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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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Mar 13, 2007

Analyzing a Promotion

Station Casinos is past the middle of a 6-week-long $1.25 Slot Challenge. The way it works is during the first two weeks, the top point earners at nine casinos combined (all Vegas-area Station and Fiesta casinos) earn prizes as follows (slightly simplified):

Places 1 through 20 -- $5,000
Places 21 through 100 -- $2,500
Places 101 through 200 -- $1,000

For the second two weeks, the challenge starts over again and awards the same prizes. For the third challenge, which includes all six weeks, the awards are

First -- $50,000
Second -- $25,000
Third -- $10,000
Places 4 through 10 -- $5,000
Places 11 through 100 -- $2,500
Places 101 through 200 -- $1,000

Overall, this is a lucrative promotion. It is instructive, I believe, to share the type of thought processes strong players go through BEFORE the event starts to figure out whether or not this is a good deal to participate in.

1. What will it take to win? The truth is that nobody knows up front. You can't possibly know what's going on in the lives of that many other players to know how much they are going to play. You can guess though. At the start, I estimated it would take 100,000 points in the first two challenges to earn 200th place, 250,000 points to earn 100th place, and 600,000 to earn 20th place. (All of my estimates turned out to be too low. The actual numbers for the first challenge turned out to be 182,000, 305,000, and 905,000 respectively.)

Receiving an extra $1,000 for earning 100,000 points equates to a 1% cash bonus, assuming you're playing less-than-100% machines. The same size of bonus is earned for the middle prize, and a slightly lesser amount is earned for top prize. These numbers were calculated beforehand --- using my "predictions" about what scores would be needed to win. Those predictions turned out to be low, so the percentage added needs to be adjusted downward as well.

Another reason the percentages in the previous paragraph are overstated is because many players want a "cushion". With scores posted every day, you might be able to guess that 100th place will turn out to be somewhere between 290-000 and 320,000. But you do NOT know that exactly and it will cost you $1,500 if you are 101st place rather than 100th. For this reason, you may well decide to put on 340,000 or more "just in case."

2. Do I have enough time, bankroll, and interest in playing this much? If you're a quarter player or lower, playing this much in two weeks is out of the question --- especially if you want to play on 100% machines which only receive half a point per dollar bet rather than a full point per dollar bet that other machines get. $2 players could qualify with a lot of play, but most winners will play $5 machines or higher. Even for $5 machines, this is a LOT of play. Other casinos will have promotions --- many of which you won't know about until you're halfway through playing for the Station prizes. You might have a vacation planned. You may only play five hours a week.

Playing so many hours generates mistakes. If you can normally play with 99.9% accuracy, playing for fifty hours just may reduce your accuracy to 99.7%. If you're playing 1,000,000 points for the top prizes in the first two events, this reduction of accuracy will cost you an extra $2,000. This is not a trivial amount.

3. Are there suitable machines? If you're going to play $5 machines (or possibly $1 Five Play) you need to check out each of the relevant casinos to see what kinds of pay schedules are offered. If you play 9/5 Double Double Bonus for $1,000,000 to try to earn $5,000, it will cost you more than $21,000 to try to earn $5,000 --- assuming you know the game perfectly --- which isn't likely. Obviously Station is banking on some people making this choice, but unless there were some better machines (there are), good players would avoid this promotion.

4. Do you like and know how to play the suitable machines? No player knows every game well. If you play a 99.5% game at the 98% level, the net return on the game is 97.5%. It can be very expensive to play a lot of hours on such a machine.

5. Can you deal with the swings? If it takes $1,000,000 in play to qualify for $5,000, and your expected loss is $3,000, your ACTUAL loss may turn out to be $20,000 or more --- or you could win. Dealing with the wins is a nice problem to have. Dealing with the losses is a showstopper for many folks.

6. What point multipliers do you have? Station Boarding Pass points have some value. You can use them for meals, rooms, travel, bingo, etc. On occasion, regular players get 2x, 3x, 4x, or even 5x multipliers. Obviously playing when you have the multipliers is a better idea than when you don't have those multipliers.

7. How much do you need to play to keep your mailers coming? Station uses your play in March to determine how much money they'll send you in the mail in June, July, and August (approximately) and what you play in April to determine how much you get in July, August, and September. If you play at the Chairman Level (where they award you about $1,000 a month in free play), you need to play 250,000 points a month anyway. This turns out to be a $2,500 bonus for what you were willing to do without the bonus. If you play at President, Platinum, or lower levels, you'll receive lesser rewards. This promotion was announced mid-way through the month and many of us had already earned our requisite points and/or used our multipliers doing so. Even if you never played at Station, playing $750,000 or more in the two-week period would jumpstart you all the way to the top level. If you play a little more than that, you'd get a $5,000 bonus for your efforts.

8. Are there any other Station promotions going on? It turned out that they had a juicy giveaway on the starting weekend. They called it a $600,000 giveaway and probably gave away about half that amount, but even so, heavy play during the first weekend gave you some extra equity. It will likely turn out that the level of play in the second challenge is less than it was in the first challenge because there is no corresponding giveaway to kick off the second challenge.

There are other factors, but you get the idea. Most of the players who end up taking home the prizes won't be doing so by accident. Deciding to go for it after the event is halfway over just doubles the amount of work you'll end up having to do.

Your choices need to be made up front and then you take the results win or lose. For the first challenge (I won $5,000 and Shirley won $2,500) cost us $13,000 --- after a LOT of play and even with hitting a royal flush. The second challenge (where we figure to earn the same prizes but won't know for sure for a few days), I hit three royals and ended up $38,000 ahead. The third challenge (where we probably won't have to play anymore and we will each earn $2,500) is gravy. We ended up scoring well because we were "accidentally" over-royaled. We hit four of them and played enough so that we "should have" hit about two and a half. We could have lost $25,000-$50,000 if things went badly. Whether or not it was a smart play has NOTHING TO DO with our results --- because we never know when royal flushes come along. Whether or not it was a smart play depends on what our expected win was. If you make choices based on whether you are the favorite, your results over time will be good. You don't know which casino you'll score at, but the sum of the scores will be positive.