Jackpot drop vs. shuffle machines Poll

[bigfishead]

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On a $1 drop, you gain $4 an hour by removing it.
With autoshufflers, your hourly rate should increase about 14%. (going from 36 to 41 hands per hour).

So, if your hourly win rate is $28, it is a push. More than that, then the autoshufflers will be a bigger factor. Less, go with removing the jackpot.

Note: does not take into account what each does to 'the action' at the table. Also, the jackpot removes ~$35 from the table per hour. The autoshuffler will remove 5 x (avg-drop + tip) from the table per hour.

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Your EV on the jackpot drop is generally neutral, unless there's some small administrative fee. Shufflers are unquestionably more important to earn.

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Clark my friend, I dont know where you ever came up with the idea that jackpot drop is neutral. ESPECIALLY in LV where the norm seems to be to spread the money thru the entire room or chain of rooms as in Stations case.

With the normal odds of 140k:1 for quads to be beaten, when was the last time you saw someone get paid even $50k? Hell I'd hate to think how many hundreds of thousands of hands I have been involved in be it as a dealer or a player in a jackpot table without EVER having been paid or paid out a jackpot.

Like rake, jackpots are hugely negative expectation until that number gets insanely large. If I remember correctly, out mutual friend said a buddy of his did the math on it for the way the old Stardust paid out. Being single table payout he said that it had to be 80k plus as I recall for it to be starting to have positive expectation.

If we are talking about which takes more off the table per hour, without question rake does. But for the better players thats moot. More hands per hr = more expectation. More jackpot $ taken off the table = more money never seen again, just like rake.

[Clarkmeister]

It's real simple. Your EV is neutral if the Jackpot drop is spread back to the players. This is inarguable. Granted, it is usually extraordinarily high variance, but it is not -EV.

[Al_Capone_Junior]

If the lottery gets big enough it could eventually have a neutral or positive EV. That does not mean it's a good idea to play it, or that one should welcome the chance to pay up their dollars into the fund.

[bav]

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If the lottery gets big enough it could eventually have a neutral or positive EV. That does not mean it's a good idea to play it, or that one should welcome the chance to pay up their dollars into the fund.

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Ignoring taxes, the lottery becomes +EV once in a while. There's a reason a corporation was formed once which bought 99.99% of the possible numbers in a state lottery lotsa years ago and won it. It was a very +EV thing to do. The times when a lottery payout gets big enough to be +EV including the impact of the 30-year payout, possibility of having to share it with another winner, and taxes are extremely, exceedingly rare. But if/when that happens, of course you should bet it. If Keno had a 110% payback instead of 70% you wouldn't play it?

Basically, you shouldn't play the BBJ's when they're small, just like you shouldn't play the Powerball when it's $5,000,000 or the progressive slots when they've been hit and have reset. The nice thing about progressive BBJ's is you can stay out of the room when the BBJ is small. Doing so makes the BBJ drop +EV for you, -EV for the suckers who play when the jackpot is small. Overall neutral, like Clark says, but dandy for the players willing to work the system.

But yes, it has very high variance. You can go a lifetime without hitting a decent BBJ. On the other hand, there are folks who've hit more than one, just like there are folks who've hit >$1M slot payouts more than once. That doesn't make it -EV. It's not a bad bet, it's a good bet, long as you understand the enormous variance it has.

[DonovanMD]

Ignoring taxes, the lottery becomes +EV once in a while. There's a reason a corporation was formed once which bought 99.99% of the possible numbers in a state lottery lotsa years ago and won it.

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Do you have anymore info on this? I'd be interested to read the story behind this.

[bav]

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Do you have anymore info on this? I'd be interested to read the story behind this.

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My info is from some Discovery/TLC/A&E/whatever program that aired years ago. I'm not finding anything offhand with Google, but I'm sure it's out there.

My recollection is it was the Virginia lottery but that may be totally wrong. A group of investors prepared a corporation or LLC or whatever and were ready to go soon as an appropriate jackpot came up in the right place. It had to be a lottery that would accept machine-generated input cards so they could pre-print millions of entries (many do not), and one that had a small enough set of numbers to cover that they could afford to buy 'em all and have some hope of actually physically accomplishing the task in however many days were available between drawings. They hired a team of accountants to spread out around the state and monopolize the lottery machines at many dozens of outlets. They'd walk in daily with 2000 pick cards (or whatever) and $20,000 in cash and make the clerks feed the things through hour after hour.

They intended to buy 100% of the possible numbers so they couldn't possibly lose (but they might have to share the prize with some other lucky gambler--that would be unfortunate, but they computed the chances of that and decided their venture was still +EV). But something went wrong at one or two of the places and they were unable to buy every number. But they covered enough and didn't get unlucky. They were going to be VERY unhappy if one of the few sets of numbers they didn't purchase hit.

Don't think Powerball or Megamillions has ever gotten big enough to be +EV for an individual. Megamillions is 175M:1 to hit. If you figure a 40% tax rate the cash prize has to hit 290M to break even. The record payout was $390M which in lump sum cash form worked out to $230M. And that one was hit by two people. Still some serious -EV territory.

[bav]

http://www.gatago.com/alt/lawyers/42715853.html

Damn I wish I hadn't just wasted 30 minutes of my life Googling for that! It just ANNOYED me that I couldn't find it. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]