The Easy Vegas thread

NY commercial and VLT revenue reports (weekly and monthly) These are not owned by the state, but the system they run on is operated by the New York Lottery.

RW NYC is a VLT parlor in NY. Yearly coin in is around $8 billion. They do $170MM in play per week. Real casinos in NYC will make an absolute killing. If you have a spare several billion dollars, buy that NYC license.

Quote: Dieter

On a technicality, VLT's cannot be Class II.]VLT's are operated by the state, not by a tribe. All Class II gaming is tribal, under IGRA 1988. Tribes may operate Class II TLS games, which are very similar.
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Class II is bingo and bingo-like or bingo-adjacent games. The feds wanted to give native american tribes the ability to have bingo without any approval from the state outside of bingo being generally legal in that state. The tribes took advantage of this and started making crazy bingo games. The first ones were live caller with a blower, but linked between halls for huge jackpots. Then they made electronic bingo games that did the same thing, but were still clearly bingo. Class II "slots" came from those electronic bingo matches. To make them more appealing, they use slot reels and bonus features to display wins.

VLTs are some form of lottery. Washington has a lottery system for tribes that uses virtual scratch tickets that are randomly placed into deals and then sold in order until expended.

Quote: itsmejeff

NY commercial and VLT revenue reports (weekly and monthly) These are not owned by the state, but the system they run on is operated by the New York Lottery.

RW NYC is a VLT parlor in NY. Yearly coin in is around $8 billion. They do $170MM in play per week. Real casinos in NYC will make an absolute killing. If you have a spare several billion dollars, buy that NYC license.

Quote: Dieter

On a technicality, VLT's cannot be Class II.]VLT's are operated by the state, not by a tribe. All Class II gaming is tribal, under IGRA 1988. Tribes may operate Class II TLS games, which are very similar.
link to original post

Class II is bingo and bingo-like or bingo-adjacent games. The feds wanted to give native american tribes the ability to have bingo without any approval from the state outside of bingo being generally legal in that state. The tribes took advantage of this and started making crazy bingo games. The first ones were live caller with a blower, but linked between halls for huge jackpots. Then they made electronic bingo games that did the same thing, but were still clearly bingo. Class II "slots" came from those electronic bingo matches. To make them more appealing, they use slot reels and bonus features to display wins.

VLTs are some form of lottery. Washington has a lottery system for tribes that uses virtual scratch tickets that are randomly placed into deals and then sold in order until expended.
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Mostly sounds good. I was under the impression that TLS (tribal lottery system - pull tab or similar based games) fell under the Class II umbrella. Is that not your understanding?

The crux of my disagreement is that a VLT parlor cannot be Class II, because the operator is not a tribe. The games on offer may be practically identical.

Quote: Dieter

Mostly sounds good. I was under the impression that TLS (tribal lottery system - pull tab or similar based games) fell under the Class II umbrella. Is that not your understanding?

The crux of my disagreement is that a VLT parlor cannot be Class II, because the operator is not a tribe. The games on offer may be practically identical.
link to original post

Tribes do not need special permission from the states to conduct Class II gaming. They need a compact with the states to conduct class III gaming. The TLS (Tribal Lottery System) is part of the compacts and is generally considered Class III.

Not that it makes much sense to me, but I think the problem is that Class III is not very well defined outside of Vegas.

https://easy.vegas/games/crash

A "crash course" is one in which the reader learns about a particular subject in a short period of time. Consider deleting most of the options in the drop-down menus for the average loss calculator. There are far too many options. Anyone who can make use of the ability of the calculator to provide such granular information has long past graduated from a crash course in calculating EV for various casino games.

Call the first column "bets per hour", because that applies to all the games. "Rounds" and "rolls" are game-specific. For each game, reduce the number of options to three. For slot machines and video poker, the average is approximately 600, so make the other two options 300 and 1200 (slow and fast, respectively). For table games, label the slow and fast options "online". In the real world, a newbie is not going to play at a slow or fast table game for 10 hours that runs significantly different from the average.

Change "bet per round" to "bet amount".

For house edge, reduce the number of options greatly. If this is to be a crash course, it has to be something that can be digested by a reader whose knowledge of casino games is limited to the fact that slot machines and table games are different. Don't drown them in options.

Slot machines should have options of 5%, 8%, 10% and 12%. No one plays the 22% Megabucks without the intention of hoping to win the jackpot. No one can tell what the payback % is of anything, only a range based on location and denom.

Roulette only needs three options: single zero, double zero and triple zero.

Not only are the video poker options too numerous, some of them are wrong. 8/5 Bonus Poker is a 99.17% payback, not 97.40%. Reduce the options to 1%, 2%, 4% and 6%. The column is labeled house edge, not payback percentage. There is no need for exact percentages for video poker because the real-world wins are two to four percentage points less than optimal because of suboptimal play. Newbies are unlikely to memorize perfect VP strategy before going to Las Vegas for the first time.

