The Loss Rebate at Molly's Casinos, Las Vegas

Introduction

This is part two of my three-part series on loss rebates currently available in the Las Vegas valley. Part one covered the 25% promotion at the Mardi Gras casino. Part two, this one, covers the Lose-$20-Get-$20 promotion at Molly’s casinos. Part three will cover the 7% promotion at the Silver Sevens casino. If you know of any other loss rebates in the Las Vegas area, please tell me so I can try to cover them later in this series. (I am on Twitter at @FiliusBruce and can also be reached through direct messages on the Wizard of Vegas forums.)

The Promotion

There is a widely reported loss rebate promotion at Molly’s small casinos in Las Vegas, running at least since September 2021. That’s the earliest mention of the promotion I could find in the Las Vegas Advisor newsletter, which called the establishments “Molly’s slot houses”. This is what the newsletter says:

“Molly’s slot houses (several locations) are running a lose-$20-get-$20 promo on Mondays and Fridays in September. The best game is 7/5 BP (98.01%).”

The promotion is still ongoing, but the days it runs have been changing. Nowadays it’s on Wednesdays and Sundays. It’s been running even after Bob Dancer wrote about it extensively in August 2022. You can find his detailed blog posts on this promotion in two parts here:

• Promotion at Molly’s — Part I of II

• Promotion at Molly’s — Part II of II

I even wrote a blog post on vidpoke.com myself, detailing the methodology of figuring out the exit points for the loss rebate. So what remains to be written?

The first missing information in the previous articles was a full analysis, the way that is expected of the Wizard sites. This article tries to provide that missing full analysis.

Also, since the previous articles were written, I have played this loss rebate myself several times. It always feels like a little adventure, because you never know which machines will be free at the location you are visiting, and if the machine has the double-up feature or not. The double-up feature increases the loss rebate expected value, but unfortunately it’s not available on all machines. On top of that, you cannot easily tell if the machine has the doubling feature or not, until you win a hand and it either comes up or it doesn’t. Then you will know…

Another thing I learned after playing the promotion a few times, is that doubling up is not forever. You can only double-up up to four times, not more. If you win the double-up four times in a row, the double-up game would be finished for this round and you would be returned back to the normal video poker game, to play another hand by betting again and drawing five cards.

Can you double a royal flush four times too? I have no idea. For the sake of this article, I’ll assume you can. (I also discuss a modified strategy for those who can’t stomach doubling up a royal flush.) Note that doubling up changes the variance of the game, but not its return (unless you consider taxes, which is a whole different topic).

My survey of a few random machines in different Molly’s locations shows a common set of games, as well as some uncommon games that could be unique to specific machines or specific locations. Some of the machines have video blackjack, where a natural blackjack pays 2-for-1, also known as 1-to-1 (boo!). Some machines even have Pick a Pair, Dice Fever, Atomic Fever, and Fast Fours, sometimes with odd pay tables that are not yet listed on the Wizard of Odds website. What seems to be common to all machines though, is a set of traditional video poker games at the $2 denomination. Every video poker machine I’ve checked has had 7/5 Bonus Poker, 8/5 Double Double Bonus, 7/5 Bonus Deluxe, and 12/4/3/2 Bonus Deuces Wild at $2 a coin.

But I’ve seen other games too. I’ve seen Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild, Double Bonus, Joker Poker, Ace & Deuce Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus Plus, Super Double Bonus, Blackjack Bonus Poker, Super Bonus Deuces Wild, Wild Sevens, Straight Flush Bonus, and Red Black Double Double Bonus. Since loss rebates are about variance, each of these games may provide an opportunity you may want to consider. (Without reading further, try to guess the best game for the loss rebate promotion from the above list. Ok, you can now proceed.)

I will not get into more details of the practical aspects of the promotion. For that, read Bob Dancer’s articles. To figure out how to calculate loss rebates using your own software, read my article on vidpoke.com. In this article, I’d be using those tools to find the best game or games.

The Games

Here are the traditional video poker games I could find on the machines for the $2 denomination. There were some other games available at lower denominations too, but I didn’t write them down. (You can generally expect them to have lower value for a loss rebate promotion, because a lower denomination means a lower variance.) I’ll also skip Pick a Pair, Dice Fever, Atomic Fever, and Fast Fours, as I only saw them on one machine. The rest are:

The highest return clearly belongs to Bonus Poker 7/5 at 98.01%. The highest variance is for Black Jack Bonus Poker 8/5. So those are the most important games to look at, as well as any game that has a higher return than Black Jack Bonus Poker 8/5. Unfortunately, that’s all of them, so we need to consider every game. (There’s also the double-up feature we need to be aware of. More about that later.)

Another factor we need to consider for the promotion is how much the slot club is worth. As far as I know, it’s 0.1%, good for Free Play. Considering the game with the highest return is Bonus Poker 7/5, we should call it 0.09801%. That’s the number I’m inputting into my loss rebate software for the slot club.

When we run the loss rebate program on all the above games at $10 a hand, we get the following exit points and expected values for the promotion, assuming perfect play:

As you can see, the loss limit is always $20. It makes sense, since the promotion doesn’t change in any way if you lose more than $20. You only get $20 of Free Play, even if you lose $100. Stop playing when you lose $20!

