The Lucky Donut

The picture below is Gary Hoffman taking his own photograph in front of a slot machine jackpot.  It’s not a bad photo for an arms-length camera phone shot, but you think he’d look a little happier.  Maybe he was saving up a nice cheesy grin for the inevitable picture on Winner’s Wall.  Or perhaps he already knew what was going to happen…

The machine’s screen shows that he just hit a whopping $1.6 million jackpot on a Mystical Mermaid nickel slot machine.

Quite how this reel combination triggered a jackpot, I’m not exactly sure.  Any major payout on a video slot machine is going to need five adjacent identical symbols.  Even with some of the wacky winning ways on a 20-line machine (this game shows the mess of win lines about as clearly as you could hope for) I can’t see anywhere that a row of five could be possible, even if it used wild symbols.

Usually a seven-figure jackpot would require something very specific like five wilds right along the middle pay line, and that’s definitely not the case here.

How the jackpot was hit isn’t the big issue here anyway.  This machine has a maximum payout of 50,000 coins, equal to $2500 in nickels, and it wasn’t (and in fact cannot be) linked to a progressive jackpot meter.  Clearly something broke.

The legend printed on all slot machines is "Malfunction voids all pays and plays".  The media coverage of this story insists on referring to this as "small print".  I guess it’s fairly small, but it’s not exactly tucked away out of sight.  It’s right above the hole where you feed your money, right next to the button you press to spin the reels, and there’s a huge lighted yellow arrow pointing to it.  In the picture above, just follow the arrow verically down from his nose and this disclaimer would be in the box right underneath the tip.

If you play slots you’ll have seen it many times, but in this case, it’s common sense anyway.  There’s no way that a machine trying to pay out a random jackpot way in excess of it’s maximum when the reels are aligned to no winning combination is anything but a malfunction and you’re not going to get paid.

With no obligation to do so, the casino offered to pay Hoffman the $2500 maximum, but he declined and instead filed a lawsuit for the $1.6m.

It’s the casino’s defense that’s caused the story to make national news.  The incident happened at the Sandia Resort and Casino in New Mexico, which is located on a Native American reservation.  The tribe is exerting their identity as an independent nation (the very reason that gambling can take place on their land at all) in order to have the case dismissed.  They insist that any legal action involving an incident on their territory may only take place through their own court system and not a state court.

Even though Hoffman’s case is a pointless waste of time with no chance of winning, it might not even get to be heard.  Nobody seems to be quite sure how exactly you would go about suing an Indian Casino – even if you actually had a genuine grievance – if they can simply claim sovereign immunity at the first sign of trouble.  "What happens here happens only if we say so" is not such an attractive proposition.

However, any distrust that is generated through the publicity of this claim will almost certainly be shortlived as it is displaced by the human urge to gamble.

Even Hoffman himself, pissed off and $1.6m out of pocket, has been giving Sandia plenty of action since the incident in August 2006.  The casino has revealed that he has visited more than 70 times in the first six months of 2007 – nearly three times a week!

I have read, albeit with some scepticism, the account of Richard Brodie being barred from all Harrah’s casino properties on the grounds that he is simply a lucky player.

Brodie is the author of Microsoft Word, a ball and chain that will no doubt follow him to the grave.  It’s only fair to say from the outset that the person responsible, however indirectly, for that goddamn talking paperclip will receive very little sympathy from me.

Besides an overpriced, bloatware word processor, I am unfamiliar with his work and his adventures as a gambler and I had not read his blog until today.  After a little research, there appears to be enough respect for his writing that I decided that I should not immediately call BS, even though the tale seems a somewhat far-fetched.

I will, however, hold reservations that, just maybe, the story is fabricated (after all, he is a poker player) or that Harrah’s in fact have barred him for some other reason than simply being lucky.  We cannot assume Harrah’s will automatically reveal personal information about a high roller, however there’s always a chance that Jan Jones will open her gob again.  Let’s hope so.

Brodie has been barred from Harrah’s casinos because they cannot work out how to make money from him.

How ridiculous is that statement?  A Las Vegas casino cannot win money.  Sorry, I’ll correct that.  The world’s largest gaming corporation cannot win money.  It really shouldn’t be that hard, and if they’re sweating the action on a $300 per spin video poker machine then the answer should be simple.  Pull the machine.

This photograph (click to enlarge) shows Brodie grinning next to his machine having just hit a natural royal flush – on the deal – for $240,000.  The machine is almost full pay deuces wild.  There’s one variation: 8 coin payback for a straight flush instead of 9.  I plugged the paytable into Frugal Video Poker and it checks in at 100.35% payback, compared to 100.76% for FPDW.  At $300 a pop, with perfect strategy this machiine is worth $1.08 per spin to a knowledgeable player. 