Baccarat should have 1.24% player and 1.06% banker with commission, 1.46% no-commission, and 14.36% tie.

For craps, the options should be pass, don't pass, field, any craps and any seven. Adding place and buy bets (between pass line and field, percentagewise), adds more options, and if the list gets too long, newbies will not understand. It's a complicated game for newbies anyway unless they only do the pass line with odds, in which case they don't need calculations for all those other options.

And then there's blackjack. This game can have the widest range of house edge of any casino game, ranging from negative (counting cards) to insanely high (awful play plus side bets). Make the options 0.6% (good rules with optimal play), 1.5% (bad rules with optimal play/good rules with imperfect play), 5% (terrible play or side bets) and 10% (really terrible play and side bets). The granularity of whether or not you can surrender or six decks vs eight is unnecessary.

You should add live keno. Yes, the house edge is very high, but it only runs at 10 games per hour. Some casinos run a separate RNG in the keno lounge at 20 games per hour. If one bets a small amount (as little as $1/game), live keno is pretty cheap on a $/hr basis.

Finally, you should consider deleting the phrase above the calculator "One of my goals for this site is to get players off of slots and onto games that don't suck your money away hand over fist". Be objective about the difference between slots and other games. That statement reads like it came from a slot hater.

The reason why people can lose lots of money playing slots is because they get sucked into betting a large amount per spin. The latest development in that arena is the ridiculous (in my opinion) buying a bonus for hundreds of dollars. Yeah, I know, betting 25 cents per spin gets boring. Players can lose lots of money on table games too. All they have to do is play badly or chase their losses. All these games are different, and none of them are intrinsically worse than all the others.

Quote: Mukke

Quote: Dieter

Mostly sounds good. I was under the impression that TLS (tribal lottery system - pull tab or similar based games) fell under the Class II umbrella. Is that not your understanding?

The crux of my disagreement is that a VLT parlor cannot be Class II, because the operator is not a tribe. The games on offer may be practically identical.
link to original post

Tribes do not need special permission from the states to conduct Class II gaming. They need a compact with the states to conduct class III gaming. The TLS (Tribal Lottery System) is part of the compacts and is generally considered Class III.

Not that it makes much sense to me, but I think the problem is that Class III is not very well defined outside of Vegas.
link to original post

That is news to me. I honestly thought TLS didn't require a compact.

Class III is easy - (almost) everything in tribal gaming that isn't Class II, including banked card games and Nevada style slots.
(Class I doesn't apply to anything casino related.)

Quote: Dieter

(Class I doesn't apply to anything casino related.)

I always just assumed Class One was just traditional bingo.

I'm not doing much with the site these days, but I did just rewrite an article that I first wrote about 20 years ago, arguing why criticism of lotto players for playing a high house-edge game is misguided. Expected Value is Useless When Applied to the Lottery

I just bought a lottery ticket this morning so the story can be "we rented an RV, and I bought the winning ticket at the convenience store next to the beachside RV/trailer park." I bought a Calif. lottery ticket because the odds are "better."

Quote: MichaelBluejay

I'm not doing much with the site these days, but I did just rewrite an article that I first wrote about 20 years ago, arguing why criticism of lotto players for playing a high house-edge game is misguided. Expected Value is Useless When Applied to the Lottery
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Fun read!

I'd like to note that South Point Casino offers the same cost for bowling as when I was in high school—$1!:
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Sometimes when an article gets too long I split it off into a new article. When that happens I generally also rewrite it and expand it. I'm submitting it here for peer review.

The Short-Term vs. the Long Run in Gambling

Incidentally, I'm generally very confident about my articles' understandability, the points being clear, and the concepts being well-organized, but initially I wasn't so confident about this one, so I asked ChatGPT for a review. She pointed out what could be clearer so I rewrote one whole section. All the words are still 100% mine (I'm a writer and I'm loath to let anyone else come up with the words), but she helped identify what was nagging me but I couldn't put my finger on.

You might need to reconcile a couple of things in your article:

Quote: easy.vegas

More bets = greater chance of losing

Quote: easy.vegas

With some betting systems, you’re likely to win your session.

That can be taken as paradoxical. So I can flip a fair coin and have a 50% chance of winning, but I can also play a Martingale game with coin flips and have a greater than 50% chance of winning. So there's a way that doing more than one flip can have a lower chance of losing than just doing one flip.

You do elaborate by saying that this will be offset by larger losses, but that's not exactly the same as there being a greater chance of losing, which is a binary thing and not quantitative. Maybe there's a better way of saying "the more you bet, the more you lose" that's true in all cases, rather than "the more bets you make the more / more often you lose" which is not always true.

That you, AutomaticMonkey. You've identified an issue which is common across many disciplines: it's impossible to make a concise definition of something that covers all cases. Something has to give, either the definition is easy to understand but not 100% accurate, or the definition is accurate but verbose and hard to parse.

