For those of you who are looking to maybe get into advantage play either online or at brick-and-mortar casinos, if there is one piece of advice that I know I actually have standing to give it is this: Diversify your skills. The inspiration for this Editorial comes to me because I have had five events happen within the last ten days that, by themselves, are not odd at all, just odd that the five events happened so close together.
On five different occasions, I was addressed privately about different aspects of potential advantage play with various things cited as the reason why the individual in question chose to address me. In two of the cases, the individual was either a predominantly poker or blackjack player and wanted to address me about learning how to beat slot machines in Brick & Mortar Casinos. I had an individual address me about how to handle a double jackpot bonus, (don’t know what his normal angle is) an individual address me about when a 10/10 Keno Progressive might be good, and finally, I had someone ask me about Poker, even though I really don’t consider that an area of any serious knowledge for me at all! The person who asked me about poker is generally a card counter at Blackjack, on a bad run right now, I suspect he’ll forget about poker soon enough.
While there is certainly nothing wrong with seeking out advice from people, if you’re an advantage player looking to diversify, it is generally better to find information on your own and come to people who you think may know more about a specific subject with specific questions rather than fishing for general ideas. The individuals who all presented their questions to me within the last ten days did so with varying degrees of specificity, with only three of the inquiries being at all specific. The best question came from WoV Member and card counter, Romes, but since they were in a private message, I’m not at liberty to share them.
Anyway, anyone who knows anything about poker would know not to ask me anything about Poker because I cannot speak with enough authority on Live Poker to answer the question. It’s not that the game is not my strong suit, I’m terrible at No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em simply because I don’t have the personality for that game. I am more than competent at Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, I would suggest a better than break-even player, but still not the person to talk to if you want to know about how to make any meaningful sum of money at poker.
The Keno paytables for a straight Keno game are generally available on the Keno Calculator at WizardofOdds.com, so I have no idea why anyone would even need me to answer when a given Progressive is good. The WizardofOdds site, which would be found with a rudimentary Google search, answers that question for the player. I certainly understand why a player might think that a certain Progressive is good if the number is way over its base, but that does not necessarily mean anything if the event in question has an extremely long cycle.
The 10/10 on Keno has a cycle of 1 in 8,911,711,.18 which means that, even in the nearly impossible event that a Progressive on that result did present an advantage, a player recognizing and playing to that advantage would be extremely unlikely to ever hit the result and would effectively be more likely to be playing to the house edge as if the 10/10 did not actually pay anything. Is it true that the player would still be getting 100% on a positive Progressive? Well, yes, but it is also true that the Powerball Jackpot can theoretically go positive.
I definitely understand asking about how to approach a double jackpot bonus for a number of reasons:
A.) There are a number of advantageous ways to approach it, the best one really depends on what specific games the casino offers.
B.) A player who doesn’t normally advantage play machines might recognize a double jackpot promotion as good, but legitimately have so little knowledge of machines that he cannot reasonably be expected to know how to play it.
C.) Same as B, except some people might not advantage play at all, but recognize that there must be a positive way to play a Double Jackpot Bonus.
In any event, I can appreciate that, and even individuals who regularly Advantage Play machines bounce ideas off of one another from time-to-time.
The point of the matter is this: Some of the questions I received over the last ten days were specific or topical enough to be sensible and I could understand why they were being asked, whereas alternatively, some of the questions that I received (on a personal one-on-one level) were way too general and it would take me hours to answer in such a way that a person willing to do his homework could figure out for himself.
With that in mind, I would advise all Advantage Players or would-be Advantage Players to do their homework and at least understand the rudiments of other aspects of Advantage Play only asking other Advantage Players about things when they have a specific question in mind. For example, if I ask someone about Card Counting Blackjack, the question is either going to be somewhat specific or a question concerning their personal philosophy and approach simply because I have enough of an elementary understanding of card counting to ask such questions! I’m not going to approach someone with the equivalent of, ‘How do you count cards at Blackjack?’ The basic information is readily available to anyone who wants to look for it, that’s also one of the reasons I write, to put basic information out there in the public venue!
With that in mind, when it comes to the potential for Advantage Play in other areas (if you are already an advantage player) or the potential to advantage play at all (if you are not) here is what you need to know:
Card Counting, Hole Carding, Edge Sorting:
These are actually three very different advantage play methods, but in one case, the game of Blackjack, they can each occasionally apply to one game. A few of these methods can apply to some games, but not to others. For example, you can hole card at Three-Card Poker, but you cannot card count Three-Card Poker.
My advice for these forms of advantage play is to look up the information on them on WizardofOdds.com as well as APHeat.net before approaching an individual with questions. A person could also become a Member at WizardofVegas.com and post questions there after reading some of the existent threads dedicated to the subject.
It is important to note that specific answers are generally both better and more accurate answers than general answers and specific questions tend to get specific answers. General questions get general answers. For that reason, the more you already know about a subject before asking about it, the better the information you will get in return. It’s not that people are arrogant or don’t have time to help others on a one-on-one level, it is just that people take others more seriously when the others have shown that they have put their own work into something.
