I had an interesting opportunity (a Dancer moment) present itself over the New Years weekend. Both my wife and I are 7* level with the Caesars group and were at a property for the weekend. On Monday the 2nd, our departure day (we were planning on leaving about noon) the property was running a normal promotion on typically slow days for a Reward Credit multiplier. It is advertised to get a multiplier on slots up to 100 times (3 times on VP) once swiping your card to activate the promotion. Normally we will get a 7 multiplier on slots, sometimes a 15 multiplier. Lo and behold, my wife gets the 100 multiplier. We wander down to the VP machines we play and she begins to play Bonus ($1.00 playing 15 credits at a time). She winds up hitting a couple of 4oK and has about $700 credits on the machine. In the meantime, I am doing the math and, with a 7* redemption rate of 1250 RC’s for $10, the cash back works out to 16% on slots - absolutely nuts. Putting on my Dancer hat, I figure that from previous reading about slot paybacks, that $1.00 ranged in the low 90% and $5.00 in the mid 90’s. Being conservative, I figured at least a 6% point advantage ranging possibly up to 11%-12%. An absolute bonanza. A clock was working against us as it is now about 10:30. While we were driving and had flexibility, we were gambled out. We took our winnings for that morning and went to play slots. I assumed, without any “facts” that playing a $5 machine would optimize the time and payback. I had no idea what the payback experience would be on slots and $5 in particular. By that I mean, we usually play JOB and there your wins and losses combined generally take time to eat through what you started with. Of course, the play results in a loss until you hit a Royal, but still a slight loss. I had no idea with slots. We started with the $700 in a $5 machine (2 credit Double Diamond). In the first 70 spins, we hit 10 credits twice and 2 credits once. At the tale end of that my wife became very agitated (imagine that) and took over playing the machine (of course we were playing on her card the whole time). A few more spins and losses then lo and behold, luck came out of nowhere - 3 Double Diamonds lined up for the jackpot of $8000. Since that was certainly the zenith, we picked up stakes and left for home.
Now a question for the mathematically inclined. How would you have approached the situation with and without the time constraint. What would you figure is your advantage? I thought the exercise was quite interesting.