Evaluating a new offer from the Silverton

My February mailer from the Silverton contains a new "bonus offer" that requires some evaluation to determine whether it's worth pursuing. I've decided to share this process to give anyone interested an idea of the considerations involved, which are more complex than they might first appear, as well as the math, which is not as difficult as it might first appear (if I can do it, almost anyone can do it).

The offer is simple: "When you earn at least 60,000 slot point during the month of February, we'll give you $105 in Free Slot Play!"

First, we have to know how much coin in is required to earn 60,000 points. For the Silverton, that's an easy calculation: $1 coin in earns 1 point on most video poker. Remember, coin in is money run through the machines, including recycled wins, not money actually inserted.

Next we have to figure the cost of playing $60,000 through. The best video poker game at the Silverton is 8/5 bonus poker, with a maximum payback of 99.17 percent. For simplicity and to account for less-than-perfect play, let's use 99.1 percent as our payback percentage, giving the house a hold of 0.9 percent. We multiply that by $60,000 to get the cost of playing enough to get the bonus. The answer is $540. So far, it looks like a lousy deal -- lose an expected $540 to get $105 in free play.

But there's more to consider. Points at the Silverton are worth 0.3 percent and can be used for free play, which is a cash equivalent if we're going to play at that casino anyway. 0.3 times 60,000 is 180, so we reduce our expected loss by that amount: $540 - $180 = $360. We're closer, but still quite far from from profitability.

The next thing I would consider is how much coin in I would play at the Silverton anyway to continue to get a mailer and take advantage of promotions. My records for recent months show that I played an average of less than $30,000 a month at the Silverton. I'm assuming I would play about my usual amount without the bonus offer, so I'm going to figure the cost of the additional play to see if the bonus offer is worthwhile. Let's use a round number of $35,000. Again, we multiply by the house's hold of 0.9 percent, giving us a gross cost of $315.Than we multiply $35,000 by the value of the Silverton's slot points, 0.3 percent, to get an offset of $105. We subtract that from $315 to get $210, which I would consider the approximate actual cost of earning the $105 in free play. This amount might be further offset by getting more free play in one or more future mailers because of the additional coin in. But this possibility isn't enough to sway me to play at a loss.

If the numbers had come out in favor of taking up the offer, I would have considered one more factor: the time required for the additional play. At the Silverton, 8/5 bonus poker is offered in many forms, including 10-play and 100-play that allow a lot of money to be put through in relatively little time. I'm not going to figure out exactly what I would have played, but if the offer had been profitable, I'm sure I could have made it work out time-wise. At other casinos, time might be much more of a factor.

I like the kind of offer the Silverton made, sometimes called a "points challenge," but not the specific numbers. This offer doesn't work for me, and I doubt it will work well for the Silverton, either. It doesn't seem realistic to me to expect many players to more than double their usual amount of play at a casino, unless that usual amount is very small. Setting rewards, possibly on a sliding scale, for increases of, say, 20, 35 and 50 percent, probably would get a better response.