Therefore, if one is going to approach an individual with questions about any of these three items, it is important to understand the meaning of the terms and, at a minimum, have a general idea of why these three things are viable forms of Advantage Play. General advice on how to actually do the three things is also out there (particularly card counting) and all three things have been discussed at the Wizard of Vegas Forums.
When an individual demonstrates that they already have rudimentary knowledge about a particular subject, they’ll get better answers from people.
Advantage Playing Machines (Straight Up):
The first thing that we should get out of the way is that there is a difference between Advantage Playing a Promotion of mail offers as opposed to Advantage Playing machines straight up. When it comes to Promotions/Offers, generally one of two things is happening, and either of them amounts to a willful or accidental mathematical error:
Promotions: If there is an advantageous promotion that involves machine play, it is either because the casino does not realize there is an advantage to be had, doesn’t care, or does realize it, cares, but thinks it is a lesser advantage than it actually is.
Offers: Whether a casino knows it or not, the sum of the offers that they extend to a player from a, ‘Player Development,’ standpoint, which often includes Free Play, may by itself overcome the house edge on the game that the player is playing in order to generate those offers. Occasionally, it will be a combination of the offers, other comps and promotions, but one of the most common methods of machine play is using some combination of these things to end up with an expected return in excess of 100%.
Drawings: Drawings can also be technically lumped in here, but I put them in the same category as promotions.
However, two of the questions I got this week had nothing to do with either of those things, but rather pertained to a poker player and a table games AP who wanted to know some of the specifics on how to exploit slot machines that are over 100%. The poker player has almost zero rapport with me and also didn’t ask terribly specific questions that indicated some pre-existing knowledge of machine play. As a result, the poker player was met with general and clipped responses that largely just hinted at what types of machines might occasionally be advantage played.
The Table Games AP, on the other hand, demonstrated that he had already explored the matter on his own, asked specific questions, and had a pre-existing rapport with me, so I was more than happy to entertain his questions. While there were just as many questions, those questions were specific and specific answers were given to them. It was actually a fun thing to respond to! I may have even dropped a couple of titles to machines.
However, there are a few things that a person needs to know before asking for any advice on how to take advantage of machines straight-up:
A.) Nobody can really give you any specific machines that can be beaten with very few exceptions such as Vulturing Ultimate X, and perhaps a few slot titles that either have a Must-Hit Progressive or do not rely on a Progressive at all to be positive. The ones that essentially don’t rely on a Progressive at all are basically other vulture plays.
The reason it is difficult to namedrop other specific machines that could be advantageous, especially those with Progressives, is because the, ‘Base Return,’ settings often vary from one casino to another even if the machine is otherwise the same unit. How this happens is that the reel stripping gets changed and the probability of certain high payouts may go down, or alternatively, a Free Games symbol might be replaced with something else.
The possibility of this happening is why machine advantage players are loathe to name a machine and say the Progressive is good at $XXX.xx. While that may be true for that individual player and on the machines at that individual casino, the base returns could be set differently at a different casino. It is even theoretically possible that the Progressive in question (because of the symbol/reel distribution) is itself harder to hit at a different casino!
Video Poker is kind of easy in this regard because the probabilities are based on a random 52-card deck and the payouts are pretty clear based on the paytable. Granted, there is an optimum strategy that should be followed based on the payouts, but anyone can clearly determine that a Jacks or Better game that pays 6-FOR-1 on the Flush is better than one that pays 5-FOR-1 on the Flush, all other things being equal.
The problem is that even that concept doesn’t mean anything for slot machines, although, slot machines usually tend to have the payouts for certain results be the same across the same title and simply only change the reel assignments. The result of that is that the pays for a particular result are the same from one machine to another, but from one machine to another, it is difficult (if not impossible) to know what the likelihood of the result in question is. As a result, no blanket advice can be given and for any player who doesn’t want to, ‘Spin and pray,’ the only thing left is to either do an Empirical Observation of the machine or make some assumptions.
B.) Empirical Observations Suck, Unless You Like Them
I happen to enjoy doing Empirical Observations of slot machines, when it is even possible to do so, and using symbol frequency to attempt to determine the probability of all of the paying results. However, doing so is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and potential players need to realize that it actually takes a long time to do this. For players not wanting to waste money playing a negative expectation game, they must do their best to get a record of spin results while someone else is playing, which is not always the easiest task. It’s not that tough on a single-line machine, but on others, it gets difficult in a hurry.
It is still tedious on a single-line machine, though! It can take quite a few man hours to log anywhere from 1,000-2,500 spins of data depending on how confident you want to be that your sample size accurately represents the probabilities of the machine. The problem with a smaller sample size is that all kinds of screwy data can come from a small sample size with the Progressive looking substantially more likely or less likely than it actually is. With a more significant data set, the player can be more sure that the probabilities indicated by the data are correct.
