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Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column with Jeffrey Compton, "Player's Edge", featuring information on promotions at various Las Vegas casinos. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Neon section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.

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Sep 12, 2006

When Casinos Change the Rules

Over the early part of the recent Labor Day weekend, Palace Station hosted a slot tournament to hundreds of players. It was a relatively low-level event with LOTS of people entered and the prize pool not being very large. I signed up for it. I wasn't interested in the tournament part of the event (and in fact didn't even play), as there were something like 400 people competing for $10,000. However, I was very interested in the Saturday night drawing worth $15,000. You earned one ticket per 500 points --- which means $500 on most machines, but $1,000 on their 100% machines.

Every month at Palace, I play $250,000 through the machines to maintain Chairman status. This is about 12 hours of play on a $5 machine. If I played the entire amount during the event, then I would have 500 tickets in the drum, and most people in the room would have 20 or less. There were another six to eight players with a similar number of tickets --- and most of these people won something at the drawing. It's a guestimate without much precision, but I suspect that that many tickets gives you an expected value of about $1,000, which adds 0.4% to a play that I felt was worth doing without this extra.

The casino gives you 2-part tickets. You fill your Boarding Pass (BP) number on the back of one of the parts, and put that part into the drum. They call the winner as BP 123456, and ticket B458129. Whoever BP 123456 belongs to then has one minute to find the other part of the ticket. This isn't very difficult, as those of us with large numbers of tickets got them in packets of 100. For example, I got one packet with B209101-B209200, another packet with B209201-B209300, and three similar packets starting with numbers B209301, B209401, and B209501. I kept the glued-together ends of the packets, and if they called B209443, for example, I'd go to the fourth packet and quickly find the 43rd ticket.

It's tedious to rubber stamp that many tickets, and even more tedious to fill out the BPs manually, but it's not really that big of a deal. The casino has the capability for electronic drawings but for some reason they don't use that capability for these events.

Anyway, about five minutes before the drawing started, a senior citizen lady used her cane to slowly walk toward the host at the microphone. She told him that she hadn't understood that she was supposed to put her BP on the back. So she just put her ticket in the barrel and could produce the other half.

The host didn't want to disappoint this lady (perhaps he knew her --- hosts get to know A LOT of the players) so he announced over the microphone that you didn't need to have your BP on the back.

This was not what the rules said and it decreased the value of my tickets. I went forward immediately and explained calmly that this was unfair for a number of reasons.

1.If I didn't have to waste 15 minutes filling out the tickets, I could have earned more tickets.

2.If your BP is on the back, it is easy to enforce "only one win per player". If your BP is NOT on the back, then it is easy to trade off winning tickets among players so you could win more than once. (In fact, eight of the 18 tickets drawn were duplicates. At least one was mine.)

3.Since the rules stated that BPs had to be on the back, any ticket drawn that didn't have a BP dilutes the amount of money given away to the people who DID follow the rules.

4.It's too bad that this particular lady didn't read and follow the rules, but that is HER problem that SHE created by inattention. You can't go around and protect people from themselves.

I expressed these points calmly. This casino knows who I am, of course (I taught at their sister-property Fiesta for a number of years). This gives me some credibility, to be sure, but it also makes me vulnerable. Casinos are profit-making enterprises, and if I make myself a pain in the butt, it would be tempting for them to restrict me in one way or another. And I certainly do not want that.

As soon as I finished my explanation, other players came up and made the same points in their own way. I overheard one player threaten to "go to Gaming". I was glad the casino was made aware of this vulnerability, and also glad that I wasn't the one to make that threat. Why risk ticking them off?

Fortunately, there were some top executives present. The Director of Marketing (who probably had the final vote) was there, but he was rather new to the property. There were some long-time mid-level managers present who participated in the discussion as well.

Eventually they came to the right decision. When the host-emcee announced it, there was cheering. He then announced that so long as your BP was on the back, you didn't have to have the matching stub. This was met by a lot of grumbling from the players, and the quick-thinking ones rushed forward to deposit the other half of their tickets in the drum. After all, if you didn't need to show the other half, why not double your chances of getting picked? (This wouldn't have worked for me. I had 500 ticket halves and none of them had my BP stamped on them. It would take several minutes to do this. If EVERYONE did this, it wouldn't change the odds at all but would merely waste dozens of person-hours and create a lot of grumbling with nobody benefiting.) Fortunately, the employees guarding the drum prevented these duplicate tickets from being inserted into the drum, at least until the managers huddled again. This time I didn't go forward to state my opposition as there were several other players up front yelling out many of the same points I would make.

This also got resolved properly, However, the first ticket out of the drum didn't have a BP on it. The host decided to award the $7,500 first prize anyway and read the ticket number. A LOT of players started to yell angrily. This host had just verified that they were sticking to the rules, and then he was backing down from this position right off the bat. This was a volatile and tense situation. There were numerous people red-faced from yelling. After all, the casino appeared to be going to award half the prize money to a ticket that shouldn't be eligible.

The managers huddled again, and again made the correct decision. The ticket was disqualified for not having a BP on it (amidst heartfelt cheering), and the drawing started over again. In five minutes it was over.

Although this particular incident happened at Palace Station in particular, I've seen it happen elsewhere. To their credit, Palace Station eventually came up with the right answers and apologized profusely. On the same weekend, I've heard reports that Hard Rock changed the rules at the last minute (from one 3:00 drawing to THREE partial drawings at 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00.) Had I been there, I would have strongly argued with that casino that doing this was very wrong and in violation of Gaming regulations.

So how do you protect yourself against the casino changing the rules at the last minute? First of all, you have to KNOW the rules. If you don't know what the rules say, you can't effectively argue one way or the other.

Second, you need to consider how the change in rules affects you and others. If the rule change goes against your interests, you must be prepared to speak up. If someone else effectively presents your argument, fine. But if nobody else speaks up, you only have yourself to blame if the rule-change hurts you.

Finally, you have to know from the outset that you're not going to win all of these battles. On the night in question, the casino managers have the final vote. You can always appeal to Gaming after the fact, but if you're told a couple of times that the casino's decision is final, you need to sit down and shut up or risk being escorted out by Security