An under-appreciated habit of successful players is scouting. One friend of ours who lives in California and visits Las Vegas once a month claims that for years he has walked the Strip every trip looking for opportunities. Depending on exactly how many casinos he stops in and how thoroughly he looks, this will take several hours at least --- maybe more. And yet he regales us with stories of what games he found at Treasure Island that only lasted a week, or at the Venetian that lasted less than that, or that he was able to learn about certain promotions that were only publicized within the casinos.
For me personally, occasionally I’m paid by casinos to “shop” their casinos as well as those of their neighbors. Many of the times I’ve done this, I have found something interesting and playable. Years ago when I was hired by Stanford Wong to scout blackjack conditions in a group of casinos once a month, I frequently found good video poker opportunities just by walking through.
Today it takes longer to scout a casino than it used to. In the past, a machine was a fixed denomination and game-type --- say 25¢ Double Bonus or $1 Deuces Wild. I could tell by the “candles” on top of the machine (yellow for quarters, orange for half-dollars, blue for $1, green for $2, magenta for $5, etc.) which machines to look at, and then a glance at the game type and pay schedule was enough to tell me what I needed to know.
In today’s casinos, frequently you’ll see machines containing many denominations and many games in each denomination. Checking each combination on a machine may well take five minutes or so. Most of us are only interested in a denomination or two (almost nobody is willing to play both 5¢ and $1 machines), and within that denomination there are only a few games we know well.
A shortcut is to assume that adjacent machines have the same pay schedule. This usually works, but there are numerous cases where it doesn’t. Even when I’m playing a machine, where there is downtime while waiting for a jackpot to be paid, I’m always checking out nearby machines to see if there is something better to be played.
Players who visit a particular casino frequently are better able to scout it than are infrequent visitors. Frequently this is “locals” versus “out-of-towners,” but it doesn’t have to be. As an example, there are numerous Las Vegas casinos I rarely visit for one reason or another, but I’m at Harrah’s New Orleans frequently enough that I know their High Limit inventory quite well.
The reason frequent visitors make better scouts is that casinos change slowly. It’s easier to spot changes if you know what “normal” is. Slot directors frequently place their better games in one spot in a casino. If you’re a regular, you know this. If you’re now, you don’t.
While there is no doubt that scouting is valuable, there is likewise no doubt that it is expensive time-wise. If you’re going to have only ten hours to play on your next Vegas trip, you’re not likely to want to go scouting for eight hours before you begin. If you have 2,000 hours a year to play, though, scouting for five to ten hours a month makes a lot of sense.
There are websites who do the scouting for you. Perhaps the best of these is vpFREE (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFREE) While this website has the goal of being perfect, it isn’t. It is maintained by volunteers of various abilities and diligence. Sometimes the best plays aren’t reported because whoever is doing the monitoring for the casino, rightly or wrongly, believes that publicity will kill the machine.
Still, the information listed in this website is generally correct and is a good place to start. Some people hate scouting, find it difficult to do because of handicaps, or are not particularly good at it. That’s okay. You’ll miss the best plays, but frequently you can find “okay” plays via the vpFREE website.
Sometimes I get emails from people I don’t know saying they only have two days on their next Vegas visit and so they want me to tell them the best plays I know of. I respond that for a fee of $2,000 I’ll be happy to share what I know. (That’s actually pretty cheap if you’re a high limit player. It’s outrageously expensive if you’re a 25¢ player.) So far nobody has ponied up the two grand, although, a few have informed me by return email that I’m selfish and mean-spirited.
As I write this, in addition to playing at “regular” casinos in Las Vegas whose names you would recognize, I play at a convenience store next to a gas station, a pub with 15 machines, and an out-of-the-way casino where I’ve never seen any other pro. I didn’t find these games by accident, and I likely checked out 200 similar places before I found these gold mines.
Bob Dancer is America's best-known video poker writer and teacher. He has a variety of "how to play better video poker" products, including the software "Video Poker for Winners," Winner's Guides, strategy cards, his autobiography Million Dollar Video Poker, and his two novels, including Sex, Lies, and Video Poker. Dancer's products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com or by telephone at 1-800-244-2224 M-F 9-5 Pacific Time.