Add on Total Rewards benefits for some extra value.  It’s only a paltry 0.05%, but then each hand becomes worth a theoretical $1.23.  Grind out 600 hands an hour and you’ve got a job that pays over $700/hr.  If you can cope with the swings, of course.  Typically you need a bankroll equal to five royal flushes to deal with the huge variance of video poker.  That’s only $1.2 million then.

Obviously this figure requires perfect play, which is not that simple, when you have to work out which one or two gap straight flush draws to hold and which to discard, taking into account the slightly reduced payout for that hand.  So you have to play a little slower to make sure you make the right holds… maybe it’s only worth $300/hr.

This paytable is rather surprising, given the downgrades Harrah’s have made to the video poker at Caesars (and indeed to Caesars in general) over the last couple of years.  Once the best paytables on the strip, they’re now a poor imitation of their former selves.  The 9/6 Jacks or Better machines have become 7/5 machines, reducing the payback from a healthy 99.54% to a dreadful 96.15%.

Slightly fewer players with a much larger house edge (in this case, more than eight times larger) generates a bucket load more money for the Evil Empire, and since Harrah’s has the marketing clout to ensure a constant volume of players through their doors, they have absolutely no incentive to offer ther players a good gamble any more.

Claire has been researching video poker availability for her summer assault and has found that although there’s a handful of positive expectation machines scattered around downtown and off-strip, they only exist at the 25c level.  The hourly rate, with the very best slot club cashback deals, is about $6/hr.  It would take a really creative use of slot club points and fancy free drinks to come close to 100% payback on a $1 machine.  For anybody interested in all the numbers, vpFREE is the definitive resource.  They don’t even mention the three-coin, $100 machine at Caesars though.

That Brodie has been been lucky is not his fault.  Anyone can run hot, but the odds of hitting a royal flush on that machine still remain in the region of forty thousand to one.  In fact, on Deuces Wild games you should hit less royals than on other types of video poker, if you are playing correctly – you’ll never discard a 2 to draw to a natural royal flush.  The Frugal VP simulation shows that it comes along once every 45,409 hands.

Brodie has indeed been exceptionally lucky, hitting three royals at Caesars in the past year.  To hit three royals should require, on average, 136,000 hands, which is a ten day stretch with no sleep if you can maintain 600 hands per hour.  However over the course of a year, this is certainly achievable although Brodie doesn’t appear to have played anything like that many hands to get his three jackpots.

Brodie claims he’s given about 80% of the winning back, which would put him at about $144,000 profit on the year (20% of $240,000 x 3).  This is the figure I found most interesting though: for an advantage player that would actually grind through 136,000 hands to hit three royals without being exceptionally lucky, their expected return would still be in the same region: $146,000 won plus about $20,000 in comp.

So clearly the thing to do here is to reduce the paytable or bin that machine completely.  It’s a major leak in Harrah’s game.

Instead their answer is to find players who seem to be winning more than their fair share and then do their best to remove the lucky element from their casinos.  Is this not just the same as a player who has to sit in a particular spot at the blackjack table, or has to set the dice the same way every time, or has to wear his lucky underpants before going out to gamble?

That kind of thinking is for suckers, so who’s the sucker now?

It’s a ten second clip.  Not even that – honest!  You’re missing out on the whole multimedia experience if you don’t press play.  But I know you probably won’t, so I’ve added a transcript this time too.  See.  Just a few seconds. But it’s still better if you play the clip.

Anyway…

Speaking on the American Casino Guide podcast, legendary collector of free casino shit and (I think it’s compulsory to call her this now) "queen of comps" Jean Scott advised listeners that they shouldn’t leave comp dollars on a players card, just in case you never get a chance to use them.  Casinos change hands; players clubs mess with their programs; comps expire before your next trip.  There are so many ways players can lose out, and obviously that’s bad.

In fact the two casinos I still have comp left with are Binions and Imperial Palace.  Both assured me I’d still be able to eat for free in the summer, but really neither have a particularly certain future in Las Vegas right now.  As usual, we can blame Harrah’s.

After Binions went busto, it was stripped of the only things the Evil Empire wanted it for – the Horeshoe name and the World Series of Poker.  It was then sold on to MTR Gaming who, so far, are not doing a particuarly good job at plugging the leaks.  Oh how the Shoe would be jumping right now if it had a little bit of ESPN money to keep it ticking over.  The IP was gobbled up only for the land it sits on and it’s only a matter of time before it comes tumbling down.  But as Harrah’s themselves are now the subject of a takeover, and their investors have said that they want to clear their outstanding debts (a mere $21 billion) before reinvesting in growth it looks like those Dealertainers are going to be hanging around for a little longer.

Anyway…

Over to Jean.

