No comps? :(

So we're going to Vegas from June 29th to July 3rd. My plane ticket is booked. Only problem is... we don't have a hotel room yet!

Jeff had a voucher for 2 free weekday nights at Bally's which we were going to use for Sunday and Monday nights, but unfortunately he hasn't called to book it yet, and I just heard from Emily who tried to book rooms with a deal that she got around those same dates, and they told her that the rooms were too booked up to let her use her deal.

So this does not bode well for us. Our only hope is that Jeff's deal is somehow different enough that they will let him use it despite what they told Emily.

Augh. Weekend rack rates are like $155, and weekday are like $70ish. So this could suck. Meanwhile I did not receive any comped rooms this time around so I have no control over this. Bummer. We've been so used to staying at Bally's for so cheap. I got a deal for our Christmas trip for like $29, I got free Paris rooms over the summer, and other Bally's deals in the past too.

The difference is that on my past trip, I didn't play any -EV games. Those are the ones that they like to give you stuff for, to make you come back. Jeff no doubt got his comps from that big rush in Blackjack that he went on, when he was betting like $100-$200 per hand. The way they rate your play is based on how big you're betting and how long you're playing. The outcome has absolutely no bearing on it. They just want people who will give them big action to come back.

In the past, I've played Blackjack and Pai Gow giving them action of like $25-$100 per hand. But I could never play Blackjack for very long because that game terrifies me, even when I had a decent roll, so I never even built up THAT many points. Just enough to get a free room here and there.

Well, lately I've been reading about video poker, because Mike told me that you can actually beat it. This really surprised me, and coming from just about anyone else I wouldn't have believed it. But as Mike is a 2nd year in the Biostatistics department (ha ha) and a reader of 2+2, I have some faith in what he says about gambling and EV. So I looked into it. There are tons of different variations of this, but some are better than others, and some even have positive expectation. These are of course quite rare, but a decent game that shouldn't be too hard to find is 9/6JoB.

This is Jacks or Better, and the 9/6 means as follows: the 9 is the payout for a full house and the 6 is the payout for a flush. Other games have different payouts for these two hands, like 8/6, 8/5, even 6/5. This of course makes a huge difference in the long run, and with perfect play, 9/6JoB has a longterm expectation of .9954 per hand.

This means that if I'm at a 25 cent machine betting the max (5 coins, so $1.25), playing 1000 hands per hour (about average), I can expect to be down about $57.50 in 10 hours.

Ok so you're probably not quite sold on this yet. Why stare at a screen for 10 hours just to lose 60 bucks? Where does "beating it" come in? Well, what I've found out is that playing 25 cents at max bet for an hour is roughly equivalent to playing $25 blackjack for an hour, as far as comps go. That's pretty decent. And I can't play blackjack for more than like one hour without having a heart attack. It just moves too fast. But the comps that can be generated by this level of play are nothing to scoff at, in the form of free rooms, cashback, and gift cards. This can add up to way more than the $60 expected loss.

You might wonder how they can do even this. Why give you back more money than you're losing to them? Well, two things. First, not everyone plays "perfect," so their expectation is quite a bit lower. I hope to learn "perfect" play by my trip, which appears to be feasible for this variant of video poker (others are tougher). Second, things like free rooms will be quite valuable to me but cost almost nothing to them, especially if I use it at an off-peak time. Even gift cards probably cost them less than face value, and if I use it at somewhere that I would shop anyways, it's the same as cash to me.

The other thing is that video poker machines are sometimes tied to progressive jackpots. These can get quite huge, and if it's big enough, you might be actually playing with positive expectation. Ok so the odds of hitting a jackpot are of course quite low even if it gives you positive expectation, but from a gambling perspective, we always have to think about things in terms of an infinite sample size. If you think about everything this way, your long term results will show it even if it does not manifest itself in a given trip.

So. 10 hours of play. Cost $60 on average. Chance to hit a sweet jackpot. Keep the free scotch coming. And hopefully comped rooms for my next trip and probably other comps as well.

Everyone wins.

I hope. Will report back on this.