Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1596 (1/2009)

Pictures from Showboat Atlantic City Orleans Tower Room 1596, January 9-10, 2009.

Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1486 (12/2008)

Pictures from Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1486, from December 28-30, 2008

Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1099 (11/2008)

Pictures from Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1099, from November 21, 2008

Atlantic City Cuts Back on Service

During this past weekend in Atlantic City it became obvious that cutbacks in service will continue for the foreseeable future. Everywhere you looked you could find another restaurant reducing hours or a casino cutting back on some seemingly minor detail. Let's start at the cashier cage, where Showboat closed their second "cage" months ago and seems to lop off one more teller window from their existing cashier's booth every time I return. At Wild West, the line normally reserved for Diamond members disappears after a certain hour. At Caesars, the cashier near the poker room is down to one window for poker players to buy chips and the tellers who used to cash slot tickets have been gone for weeks. I've even heard reports of Harrah's closing the Diamond line for their buffet. So, if you are looking for places where the casino layoffs are affecting players, then take a look at the line that forms when a high-roller is cashing out chips and needs managerial approval while everyone else in the casino waits for the one available teller who can convert their chips to cash. This isn't the sort of service that will make folks want to return to Atlantic City.

This cutback in service doesn't apply only to the casino cage. Showboat was ahead of the curve months ago when they starting closing their buffet two days during each week and have now drastically cutback on the hours of their Mansion Cafe coffee shop. Slot Club booths are no longer open late in the night on Fridays and Sundays. The My Borgata club wasn't even open at midnight this past Saturday and midnight is long before the party crowd kicks into full swing in Atlantic City's most upscale resort. Among the most telling examples, however, of the mediocrity that casinos are presenting to their customers were the signs I noticed on a variety of video poker machines explaining that certain promotional "cupons" will not "be issued for Hand Paid Jackpots paid on this machine." I'll forgive folks for bad spelling, but in order for these stickers to be applied across the casino they much first have been printed without anyone proofreading them and after the stickers arrived, management must have decided it wasn't worth the few dollars it would have cost to reprint the labels to correct this spelling error. It's sloppy and unprofessional, although you may be able to forgive casino employees these days, since their management isn't providing them with the resources to take care of routine customer needs and is forcing the employees who haven't been laid off to pick of the slack of their sacked co-workers. It's not fair to them and it's certainly not the sort of thing that makes anyone believe that anyone in Atlantic City has a plan to retain what remains of their customer base.

Things aren't looking good.

How often do you finish with two pair in video poker?

While playing at the Showboat recently another player noticed that I was taking notes and asked how often I drew two pair in an hour. His reason was that he noticed another person playing Double Bonus (DB) and thought that player was giving up an awful lot of small wins in chasing the bigger bonus payouts. Of course, this gentleman was correct, though Showboat does offer some Double Bonus machines that return over 99% (as good as any that you will find in Atlantic City these days), but I couldn't offer him the exact statistics that he requested. However, having just purchased Frugal Video Poker I was looking at expected returns for different video poker games and thought I would share my the data that this gentleman requested.

Assuming a reasonably rapid and steady (that not insanely fast) pace of play, at 800 hands per hour playing perfect strategy you should expect to finish with two pair 103 times per hour playing 9/6 JoB (12.93% of the time), 95 times per hour playing 9/7/5 DB (11.89% of the time), and 98 two pairs per hour playing 9/6 DDB (12.31% of the time). Assuming a more leisurely pace of 600 hands per hour, which was closer to the speed I estimate this man was playing, the number of two pairs per hour ranged between 78 for 9/6 JoB to 71 for 9/7/5 DB.

Those are a lot of credits to give up for a chance at the mini-jackpots that these Double Bonus games offer, but that goes a long way to explain why your results will vary so much more over the short run from playing these games and why your gambling bankroll needs to be robust enough to cover those swings.

Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1053 (11/2007)

Pictures from Showboat Orleans Tower Room 1053, from November 30, 2007