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"You know what happened when Katrina hit Mississippi.  A lot of people lost a lot of comps."

Nearly two years on, our thoughts are still with those victims who not only lost their homes, jobs and families, but also a nice steak and eggs special.

If I may paraphrase the email message I had today Terrible’s:

"Once you’ve lost your money at our casino, we’ll help you kill yourself."

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.

Roulette is not the most thrilling game anyway, but I can appreciate the recording of the £30 I bet with Sporting Index this weekend that didn’t actually cost me anything was pretty much at the bottom end of the excitement scale.  Even for me, whose money was almost at risk.

This one is slightly better.  Ashley Revell bets his life savings on red.

Yes, it’s old news, but I never thought to look for it online before and I’m glad I finally did.  When this was on TV, the sound quality was all over the place but in this version you can hear what the dealer is saying to him (just try to ignore the DIY Tarantino soundrack).  Sky One had to rush to get the program out on time.  It was meant to be live from the Hard Rock, but they changed their mind about accepting the bet and in the end the Plaza stepped up but it wasn’t allowed to be broadcast live.

For a bet of this size, I think they have every right to be paranoid.  The rule that the bet must to be placed before the ball has travelled twice around the wheel is to eliminate the use of any computer devices that can calculate where the ball will land from its speed.  Even so, such a device is only accurate in predicting a segment of the wheel (its users have to know the arrangement of numbers on the roulette wheel and bet accordingly) so it’s unlikely to be significant on a red/black bet.

The Plaza still have a sign on the "lucky" table to commemorate their huge loss.

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Congratulations, it’s an apostrophe.  Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon has now replaced Barbary Coast in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip.  

Before:

After:

Nice photoshop work, but are Harrah’s so ashamed of this place (or perhaps the name) that they had to crop out the neon Flamingo logo from their own hotel next door?

Just like the Imperial Palace – the property just the other side of the Flamingo that they also bought to knock down – they’re not associating it with their other Las Vegas casinos.  The slot club is independent of Total Rewards, and you won’t find any hotel information on harrahs.com.

Big Elvis is still playing there, but are all drinks still $2?

There has been a story in the news about some crooks being jailed for, apparently, cheating at poker.  I first heard this in a brief report on the radio so my first thought was exactly what they’d been done for – even in a fully licenced casino, the house pretty much can’t (or wont) do anything about a poker cheat, on account of it being a game that’s played only against other players.  If they’re not stealing from the casino, the worst that will happen is a swift ejection from the premises.  They usually want to keep punter-worrying stories quiet, especially when they don’t have to worry about getting their money back.

The crime in question took place in September 2005, but with the story breaking less than 24 hours before a verdict is expected in the Gutshot case, and showing the public – and the jury, if they are allowed to watch TV – that a licenced casino is a very safe place to be, the timing is impeccable.  I may very well say more about the Gutshot defense and their shocking definition of gambling and expert witness who does not understand conditional probability after judgement has been served later today.

Footage of the scam taking place confirms that the three men had actually been caught cheating at three card poker.  Just having the word poker in the name of the game will help to carry the story in the media, but really this is just a poker-style carnival game, played against the dealer and featuring a juicy house edge.

According to the ITV news report I saw last night, they got away with "three and a half (pause for effect) thousand pounds", suggesting that these guys were stupid enough to not only hang around long enough to be seen repeatedly winning at a game with horible odds, but also that they only got away with a little more than one month’s minimum wage each.  The BBC coverage, however, suggested a much more respectible figure (although only a guestimate) of £250,000, won over a four month period. 

Yau Lam and his partners in crime – Fan Tsang and the fabulously named Bit Wong – used a lipstick camera concealed in his sleeve, positioned to see the faces of the cards as they were dealt.  The pictures were transmitted to a nearby van where his accomplice could speak the relevant information to a hidden earpiece.  Sky News has pictures of the kit.

As only 26% of hands in three card poker are decided by a pair or better, even seeing just one of the dealer’s cards is very valuable indeed.  After placing an initial ante bet, the player has the choice of "raising" – doubling the bet to find out if he beats the dealer’s hand – or "folding" and forfeiting his bet immediately.

The basic strategy is to raise if you hold a Q64 or better, otherwise fold.  However every time you have a queen-high hand but see that the dealer was dealt an ace or king, you can save a bet by playing opposite to the normal strategy because you already know you are beaten.  Quite clearly though, if you are only investing more money on winning hands, the casinos is soon going to notice.

In case you’d somehow forgotten, it was actually the World Poker Tour that invented fucking tiny cameras (not Noel Edmonds or Timmy Mallett as I believed in my younger days).  If the police didn’t get these guys, WPTE’s lawyers would have done, and that’s a much scarier prospect than a few years of porridge.