Furthermore, some machines simply cannot be empirically observed, so it is often impossible to know when they are at an advantage. Free Games, for example, often operate on separate reel strips, so a player would have to determine the probabilities for the base game followed by determining all of the probabilities for the Free Games as if they were on an entirely different machine. Imagine if you hit Free Games on average one in a hundred games and you end up with ten free games on average, if that holds, it would be expected to take about 10,000 base games to get 1,000 games of Free Games data, which still might not be sufficient enough to make any absolute conclusions about the probabilities.
Of course, there are machines that can be Empirically Observed, and even some with what I would call ease...even though it can still be tedious. Those types of machines, however, are fewer and more far between as Free Games based machines as well as must-hits are all the rage these days. Again, the Free Games based machines cannot be Empirically observed very well, but the must-hits games are much easier and do not need to be empirically observed at all.
Even though the must-hits are easier to understand, players would be advised against trying to make a meaningful amount of money on beating machines straight up because:
C.) The plays aren’t always worth a lot and there aren’t always many of them.
Unfortunately, for the would-be machine AP, just determining when a play is advantageous is only half of the battle, the other half is actually being in a given casino when a positive play is available. Even then, are the plays good enough to justify repeated visits to the casino to identify whether or not they have, ‘Developed,’ into something playable?
In the case of machines that required Empirical study, the player would often be lucky to find plays with sufficient value to get any decent value just on the time the player spent analyzing the machine. Plays on individual slot Progressives that go positive are really more, ‘Novelty plays,’ on reels than anything else and are only rarely worth any serious money. People cannot expect to get rich off of it, and depending on the casino, shouldn’t even really have any specific expectation for hourly profit. Sometimes, the plays simply aren’t there.
Furthermore, it is also possible to engage in a drawn out Empirical study on a play just to discover that the time is a sunk cost due to the fact that the machine is virtually never playable. This often ends up being the case when a Progressive would have to hit some ridiculous amount (based on the probability of the Progressive hitting) in order to be any good. When this happens, any hope of profit per hour on the work on that machine is gone because the player is likely never going to have a play on it, and if he/she does, the play is not likely to be worth anything.
Competition and the knowledge of the other players varies from casino-to-casino, and there are certainly houses out there in which a player can have an expectation of what I would consider a reasonable hourly profit for what is really just supposed to be fun to begin with, but even with that said, it is unlikely that very many people are out there beating slot machines straight up full-time. There are certainly a few, I’ve spoken to at least two, but it’s a tough road to get to that point and even they will acknowledge there are often more valuable plays out there.
Promotions/Offers:
There are ways to beat Promotions/Drawings and definitely a myriad of ways in which an advantage player could play the offer game, but players doing these things tend to be extremely well-bankrolled and are playing with a huge profit expectation. There have also been questions as to the legality of certain tactics necessary to take advantage of offers to the fullest extent possible.
The result of that, of course, is that the players who play Promotions/Offers in Brick & Mortar casinos tend to guard their information the closest. They really don’t care if a Progressive has a profit expectation of $20 if the Minor Jackpot is at $XXX.xx, they are concerned with returns on their investments approaching and occasionally surpassing 100%. In other words, more than doubling the investment on a particular play.
Online Promotions will also occasionally be almost as good as all of that, and I have certainly written Editorials about a number of them for this site as well as Wizard of Vegas. I will have some new Editorials coming out in the near future in that regard, as well. Some of the best Promotions (but mainly the Terms & Conditions) have changed a lot within the last year.
Players who play the offers and promotions in brick and mortar casinos especially guiard their information closely because, the more people who are doing it, the more likely it is to get figured out and for the casino to discontinue the offers/promotions that made it advantageous in the first place. What I’m saying is, other than speaking in hypothetical terms about a one-time promotion, don’t expect a lot of information in this regard unless you prove to the person you are asking that you have some really good information (usually about the same type of thing) in exchange.
Improving Your Poker Game:
The best advice I can give anyone about how to improve their No Limit Poker cash game is to ask someone who is not me about it. If you’re asking me about it, then you’re really just grasping at straws because I am likely no better at it than you are.
Conclusion:
The key to getting good answers is to ask good questions, so if you want to learn about Advantage Play in any form, it is important to put in the work necessary to understand the rudiments of it on your own before approaching someone who actually does it with any questions. Advantage Players usually only begrudgingly accept other advantage players into what I will term the, ‘Inner Circle,’ simply because the more people that are out there doing a particular play or looking for particular plays, the more likely it is that the casinos will get hot to the play and the play will be discontinued by one means or another. With other types of plays, the increased competition is just a negative for the guys who are already doing it.
However, it is possible to break into the field of advantage play, often by working with people who already know more about it than you do in a helper/runner/hustler capacity and then learning from them. For people who are already advantage players by who may be looking to learn a different angle, then it is a good idea to market yourself that way and offer training/information in exchange for other training or information.
Either way, nothing will change the fact that the best way to get good answers about a matter that someone takes seriously is to demonstrate that you also take it seriously.
