8a. Re: High Rollers
Date: Sun Dec 28, 2008 6:46 pm ((PST))
I don't like to beat a dead horse and it appears that my original
posting didn't seem to attract very much interest nor did it spark
much discussion.BUT,
The young men I referred to in my initial posting were playing at
least 20hands/minute or 120 hands/hour.By my calculations, they were putting in excess of $120,000 through
the machines every hour. They played for at least 20 hours straight!!Is this such a common occurrance that it doesn't even deserve a
comment by someone who plays at that level?
You have a typo; 20 hands/minute (and I'm assuming you mean dealt hands, not hands AFTER the ten-play is figured in) is 1200 hands/hour, not 120, pretty fast, but not impossible at all, even on a ten-play machine, if there's a "turbo" mode and they don't dawdle around high-fiving each other when they get quads. That is, indeed, $120,000 an hour on a $2 10-play machine, so your bottom line math was correct.
Your (original) questions were about how much they should stick in the machine at a time and when they should quit (winning or losing). You didn't ask if anyone thinks it's a lot of money.
To me, it's a lot of money -- but there are those who play $25 machines (and higher) who post here, which would put more money through the machine that those young men.
I myself have seen $25 machines in use, and although I haven't seen them in use personally, I'm sure the casinos that have $100 machines do not put them out just to impress; those machines must get some play once in a while.
The first time I went to Vegas, in the late 1970's, I saw a man at a roped-off blackjack table playing all seven spots at $10,000 per hand, $70,000 each time the dealer received a hand (although his dividing it up into seven bets probably gave him variance more similar to playing $30-50,000 per hand and just one hand, someone no doubt can comment).
Personally, playing heads up against a dealer and playing one hand at a time, I can do 300 hands per hour - so if this gentleman was even getting 100 (of his, not the dealer's) hands per hour (and he probably got far more), he would be putting $1,000,000 an hour at risk.
He easily could have been playing two or three times that much money per hour.
And that's 30 years ago, when $1,000,000 was a lot of money 
There are often private casinos, for high rollers only, within the high-end casinos, for gamblers who come to town with that kind of money, so we don't always even see these high rollers; not all of them want the riff-raff to see them, although for others, that's part of the fun for them.
Is it "common"? Depends on what you mean by "common". It's not unheard of, that's for sure, and it certainly doesn't impress those who are on this list and who themselves play at that level.
--BG
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