Expanding just a bit on my comments about casinos not really understanding the profitability implications of their offerings, Bob Dancer (and many others) are absolutely right about one thing: a great number of people are adept enough with the internet to understand what represents a good or bad play, but very, very few are willing to put in the time to understand how to really leverage that information.
A case in point (but not by any means a solitary example). Recently one of my local casinos dropped full pay PKM (99.95%) and replaced it with a 96% version. After discussions with several regulars the first weekend after the change , two facts were fundamentally apparent:
1) People understood that full pay PKM was better than the other VP offerings and they also understood the new pay table was different from the full pay pay table
2) Nobody understood that the changes to the pay table that they readily recognized took the game from about a break even proposition with the casino (over the long run with CB) to about a $30 per hour loss ($1.25 play)
In short, they kept playing them like nothing had changed. The most obvious example to take from this is that casinos should get replace all of their attractive pay tables with more advantageous pay tables. But that's not the end of the story.
For the next few weeks, play at those machines dropped off consistently. Every week. When they had the full pay table PKM, you could not get on a machine in prime time. And the rest of the vp was getting the overflow and well loaded up. Now the whole VP are is deserted, even on Friday and Saturday night. And that's not the whole of it. PKM is a very easy game to master. A good player has lots of free time between hands to look around. What I saw when I looking around, what I saw was the people were not playing very accurately--even though this game is relatively easy to play accurately. I would guess there were 5-6 people playing the game at something approaching the true ER. But there were dozens and dozens of people who played the game regularly.
The casino was making money on full pay PKM, no doubt about that. There were too many people playing and playing sub-optimally. And they were making more money from all of the really bad return VP the rest of the machines offered because of all of the spill over action, and general interest. Now they have a $30/hr PKM play (for them), but I would be willing to bet their overall profitability has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY. It has to be so. The place is a ghost town. I don't care how lucrative your pay tables are, if no one plays them, you can't make money.
That a simple example of what I'm talking about.
rob
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--- On Fri, 11/13/09, Rob Reid <rreid0859@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Rob Reid <rreid0859@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [vpFREE] Re: Dancer strikes again!
To: vpFREE@yahoogroups.com
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009, 11:16 PM
I don't know about the "small dot on the VP landscape", but I can verify that casino GM's are VERY aware of the theoretical ER of their VP offerings from the personal experience of dealing with them. Frankly I would expect nothing less. If I was in their position and didn't understand the business at that level I'm sure I would not last very long.
I think the problem is that they understand the theoretical ER very well, but they don't always understand how VP plays positively or negatively impact the overall return of their casino operation, and often don't understand the profitability of specific VP offerings.
rob
--- On Fri, 11/13/09, Jean Scott <queenofcomps@cox.net> wrote:
From: Jean Scott <queenofcomps@cox.net>
Subject: Re: [vpFREE] Re: Dancer strikes again!
To: vpFREE@yahoogroups.com
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009, 1:37 AM
<<Sorry Jean. I wish I could go 100% all along with your message but, the
Sorry, Gilbert, but generally casino executives are more knowledgeable about
VP these days than they used to be. There is tons of information available
to them, including from the machine manufacturers. I wish I were that
"powerful," but I am just a small dot on the VP landscape really.
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