? <\/i>No. Being behind would tell me neither of those things. I\u2019m basing my play-or-not-play decision on what I believe my edge is and whether or not my playing for these stakes can threaten my bankroll. How well I\u2019ve done to date is not part of that decision.<\/p>\n

What I have going for me that many players don\u2019t is I\u2019ve been gambling for \u201csignificant\u201d stakes for more than 40 years. I trust the math. I trust the games. I trust my knowledge. I trust my discipline to only play while sober, well rested, within my bankroll, and not otherwise distracted. That experience gives me lots of confidence that things are going to work out okay.<\/p>\n

Someone who is just starting out doesn\u2019t have that wealth of experience\/skill\/discipline\/confidence. Someone just starting out likely thinks of a $100,000 jackpot quite a bit differently than I do. I\u2019ve had more than two thousand royal flushes through the years. This is just another of them, albeit bigger than average for me. If one royal flush is a life-changing experience, you\u2019re playing for stakes that are much too high for you.<\/p>\n

f. Do you have to play that big to have an advantage at Dotty\u2019s?<\/i> No, of course not. The NSU games can be found for single line dollars and up. The higher you play, within certain limits, the better your edge is percentage-wise because one of their promotions deals with how many W2Gs you get. Playing $120 per hand or more gives you W2Gs for straight flushes and higher. Playing $5 per hand only gives you W2Gs for royals. Playing $6 per hand gives you W2Gs for royals and deuces. Etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently published an article on quitting when you\u2019re ahead which may be found here. The article referred to a particular $100,000 royal flush I hit at Dotty\u2019s and why circumstances at that establishment led me to quit gambling there for a few months after the jackpot. Some of the follow-up comments about the article […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[558,557],"tags":[704,808,752,708,753,809,810,811,812,813,786,774,758,814,585,678],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}