CasinoGaming.com


	Sundays: Inside Gaming Tuesdays: Video Poker Wednesdays: Off the Shelf Fridays: Richard Eng, Player's Edge Saturdays: Pocket Aces

VIDEO POKER

Columns

• Back to Bob's index

• Back to columnist index

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.

For more details and a schedule of Bob's free classes, visit www.bobdancer.com.

Nov. 24, 2009

Learning a New Game for a One-Time Deal --- Part II of II

In last week's column I discussed a 24-hour 10x points coupon I received from Railroad Pass. If you haven't read (or don't remember) the details of that column, it's available a few clicks away.

Just before midnight I went downstairs from my comped room. I first checked to see if the 7-5 Bonus pay schedule was still available at the $1 Five Play level on the Wheel Poker machines. It was. It's fair to assume that this 10x promotion while a "high denomination" (relative to the other games in the casino) 98.79 percent game was a casino oversight. Every other pay schedule on that machine was worth quite a bit less than 98 percent and wasn't interesting to me even with 10x points. It's was possible that their staff did a last-minute adjustment to the pay schedule -- which is why I checked -- but fortunately they hadn't.

I then went to the booth to ask when the promotion would officially start. It was probably midnight to midnight, but sometimes casino promotions are according to the "casino day" -- perhaps beginning at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. or some other time. If this was an ongoing promotion I would have asked this question quite a bit before the promotion started. But I didn't want to alert the casino that I was going to show up and hit them hard. If they told me that it didn't start until 3 a.m. I would have gone upstairs and rested until the starting time. This is one advantage of getting a room on the property.

Both the booth and the head slot guy thought the promotion would start at midnight -- but nobody was sure. Therefore, it means I needed to check carefully. When I played the first hand at 12:01 a.m., I only got credit for playing $30 (which means it was single points). So I waited a couple of minutes and tried again. Now I was getting credit for $300 per hand, which was indeed 10x points. So I was off and running.

The Wheel Poker machines are too high to be comfortable relative to the chairs they have there. So I "borrowed" bar stools, which are several inches higher. I got two different stools because hopefully there were going to be a lot of W2Gs and I'd want to move to the next machine over when this happened. No other knowledgeable player attacked this game on this day. There were quite a few nickel and quarter players who played a few hands at one time or another, but nobody other than me was playing seriously.

W2Gs can happen on royals ($4,000), dealt straight flushes ($1,250), and dealt aces ($2,000 before the wheel). Other W2Gs happen when you hit one or more quads and get the wheel bonus. Over the 17 hours I actually played I received 9 W2Gs. Although this averages about one every two hours, on one occasion I had 3 W2G jackpots waiting to be paid at once and at other times it was four or more hours between them. This is a high-variance game where you live and die according to the number of quads you get.

At about 8 a.m. I went upstairs to rest. I was back at the machine at noon because there was some sort of a "free spin" promotion every half hour from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursdays. Some player with his card in would be called at random to come up and spin a prize wheel -- where the prizes seemed to vary between $20 and $50 (I didn't actually see the wheel).

They didn't call my name for this promotion -- and even if they did this would be a small blip in the day's results. My expected winnings were more than $3,000 -- whether I got to spin this particular prize wheel or not. Still, I was planning on playing a lot of hours anyway. Arranging to make sure I was there when there was a little bit extra on the table to be picked up is simply good technique.

Railroad Pass has a limit of $500 in cash back that you can pick up per day. I earned close to $10,000 in cash back on this one day. I wasn't looking forward to making 20 separate trips to claim it. Still, I come to the casino three or times a month to get food to go so I'd be able to pick up all of the money eventually.

At about 3 in the afternoon, a casino employee named Melissa (I think her title is Marketing Manager) came up to me and told me that I'd earned $6,000 in free play already and explained the $500-per-day rule to me. She also told me that she could bring me $500 immediately and could have the slot club booth staff issue a $500 ticket each day, store the tickets at the booth, and I could pick up the accumulated tickets once a week. I told her this would be very much appreciated. I'd pick up $3,500 each Sunday until there was no more to pick up.

They didn't have to do this. By this time they definitely realized that I was playing a 98.79 percent game with a 2.5 percent slot club, they knew I was Bob Dancer, so they had to assume I was skillful enough to extract very close to the maximum from the promotion. Some casinos would pull the plug on the promotion, the machine or the player in this kind of circumstance. This casino didn't, which I thought was very classy.

To some players, the bottom line is the most important part of a promotion. My bottom line was minus $3,000. Although I'd played enough so that about 1.5 royals were "due," I ended up forgetting to hit one and so I lost. I did earn about $4,000 in comps, which will be cashed in for 80 to-go meals over the next half-year or so, so I guess it turned out "about even."

Clearly this was a missed opportunity. Working so hard to turn a $3,000 expected win into a $3,000 net loss is simply "one that got away." I don't worry a lot about such things. My job is to put myself in position to succeed. Doing that consistently will lead to good results over time. The bumps along the way are simply a cost of doing business. I would eagerly participate in such a promotion again, even though I lost this time. I believe the games are fair and the fact that I was under-royaled this time is merely a short-term phenomenon.

I'm sure Railroad Pass will not run this promotion again, or if they do it will be for something like a one-hour limit. Studying for three or four hours to get ready for a one-hour promotion with a high variance is probably not something I'll want to do.

Some players will ask why I'm writing about a one-time-only promotion that will likely never come about again. The answer is that playing winning video poker is a process. The tools used to get ready for and participate in this promotion are very similar to ones that will be used to attack future promotions at a variety of casinos. Some of the methods described here were new to some readers. Understanding these methods will make these readers stronger players in the future.