You can see from the table above that the best game to play is Straight Flush Bonus 8/6. Unfortunately, the Wizard of Odds Strategy Maker doesn’t seem to know about it. Fortunately, the pay table looks just like Jacks or Better, with some changes to the returns of various hands. This means that you can use the Strategy Maker to create a strategy for it. Here’s a direct link to that strategy. It’s a very odd strategy: it includes holding hands like “2 to a Straight Flush” and “3 to a Flush”; holding suited JT9 is preferred to holding a two pair; and holding suited 345 is preferred to holding a high pair! Also, in a hand of AQJT9, all suited, where you have four cards to a royal flush, you throw away the ace and the chance for a royal flush and hope for a straight flush by holding QJT9!

The generated strategy for Straight Flush Bonus 8/6 also has a lot of “Basic Strategy Exceptions” at the end, which most players skip. So I also ran the loss rebate software on just the basic strategy (that is, without any of those exceptions), to see if the value of the loss rebate promotion changes much. That got me to $16.81, about one cent less. So it’s probably OK to play the basic strategy (which is already pretty complex) for this promotion.

Another caveat is that the Straight Flush Bonus game is not available on every machine. If you couldn’t find any free machine that had it, try the next best game for three cents less: Double Double Bonus 8/5. Here is a direct link to the strategy for Double Double Bonus 8/5, created by the Wizard of Odds Strategy Maker. You can try playing it perfectly with the exceptions and all, but the basic strategy is good enough. The expected value of the promotion only goes down by 0.04 cents if you use the basic strategy instead of the computer-perfect one. Nobody should care about 0.04 cents per trip!

Double-up as much as you can!

If you find a machine with the double-up feature, you can push the variance really high and extract even more juice from the promotion. The highest variance will be achieved by doubling up every time you are offered that choice. I’ve found that to be up to four times. Here are the results I received by running my loss rebate software on the “modified” games, the very volatile video poker games in which you double-up as much as you can:

Here, because the variance is so high for all of the games anyways, the higher return of the base game becomes more important and the best game to play becomes Bonus Poker 7/5. Once again, you can use the Wizard of Odds Strategy Maker to get a strategy. Here is a direct link to the strategy for Bonus Poker 7/5. (If you decide to just play the basic strategy and ignore the exceptions at the end, you would get a quarter of a cent less expected value from the promotion).

Another question you may have is what happens if you leave after you've won some money but not the whole $510. Well, you will leave some (expected) value on the table. Exactly how much you ask? Here are the numbers:

Final Thoughts

You may have noticed that my proposed strategy results in extremely volatile outcomes. You would be doubling up everything, including $8,000 royal flushes! There’s a chance you are among the people who cannot stomach doubling up an $8,000 royal flush and possibly go home with nothing. That’s why I also considered a more conservative strategy: double-up, unless you have already hit a W-2G. With this strategy, you don’t double-up your $8,000 royal flushes, you double-up your $800 Four Aces only once (for a $1600 W-2G), you double-up your $400 Four Deuces only twice (for another $1600 W-2G), and so on. The expected value of this conservative strategy for Bonus Poker 7/5 is $18.51, only two cents less than the hard-to-stomach double-up-if-you-can. The win limit remains the same, $510.

(Update: After we published this article, a reader suggested another modified strategy which sounded reasonable to consider. In this alternative strategy, the player doubles-up as much as they can but avoids W-2Gs, unless they have already hit one. So you don't double-up your $8,000 royal flushes or $800 Four Aces, you double-up your $400 Four Dueces only once, and so on. The expected value of this more conservative strategy for Bonus Poker 7/5 is $18.49. The win limit becomes +$500.)

Also, be careful that the win limit mentioned is on top of what you put in the machine: If you start playing by putting $20 in, don’t stop when the machine shows 255 credits ($510): you have only won $490. There is still some value in continuing to play. Stop at 265 credits ($530) or higher.

It should go without saying that whatever you play the “lose $20” part of your loss rebate promotion on, you need to switch to Bonus Poker 7/5 for the second half (the Free Play). That’s the game with the best return, and is available on all the machines I have seen. (You can choose any denomination of course. On all the machines I have seen, they have Bonus Poker 7/5 down to 25¢ a coin: That’s what I usually choose to play my Free Play on.) My loss rebate software is assuming you'd choose Bonus Poker 7/5 for the Free Play. If you play the Free Play on any other game, you need to adjust the expected value of the promotion accordingly.

One more thing: Note that there are eight Molly’s locations in the Las Vegas valley. They are listed on Molly's website here. All of them, except one, Molly’s Casino on North Rainbow Blvd, use the same players’ card system, which has a red card. The establishment on North Rainbow Blvd has the same exact promotions, but a different players’ card system which has a black card. So if you want to play this promotion, you can do it four times per week instead of twice per week. It’s just some more driving!

Finally, Molly’s also sends mailers with Free Play. If I knew the formula for the mailers and their relation to the loss rebate, I would have tried to give some advice about how to optimize your play. But alas, these things are well-kept secrets. With my hit-and-run strategy of playing the loss rebate and hitting the door, I occasionally get $5 Free Play four times per month per players’ card system. That’s $39 on top of the loss rebate promotion worth $296–$334 per month per player. ($296 for the months with eight Wednesdays or Sundays, $334 for the months with nine.)

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Posted by FiliusBruce

Comments

odiousgambit May 17, 2023

thanks

the matter of the value of variance ... the idea that variance itself has a value in these circumstances ... and that a number can be placed on it, is a remarkable thing