ADT and Video Poker

I'm mostly a video poker player. After reading all the insightful threads on comps and ADT, I stared wondering how casinos figure out ADT for VP. Do they use some casino-wide average or specific pay tables? For tier credits, CET and Mlife clearly use an average (10 pts/dollar), but TCs don't equate to ADT. Does anyone know if they determine ADT by just taking coin in times an average of the machines in the casino or by doing an calculation based on the actual pay tables on machines you played?

 

IMHO, it's silly to assume they don't know exactly what games you played, how many hands you played and the hold level for each game. If it is a machine game, they have total information awareness and can accurately calculate ADT. Only on tables, where they need people to make the observations do they not know everything about your play.

 

They could accurately calculate ADT, but I think you'd be surprised on how far behind the machines are for this topic. Maybe the newest machines judge by the games you individually play, but everything I read says otherwise. ADT rates are mostly constant among games within the same unit. So if the game unit has 9/6 JoB, and a bunch of games with ~97% return (one example of this: Sam's Town Tunica), you can get a much bigger advantage by playing full pay JoB over the other games. At my local, I think this seems to be true with the bank I focus on. Full Pay quarters, but horrid paytables for nickels and dimes to likely drive the average theoretical of the machine up.

 

CET is actually $10 per point....Are you referring to Mlife when you say 10 pts/dollar? I'm not familiar with the earn rates there, but I believe platinum is 200k tier credits. Can this be earned with only 20k coin in on VP?

 

No. I don't know any place where you can earn 10 points with $1 coin-in.

 

TCs and points are totally different.

 

Unless you're talking like cosmo, or some mlife properties, not many others have the software to determine EXACTLY what game you're playing within a cabinet (such as DDB vs JoB). The industry standard, as Tring said, is just an average of the games on that particular machine.
Fwiw, it's usually best to find a game king with decent video poker on it, that also offers KENO on the ROM.
Also, with CET, it's usually around 2% Theo for video poker

 

Yeah, each point is 10 TC when playing in Vegas, but only 2 TC when playing in Mississippi, and a pitiful 1 TC when playing in Detroit.

Each point is also $10 coin-in at VP at all of MLife.

So getting platinum requires $200k coin-in if you exclusively play in Vegas, $1,000,000 coin-in if you play in Mississippi only, and $2M coin-in if you play in Detroit only.

Anyone playing outside of MLife Vegas frequently gets hosed by MLife in terms of status.

 

What you are describing could certainly be done.

Whether it would provide any sort of return on investment however, is a completely separate question. And even if they did track play at this level (and they would need to go even deeper ... into player skill for VP) it is quite possible that generating comps and offers based on it would be a bad idea.

Comps are about expectations. Look around at the common complaints on here about offers or hosts saying they can't cover things, and its almost always about a set expectation. I played THIS way, which normally gets me X and they just offered Y.

If all of a sudden your theo/ADT swing wildly on machines based not only on coin in but on choice of game (something that is completely hidden in slots, and only somewhat more transparent in VP), there is a much higher chance that the casino will set unrealistic expectations for you (after a trip where you play a high hold game), or not live up to expectations (after a trip with a low hold one), making for an unhappy customer.

There is tons of padding built in to these offers. Not only are you only getting x% of whatever their think you will lose, but that x% is built off the retail value. Particularly in times of soft demand, the actual opportunity cost of the offer is minuscule in comparison. So I think you'd find at the bigger places, even the better players playing the best games getting comps based on a 2% theo, are not likely costing the casino money. So where is the value in putting in much more expensive tracking to generate offers that are hyper accurate, but which you cannot defend or explain to the player?

 

I've also seen casinos use the best game on a multi game machine to determine theo. Mohegan Sun did this with their 99.95% pickem game. They completely nerfed the theo on the machine despite the fact that there were games like keno and triple trouble poker that had awful payback.

 

That's unfortunate to hear. But is doing that typical? First I've heard of a casino doing that.

 

Oops...wasn't watching what I typed, yeah $10 coin-in per point

These are the same thoughts I had and are what spurred my question.

Seems like it would be a pretty easy software fix to calculate exactly what you were playing and the rate, but yet the IT systems seem so poor. There are certain machines at CET properties that have an accurate, seemingly up to the minute display of both session and overall total TCs, but the main total rewards info both online and at the desks can take a couple of days to have all the activity. Mlife seems to have good data within a few minutes of playing, but the rest of the site is so clunky. So I'm guessing they haven't invested the effort to use anything other than an average as the rest of the systems seem like they run on a Commodore 64. Grazie may be different since their system is so ADT focused.

Thanks for the discussion folks!

 

Yes, thanks. I learned something practical that also goes to attitude.

From now on, I won't be so annoyed if the good bank is full and most of the people are playing Keno. Depending on how the casino figures it, the chumps might be helping me earn a few more comps when I finally find an empty seat.

 

Almost every poker game on the floor has the capability of telling the casino exactly which paytable you are playing and what the theo hold is. It is the player tracking system that is responsible for reporting the information. The older the player tracking system the less likely it is using the exact paytable info. On the older systems most slot directors just assigned a theo to the whole machine for multi games which really benefited the good players.

 

So I normally play slots and Blackjack.
Assuming you only play VP (lets say Jacks or Better to make it simple)
How much coin in would you guys guess is needed to receive comp rooms at Caesars (5 nights any time)

 

My last couple trips, I've done $10k coin in per day on VP, plus a couple hours of table games per day. All weekdays are comped at CP, but maybe only half the weekend nights. Same with Cromwell, no comp nights at NOBU. All other props are always comped with very few exceptions.