Below is a copy of a 2-part article written by a famous AP player in Vegas. He was cheated by another AP on the east coast. He was so pissed off he exposed how he figured and executed this particular AP move out just to expose the AP’er that screwed him. I redacted all the names involved in case of anything. It’s a long read but interesting to read how AP’ing is actually done.
Through his emails, he was able to convince me that he was a very strong advantage player. Although video poker wasn't his particular specialty, he told me that he occasionally discovers a good promotion that might make it worthwhile for me to fly back east. xxxxx told me about an eight-hour promotion at the Parx casino in Bensalem, PA near Philadelphia, which would take place on Saturday, June 8, 2013 from 4 p.m. to midnight. The promotion was strong enough that I eventually chose to get on an airplane in Las Vegas and fly to Philadelphia. In some ways the promotion turned out to be less than advertised--in some ways more. The wording on the promotion was a bit vague, but here's the gist of it: If you're playing on a machine which has $1 as the lowest denomination, any W2G totaling $2,500 or higher gets a $500 free play bonus. If you're playing on a machine which has $5 or $10 as the lowest denomination on it, any W2G totaling $5,000 or more gets a $1,000 free play bonus. (They also offered bonuses for jackpots at lower denominations, but I wasn't interested in getting on a plane for five hours to play for quarters). The things I wanted to know up front were: Which games are available and at what denominations? What sort of cash back do they have? Can I get airfare reimbursed? Do they have any new member promotion? What size mailers would I likely receive? The no-risk game to play on this promotion was video roulette. They had stand lots of standalone machines where you could bet on every number. Betting $70 on each number, for a total of $2,660, you'd get back exactly $2,520 plus receive $500 in free play every time you played. The problem is that this has no variance at all and the casino likely wouldn't tolerate it for long. After flying across the country, I didn't want to be booted immediately after starting to play. (As it turned out, players WERE removed from the casino for doing this. But they were allowed to keep their winnings --- so it was a profitable play for them. I don't know if they were removed from the casino "forever" or just for the duration of the promotion.)
Apparently, the best percentage game available is a $10 9/6 Double Double Bonus single-play machine where $5 is the lowest denomination. This game would return 99.78 during the promotion. For this denomination, I would get the $1,000 bonus for a royal, any aces, and 2s, 3s, or 4s with a kicker. xxxxx thought he might be able to get the denomination bumped up to $25, which would increase the return close to 101 because all quads would then return at last $6,250 and every one of them would receive the $500 bonus. Xxxx told me that they have a 0.33 slot club and a new member promotion that yields $1,000 if you play at least $120,000 coin-in on your first day. He thought the mailers might end up being well over 0.50 if I could play double that amount. On a $10 single line machine, how much coin-in I could get would depend on how fast they paid off jackpots and how many adjacent machines I would have available. In eight hours, I calculated that I should get 10-12 W2Gs (with fewer than half eligible for the bonus) if I could move over to another machine while waiting to be paid. I could play at least $240,000 through the machines in eight hours under these conditions. If I only had one machine and it took 20 minutes to pay me, I might not even meet the $120,000 threshold for my $1,000 first-day promo. When I arrived in Philadelphia on Friday evening, I went directly to the casino. I wanted to see the games for myself. They did indeed have five of the $10 9/6 DDB machines. On the opposite side of the same bank were five All Star Poker machines, with the lowest denomination starting at $1. All Star Poker is a box with a variety of games on it and the exact mix depending on the casino's preference. But Triple Play, Five Play, Ten Play, Five Aces Poker, Trade Up Poker, Spin Poker and a couple of others were on this box --- in different denominations that varied from game to game.
