Palms pulls the plug on blackjack promotion

Further evidence of incompentence of the new management at the Palms, as if any were needed ...

A couple of weeks ago the casino ran a blackjack promotion. As advertised, it was to run from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday. The promotion modified the casino's regular single-deck game to give players a 6-to-5 payment on all winning hands, not just blackjacks. While the 6-to-5 payout on blackjacks, which has become common on single-deck games, is a rip-off, 6-to-5 vs. even money on other winning hands is a massive 20 percent premium that would easily outweigh the reduction on blackjacks. The maximum bet that would bring the bonus payout was $100.

(Deceptive advertising side note: Advertising for the promotion promised premium payouts for "all" wining hands, but the rules actually called for even money on the second hands created by splits and double downs.)

When I learned about this promotion, I tried to do a quick mental calculation of how much it would be worth to a player. I started with the assumption that tables would be full the and the game would be slow because dealers would need extra time to calculate the payouts. For number of hands per hour I picked a relatively low and round number, 50.

I also figured that the rules for this game, unmodified by the promotion, give the house an edge of 1.5 percent against a basic strategy player. So, figuring on betting the maximum of $100 per hand for 50 hands, a player would be wagering $5,000 an hour. One and half percent of that is $75, the player's approximate expected loss without the promotion.

To figure the effect of the 20-percent premium on non-blackjack wins, I first recalled that players win, on average, somewhere around 40 percent of the hands in blackjack. Applied to 50 hands an hour, that gives us approximately 20 wins per hour. About three of those will be blackjacks, so the 20-percent bonus would apply to an average of about 17 hands. At $100 a hand, that comes to $20 x 17, or $340 an hour. From that we have to subtract the house margin on the basic game of $75 an hour, which gives us $265 an hour.

Note that this calculation was done without even a pencil and paper, relying on memory for the percentage of hands won on average by players, and not accounting for split and double-down hands. So it is very, very rough. But it clearly shows that the players in this promotion would have a huge advantage.

On the first day of the promotion I was not able to get to the Palms until late afternoon. Surprisingly, the two single-deck tables were not full and most players were betting less than the $100 maximum, indicating that the advantage player community was largely unaware of the promotion. I had a run of bad luck and wound up dead even at 5 p.m., when the promotion ended for the day. Another player, who had been there for several hours betting $100 a hand, told me he was cashing out a $600 profit but had been up by more during much of the promotion.

The next day, the tables were packed and I couldn't get on. The day after that, Wednesday, I couldn't get to the Palms. On Thursday, which was to be the last day of the promotion, I made it a point to get there well before noon to make sure I could get a seat. Seeing no one else waiting, I asked if the promotion was still going on and was given the bad news. I wasn't able to determine exactly when it ended, but apparently it was sometime on Wednesday.

If there's one thing even the dumbest casino managers have learned, it's to reserve the legal right to modify or discontinue all promotions at any time, in their sole discretion. The Palms relied on this weasel wording to pull the plug. That gaming authorities allow casinos to get away with this when patrons incur expenses and expend valuable time to take advantage of promotions is patently unfair. I imagine that there can be legitimate reasons for a casino to change, delay or even abort a promotion, but  the failure of casino management to calculate the cost of its own offering is an entirely different thing. The law should require that when a casino offers a promotion, the players get the value of that promotion.

Of course, the Palms could have let the promotion run as advertised, absorbing the loss caused by its its own bad decision. That would have been the honorable thing to do.

More Palms incompetence: One of the things the new managment did was tear down the enclosure that formed the casino's high-limit slot room, replacing it with a less-attractive and awdwardly placed structure consisting of plain, low walls. Recently the location of this new high-limit corral was shifted to eliminate the problems causing by its original placement -- an expense that might have been avoided by use of pencil and paper before hammer and nails.

Finally, on my last visit to the Palms, I noticed that the color of the signs that in some cases inaccurately described "full pay" video poker games had been changed. Now, if management, which has been put on notice of the errors in these signs by me and at least one other person, would change their content ...