This is a new format I’m testing out in the Blogs: my reaction to various slot happenings. Here’s one Anthony Curtis sent over from pokernews.com.
I won’t rehash the entire article, which Tyler Boyer put together, but here’s the quick explainer: A few poker pros (Sam Soverel, Rick Salomon, Chino Rheem) clobbered a couple of high-risk slots for heaps of money and got it on film. Below is my take:
Especially in Vegas, people go around to all the high-stakes Buffalo Link, Phoenix Link, and Lightning 10 Year Storm machines and “search” for plays. I mention how that’s done in the write-ups for those games, where you take a small voucher and sift through each bet until you find something promising.
Now, the numbers I saw on the screen looked a bit low: 1,372 after what seemed like some spinning, so they likely started a little earlier, and 1,288, which they said was the first spin but is still too low.
On those nose-bleed denoms and bet sizes that I’ve never been anywhere near, I’m sure you could take them a little lower than the recommendations and be profitable long term. That said, those still seem like long-term losers to me. But in that kind of game, sometimes the numbers go right out the window in a small sample. If you get lucky, you get lucky. And they sure got lucky.
I strongly believe some thought went into picking the machines they did. Even though 1,372 and 1,288 are too low for my tastes, the odds that they happened to walk up on two like that by chance are exceedingly low.
I mentioned at the top that some people walk around Vegas and look for enormous plays like the ones featured here. There could have been one guy who found one or both of those, knew they were mildly interesting numbers, but had nowhere near the capital needed to play either. Maybe he knew Chino or Soverel, or knew someone who knew them. He made a few texts, and boom, they all show up with stacks of money in hand. Maybe he gets a micro percentage of all wins (1% range) and gladly takes the freeroll on subpar numbers to begin with.
To add one further wrinkle to the story, there is some debate about fresh installs of Phoenix Link and Lightning 10 Year Storm versus those that had been there for a while. A good number of advantage players believe that you can go much lower on fresh installs if you happen to find numbers like they found on big bets. Finding 1,372 and 1,288 on those types of bets would certainly qualify. It sounded like they were at Aria, and I haven’t been there in close to a year now, so if those machines happened to have just been installed the day before, then I’ll tip my hat and call it a solid, but exceedingly dangerous, play.
How much could they have lost?
The must-hit on those games is 1,888. Let’s say you average about 1.5 orb symbols per spin (normal), which is what moves the meter up. With the first video, if we assume the absolute worst and the meter goes right to the top on that 1.5-per-spin average, we have 1,888-1,372=516/1.5=344. That’s 344 spins times the bet of $2,500, giving us $860,000. The bonus could then pay very little at times (10x the bet, let’s say). That also assumes you make zero back on your spins in the lead-up, which is unrealistic even in this hypothetical, so figure $700,000 could be a “holy shit” kind of loss that could happen.
The other example is even more terrifying. Start with 1,888-1,288=600. Now we’ll divide that by the reasonable average of 1.5 phoenix symbols per spin and get 400. And they are betting $5,000 per spin this time, so now we have $2 million at risk. But again, that’s assuming it goes right to the top (which can happen) and you get zero back per spin (won’t happen, but sometimes it sure feels close to that).
Bottom line: Nice job! It could have been a bloodbath, though.
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