A $10 game (other than Jacks or Better) on this box is very appealing because most quads and straight flushes pay 250 coins --- which is exactly $2,500. That way you earn the $500 free play bonus most efficiently. 9/6 DDB (which normally returns 98.98) returns a tasty 101.51% under this promotion --- but that game wasn't to be found. 9/5 DDB returned a mere 100.40 --- but that game wasn't to be found either for $10 denominations. The only game that was remotely interesting was 8/5 DDB Five Aces poker, which was available in $10 Triple Play. I had never played this game and didn't know the percentage returns of the various pay schedules. But I wrote it down and planned to look it up when I got to my hotel room. It turns out the game returns an anemic 97.64 under regular conditions but a robust 100.77 under this promotion. Regular DDB has a variance of 42 --- which is very scary to some people. This game during the promotion had a variance of 112, which can be downright frightening. I had brought "only" $40,000 with me as I was planning on playing $10 single line for eight hours. For the game that I originally planned on playing, I figured that I had plenty of cash. But for playing Triple Play in the same denomination in a game with almost triple the variance, I was short stacked. I realized that I could lose the $40K in about two hours if things went badly. That would be annoying but hardly disastrous. (I clearly was there to win and didn't want to lose at all. But I was willing to lose the entire $40,000 --- and more if I could borrow from xxxx. If I hadn't been willing to lose that much, I wouldn't have toted the cash across the country.) With the expected mailers and other promotions going on, the EV for this play was in excess of $1,000 per hour --- for the eight hours of the promotion. I got the percentage return numbers as well as the strategy from The Wizard of Odds Video Poker Strategy Calculator, a valuable free resource. I'm not crazy about the format used in this calculator, but beggars can't be choosers, so I spent about three hours reformatting the strategy to my own taste and then practicing it as well. Three hours was a long time, but I started at about 2 a.m. and didn't have to play until 4 p.m. There was plenty of time for study, sleep, eating, and exercise before I had to be at the casino.) I emailed two strategies to xxxx and had him get them printed for me. The reason I created two strategies because the rules didn't make it crystal clear whether this game received the $500 bonus for every $2,500-or-higher jackpot or $1,000 for every $5,000-or-higher jackpot (although I was hoping for the latter). It was a juicy play either way, but the strategy was different depending on which rules were in effect. For example, from 4h 5h Ks Qs 9c, you hold '45' when you're getting the $1,000 bonus and 'KQ' when you're getting the $500 bonus. Five Aces poker is a 53-cards-to-the-deck game where the extra card is an ace of stars. It counts for straights, as an ace, and as a kicker for four 2s, 3s, and 4s, but it cannot be used for any flush, straight flush, or royal flush. One of the tricky things about Five Aces Poker is that you get your money back for a pair of aces, but not for a pair of Kings, Queens, or Jacks. So a pair of Kings, Queens, or Jacks is worth the same as a pair of sevens, eights, or nines --- and less than a pair of twos, threes, or fours. This also means that a suited ace-King is worth no more or less than a suited ace-ten (You hold the ace by itself in both instances), and you need to make weird plays such as going for the straight from unsuited KKQJT. You don't hold an unsuited KQJ in this game, but you do hold unsuited QJT and 345, in addition to a suited 34. Go figure. The frequency of the good hands is different in this game than in regular Double Double Bonus. I assume most of my readers are somewhat familiar with DDB (although perhaps most haven't played it at the $10 denomination), so the following table compares "regular" $10 9/6 DDB with $10 8/5 DDB Five Aces during the promo.
Four aces, with and without a kicker, occur a LOT more frequently when you have five aces in the deck rather than four. If I could average 400 deals per hour (which could be too optimistic depending on how fast the W2Gs were paid) --- that would be 1,200 total hands per hour times eight hours --- meaning almost 10,000 hands during the promotion. Three sets of aces with a kicker and 7 or 8 sets of regular aces would be "about right" for the eight hours of the promotion. But being high or low one $20,000 jackpot or even a couple of $8,000 hits makes a big difference when you only start with $40,000 in your pocket. Had I known what game I was getting into, I would have arranged for some combination of cash/line-of-credit for $150,000 or so. But it was too late to worry about that. I only had $40,000 and the clock was ticking. Did I mention the game has a high variance? In the first hour I was down $35,000 before hitting several quick jackpots within fifteen minutes. That put me up a bit, but then I started to lose again. I'll tell you more about the playing session next week. And how xxxx stole money from me.
continued in next post