I can take your example a step further: Say you've already made one bet and lost. At that point it's impossible for an additional bet to *increase* your chance of losing, since you've already lost. More play ≠ higher chance of losing in that case.

But does it benefit the reader to account for your example, or mine? I'm not so sure. I'm really trying to drive home the point that in general, longer play leads to losses. If I start listing esoteric exceptions then that might just muddy the waters rather than clarifying them.

Quote: MichaelBluejay

That you, AutomaticMonkey. You've identified an issue which is common across many disciplines: it's impossible to make a concise definition of something that covers all cases. Something has to give, either the definition is easy to understand but not 100% accurate, or the definition is accurate but verbose and hard to parse.

I can take your example a step further: Say you've already made one bet and lost. At that point it's impossible for an additional bet to *increase* your chance of losing, since you've already lost. More play ≠ higher chance of losing in that case.

But does it benefit the reader to account for your example, or mine? I'm not so sure. I'm really trying to drive home the point that in general, longer play leads to losses. If I start listing esoteric exceptions then that might just muddy the waters rather than clarifying them.
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I admit to being verbose and hard to parse, in the interest of accuracy!

But I think you might want to consider why people play progressions. I consider them the cigarettes of gambling. You might enjoy every one of them for 50 years, until you get the bad news from the doctor. But you still got 50 years of enjoyment. Was it worth it? A progression player has probably figured out he will usually walk out of the casino a winner, until he doesn't. So it's really not that esoteric, lots of people play that way. They're willing to disregard the risk of ruin for that fun feeling of walking out of the casino 1 bet up 100 times in a row and treating it like a part time job with free drinks.

On the other hand, stating it like I just did could sound like I'm selling progressions, couldn't it? And you probably don't want to do that. Maybe the way you did it is the better way with the goal of educating a typical player.

I start with $10, increase my bet by $5 on the 2rd win (so 3rd bet) and keep increasing by $5 till i lose.
Then back to $5.
11 yo's in a row was my record..um.. er.. 11 wins :)

Here's an example of how it's hard to come up with a succinct explanation. For the question, "What makes the price of a stock or crypto go up?", the common explanation is:

❌ "There are more buyers than sellers."

Wrong, for various reasons. For starters, the number of buyers and sellers is irrelevant. And it's also not true that the number of buyers has to match the number of sellers: A single seller could sell 1000 shares, and 500 buyers could buy 2 shares each.

Explanations for the above question that are both succinct and accurate are hard to come by. I couldn't come up with one myself, I find myself explaining an order book, with a whole paragraph. But AI came up with something pretty good, and I edited to make it both shorter and clearer:

✅ "The price goes up when market buyers consume the standing SELL orders."

Or to be a little more accurate (since the next unconsumed order could still be at the last sales price):

✅ "The price goes up when market buyers consume the standing SELL orders at the current price."

Still, that's not as terse as "There are more buyers than sellers", even though it's more accurate, and it's certainly harder to understand than "more buyers than sellers", even though "more buyers than sellers" is wrong.

Quote: MichaelBluejay

Here's an example of how it's hard to come up with a succinct explanation. For the question, "What makes the price of a stock or crypto go up?", the common explanation is:

❌ "There are more buyers than sellers."

Wrong, for various reasons. For starters, the number of buyers and sellers is irrelevant. And it's also not true that the number of buyers has to match the number of sellers: A single seller could sell 1000 shares, and 500 buyers could buy 2 shares each...

I think in that case I would go with good old "There is more demand than supply." That covers everything.

Is that really accurate, though? The excess demand is right, but not in excess of supply. But I think it's easily fixable:

"There's more demand than the supply at the current price."

And that's even shorter and easier to grasp than my earlier suggestion.

"Demand exceeds supply" --> price goes up

"Supply exceeds demand" --> price goes down

You missed the point of why that definition doesn't work. Demand goes up for crypto and stocks even though there's plenty of supply.

Quote: MichaelBluejay

You missed the point of why that definition doesn't work. Demand goes up for crypto and stocks even though there's plenty of supply.
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Anyone who is not willing to sell at the current price is not part of "supply".

"Demand" is the number of shares people would like to buy at the current price. Demand is lower at a higher price and higher at a lower price. "Supply" is the number of shares people are willing to sell at the current price. Supply is higher at a higher price and lower at a lower price.

If one is higher than the other at the current price, the price moves up or down so that the two are the same.

So...you didn't even read the discussion you were replying to.

Quote: MichaelBluejay

So...you didn't even read the discussion you were replying to.
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I did, and I understand the concept very well. Why would you say that I didn't even read the discussion? It should be obvious that I did. What is your problem, anyway? Why do you have to make these hateful replies?

Quote:

Demand goes up for crypto and stocks even though there's plenty of supply.

As I wrote before, this is incorrect. "Supply", when it comes to determining the market price, is the number of shares people are willing to sell at a given price.

What do you mean by "there's plenty of supply"? People can't buy something that isn't for sale. The supply of shares people are willing to sell is not limitless, and it is a function of price.