Video Poker VP Winners not welcome, the evisceration of casino advantage players.

Just read a great article on Jean Scott's Frugal Vegas blog about Las Vegas casinos and the dislike for winners / advantage VP players. Basically if you are taking advantage of favorable pay tables and promotions you might be on the casino's watch list. Losers still are and will forever be the preferred customers.

Jean Scott is a long time author, blogger, and commentator on comps. She has been featured on Travel Channel and was coined the Queen of Comps.

You can find the link to the article below. Personally I was quite surprised to hear of some of the tactics mentioned and gamblers being walked for taking advantage of harmless promotions / play which marked them as an unprofitable customer.

http://jscott.lvablog.com/2017/01/08/the-negative-side-of-promotions/#more-4502

 

i read that, and it is a sad situation. some casinos want to take your picture and make a big deal of a big win, so that it looks like the casino has lots of winners. that seems like a win-win to me. instead they want to shame you and perp-walk you. that is sooooo wrong!

 

My wife and I both hit royals in December of 15 and I hit one in February of 16'during super bowl. Offers greatly reduced but still there. Waiting for / if they will return. I get it but don't like it.

 

I think the focus is more on those who find the loop holes and playing low house edge VP in a method that max out comps.
Example promotional credit multipliers, gift card giveaways, cashback, and drawings. Highly skilled VP players on higher denomination near full pay VP
can swing the edge to the player with cash back and giveaways. Casinos used to like the repetition of having the best promos. Players who consistently win and run against EV
are not welcome, eg a debt beat customer. It's like the credit card companies canceling the cards of people who max out promotions and pay their bill in full each month.

 

Machine stickers like,"This machine not eligible for promotions" kinda take care of some of that. MSS had them.

 

That is on the edge of happening. My wife and I have gained over a million miles in the past 5 years and pay all of our bills in full each month. And, with a few rare exceptions, we cancel a card when it pops up an annual fee at the end of the year. By the way, we do owe them lots of money, all at 0% interest and a 2-3% transaction fee which means borrowing money at 2-3% annually. Cool.

 

I've been doing that for a few years too, just with 2 or 3 accounts and I've noticed recently that either the fees are going up or the promo periods are getting shorter. One of my 2%-ers went to 9 months instead of 12 to 15. And a 3%-er went to 5%. The best days of the carry trade on those may be coming to an end.

 

It's pennywise and pound foolish to punt those kinds of advantage players. For every Jean Scott that can "make a living" on VP and comps there are 10,000 wannabes who come to Vegas after being inspired by stories like hers but lack the intelligence and discipline to pull it off.

Getting the money in the door is 90% of the battle and the "idea" of beating the house brings a lot of people in the door. I'm actually pretty sure that the vast majority of degenerates start with this notion.

Books like Frugal Gambler, movies like 21, and shows like WSOP all perpetuate a very favorable myth that gambling can be a profitable endeavor. Casino operators used to understand this. It's a bad idea to shatter this image by punting VP players who are at best exploiting slight advantages for small money. Those people are some of your best marketing people and you don't even need to pay their healthcare.

 

Yeah casinos are getting crazy. ME and my gf used to go to the M-resort all the time. They would send free rooms and $150 fp offers. After my gf hit a royal on ult hd'em. Her offers dropped to 39/a night no fp. Mines remained the same. Just terrible.

 

It used to be when I would lose I would receive little, but if I won a bit, the offers would come rolling in. It seems the reverse is true nowadays.

 

Several years ago I hit 1st Royal at Ballys...and another sme night at Rio. (.25FP)...hit another next month at Horseshoe Council Bluffs. Offers continue to be same.
Now we are not high rollers--we budget $250/pp/day. 4-7 days 2-4x/yr & rarely to CB. And bulk of budget goes to poker; Vp maybe $100/day, tho coin in certainly more with small wins.
Royals alone should not change offers--it's about coin in

 

I was just gonna say that.
We're you overall down for your Vegas CET play?

 

The thing to note here is that her article is meant for "advantage players" and not the "10,000 wannabes" - if you go to Las Vegas one, two, a few, monthly, etc times a year and you look for good paytables on VP that doesn't make you an advantage player, it just makes you a tourist/visitor that looks for good pay tables and the reason the casinos don't care about you playing the games with the lowest house edges is because you likely came with your significant other who isn't, IE: husband might be playing a 99.9% payback VP game, but his wife is playing an 89% payback slot machine.

The advantage players the casinos want to get rid of are the ones that show up almost daily, play for long (12-16 hours) periods of time and milk every penny out of every promotion the casino offers. A good example of this would be a casino having a promotion where they are giving away a big prize in a raffle and you get 1 ballot for every $5000 of coin in over the course of a week - the average players and tourists are going to maybe have 1 or 2 ballots each in the draw, but the advantage player is probably going to have somewhere around 700-1000 ballots in the draw. Thats why for draws like these it seems like its always the same people winning over and over again: because there might be 250-300 people entered in to the draw, but 90-95% of the ballots are held by just 4 or 5 people.

So the typical out of town visitor really doesn't have to worry about something like this, even if you were in town for a weekend and played nothing but marathon sessions of video poker the casino isn't going to blacklist you or walk you off the property or stop sending you offers - they put the machines with the high pay back tables in to get you there, so they aren't going to complain when you actually show up. What they don't want is the locals who come in and hog the machines and work the system, trying to squeeze every penny out of their loyalty program and promotions that they've set up to get the out of town visitors to come.

 

I think your win / loss is being factored in at more properties now, as we are seeing a shift from pure ADT to real world cash win / losses. Casino operators are becoming more sensitive to actual cash losses
on the gaming side of the house. So I have heard of situations where beating the house on the trip, is viewed in the same light as received comps. You were a money loser for the casino that trip, so marketing
wants to attract more gaming losers, and might offset your offers.

That's where established players and hosts come in. A player with a long history of losing is a very valued customer indeed. So operators are so big that it doesn't matter, however I think if you had a significant
run of winning over a course of time, you would become an unwelcome guest.

 

The advantage players use the promotions to make the game 100%+. If you are just a tourist, your money is still welcome.

 

It is called marketing strategy for every casino. Getting the picture of a winner can be used to attract potential customers. The more winner they post the better they can attract customers and more money to their pocket.

 

I didn't really want to comment on this thread but I feel compelled to.
I think the notion of advantage gambling is a misnomer...now days $25 an hour from playing video poker would be the max you could make...what's the real benefit of that??
To have a job that pays $25 an hour plus health care benefits PLUS you don't have to sit in a smoke filled casino all day.. take a look at these "advantage players" and tell me how many are under age 55?
Show me a 21-35 year old "advantage player" PLEASE.

 

I'm 24, and have very seriously thought about undertaking video poker advantage play. When you do the math, at 2,000 hours per year of "office work", $25 per hour works out to $50,000 per year... about the average household income in the US. Being Canadian, I have two advantages; one is that most of my healthcare is free (and thus health benefits are only of marginal value), and the second is that I don't pay tax on gambling winnings.

More specifically, taking $25 USD and converting it to Canadian dollars, that's $32.76 CAD. Multiplying that by 2,000 hours, that's $65,520 CAD per year. If I was earning that on salary, my after tax income where I'm from would be $52,514 CAD. Since I'd pay zero tax on my gambling winnings, $65,520 CAD would be the after-tax of a $84,300 CAD gross salary ($64,350 USD). Averaged hourly, that's effectively $42.15 CAD or $32.18 USD per hour, on a before-tax basis, in terms of what I'd be bringing in and then paying tax on.

Can't retire on it... but if you've got the bankroll, the skill, and the drive to find profitable paytables while avoiding detection, it does pay pretty well, along with any fringe benefits such as free food/drinks, and any room comps.

 

When you say $25 per hour where are you getting that from? At what stakes are you calculating that? And are you including things like cash back, bounce-back, free play and point play? And any additional comps, like food?

Actually, in this case, being a professional video poker player, you would pay taxes on gambling winnings:

If you are a casual player then it is true that whether you win or lose there are no consequences or benefits to taxes... however if you became a professional video poker advantage player then you would be considered to be "in the business of gambling" and you income would be considered to be income from a business, and thus subject to taxes.

There are a few other things to consider:

=> As a Canadian visiting the USA there is a 182 day limit per 12 month span that you can be in the USA. So you would have to maintain residences in both the USA and Canada. You could try to hide out and stay longer but if caught you would be sent back to Canada and could face a 5 year travel ban.

=> Depending on your province you have to live in Canada for either 5 or 6 months per year to maintain your healthcare

=> You might have to pay US income tax, part 1: if your advantage play is considered a business and you are earning income while in the USA then you would likely have to pay taxes on it - to them it is the same as if you went down there and got a job.

=> You might have to pay US income tax, part 2: The IRS does have a "substantial presence" qualifier where they look at not only how long you have been there this year, but also the past 2 years, and if it meets their magic number (183) then you would be considered a US resident for tax purposes. The way its calculated is the number of days this tax year plus one third of the days the previous year plus one sixth the days the year before that... so the more you stay over a three year span the more likely you are to be taxed.

 

djatc from Wizard of Vegas. No idea on how much he's making from it. I get the impression he is doing "okay" though.