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I’m still not sure if this email I had tonight is genuine.
For a start, if Terrible’s really has live poker, I’m quite disappointed that this mailer didn’t come with a picture of Mr Terrible wearing sunglasses and an iPod. They usually make an effort to dress him up whenever possible, and this would be a perfect opportunity.
But let’s assume this is for real (they routinely spell my name wrong on emails this way, so that goes some way to verifying the authenticity).
How on earth did they find space to put in at least one poker table? It’s pretty cozy in there already.
The sportsbook is so small it has about half a dozen seats and the pit is perfectly crammed into the middle of the action so that if you want to play Wheel of Fortune and roulette at the same time, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to. And if there happens to be a line for the cashier (particularly likely on paycheck day) snaking through a tightly arranged grid of video poker machines at least gives you something to lean on while you wait.
They’ve recently moved the player’s club out of the broom cupboard next to the gift shop into a kiosk on the casino floor, but I can’t see that space being any use for poker. It’s not much larger than six feet square.
The mailer says “see casino pit for details”, not “see poker room”. They clearly don’t have any pretensions of being the Bellagio (thank goodness). It might just be one table. And you might have to ask for directions.
There’s just nowhere I can think that even one table could go without needing to get rid of either slot machines, table games or space in the bingo hall, and I can’t see any of those happening for a game that (according to the coupon on this mailing) has a $20 minimum buy in.
That would make it one of only two such recession-busting poker games in Las Vegas (the other is a single $1 blind no-limit Hold’em game at Bill’s). I can’t wait to see what games are on offer, and what kind of clientele it attracts.
I can’t find any other details about this. Nothing on Terrible’s own web site, or any of the usual suspect Las Vegas poker blogs. I might actually be the first to break this massive poker news in the whole of the “blogosphere”.
Oh how I hate that word.
However, to be fair, I’d be surprised if any other bloggers were on Terrible’s mailing list, let alone had ever stopped by for a 99c coffee and Krispy Kreme special.
If you’ve got any money that needs washing, Stan James are making it insanely easy for you this weekend. Just bet both sides on the SuperBowl – with no juice!
A slightly less nefarious way to take advantage of this is through their £25 free bet offer.
Grab a partner, sign up an account each and bet £25 on each side of the point spread. You can’t lose, and then you’ll both end up with a £25 free bet to play with next week.
There’s usually a way to cash in sports betting bonuses without any risk, but this one makes it pretty easy to explain how it works.
So I thought I would.
Yesterday, quite randomly, I found myself at the London Affiliate Conference.
You’d never know from the modest name, but this event is an expo specifically for affiliates of online gambling sites.
You know what? Other affiliate programs are available.
I wasn’t there for a conference, or as an affiliate – just for a meeting with someone who happened to be in the country because of it.
All the big names were there, which meant I was happy enough wandering around and gawping for a while. These things are usually pretty fun for about twenty minutes, after which they get really annoying. Fortunately I didn’t have to wait too long before my meeting.
I wandered round admiring the usual collection of free giveaway tat. Plenty of pens, t-shirts, calendars… that kind of stuff. The chocolate dice were particularly appealing, although I couldn’t help wondering whether the stand giving away branded cigarette lighters was exhibiting in the wrong decade.
And then I noticed this.
Scotty Nguyen, baby.
There are not many well known poker players that I would stop walking to take a photo of, but Scotty is the man, baby.
But wait, round the corner there was more:
At first I thought this was a looky likey… any dude in a hat could be pretty convincing. But it is your actual Texas Dolly, Doyle Brunson.
The godfather of poker, making a personal appearance because his online poker room has gone down the pan and they’re pushing a casino instead.
Quite a star studded line up for an event that I still haven’t really worked out why it exists.
After all, when your online business does online marketing for an online casino, what is the actual benefit of getting some face time – except to be able to pick up the odd Blue Square stress ball, or something.
You just make a web site that links to another web site and get people to read it, right? And if banner A makes you more money than banner B, you run banner A. You don’t run banner B because a pretty girl who was employed by them – probably just for the day – gave you a free umbrella.
It was only after I heard that one of the people I’d gone to meet – a gaming writer who relies on affiliate commissions to eat – had already interviewed Brunson that it dawned upon me: I was probably the only blogger there who had to sneak around with a camera phone to get pictures of these guys.
But along with that realisation came a reminder that I don’t write this rubbish for anyone other than myself. That’s pretty obvious from the fact I haven’t even bothered trying to put a banner ad on the site in three years. But I’ve come to realise what a world of difference there is between writing for fun versus writing for a living.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that (I’ve been paid to write before – albeit on a small scale, meaning I had plenty of freedom to choose the subject – and would do so again if the right gig came along) but it’s not what this blog is and I quite like it that way.
So to those of you that do actually bother to read this now and again and humour me when I talk crap or rant about things that aren’t really that important, I thank you.
You can’t imagine how excited I was to see an offiical Caesars Palace iPhone app appear on the App Store recently.
It came with a big boast too: “The Caesars Palace Mobile application is a travel companion that can elevate your trip from ordinary to legendary”.
Sadly, I beg to differ. It’s a bit of a turd.
The app weighs in at a tiny 0.4Mb, which tells you it’s going to have to fetch most of its data from the network.
This is good and bad. It’s easy for them to update information when it changes (it’s Vegas – things change frequently) but it alienates iPod touch users and visitors from outside the USA who don’t want to get stung by horrendous data roaming charges, pay extortionate hotel wifi charges, or go to the effort of getting their iPhone unlocked and using a local SIM.
iPod touch users are also screwed over on the included gimmick to put your own photo onto a Caesars Palace sign. It only works with the iPhone’s camera – you can’t use a picture from your photo library. Although it’s a pretty piss poor effort at slapping two photographs together anyway. I tried it with an old friend.
The other information you get is a subset of what you can find on the Caesars web site, thrown together in a style reminiscent of web sites from 1995, except without a hit counter or an animated “men at work” image.
The part I was really interested in though was how I would be able to “use Caesars Palace Mobile to find [my] way around the resort”, like they claimed.
Let’s face it. If someone describes the floor plan at Caesars as “all over the place”, they’re being kind.
For what it’s worth, I actually find that meandering mess of a maze an endearing feature of a property which has evolved and grown in character over more than 40 years. It’s just a nightmare to get to where you want to be.
So, what technological wonders that take advantage of the iPhone platform have they used to help you find your way?
It’s a map.
It’s the same map that you get when you check into the hotel or if you can pick up around the casino.
The user experience is somewhat different, however. When they print maps, they tend to make sure that they’re readable, and they generally print them larger than three inches in size. This is is pretty standard because, well, it just works.
Above is an actual size screenshot. Tell me where Total Rewards is, or how to get to the Augustus Tower from the parking garage.
I’m being a little unkind. You can actually zoom in enough so that the text size is almost the same size as it would be in print. Of course, once the text is readable, you can only see a fraction of the map.
I guess it’s nice to have a map graphic on your phone though. I’ve used that kind of thing before, with zooming and panning and what not. I’d probably use this one too if it actually stayed downloaded to my phone long enough to use it – instead of requiring a significant download every single time you navigate away and come back. It takes a good 5 seconds over wifi and 25-30 seconds on 3G. (I didn’t bother trying over EDGE). They should at least cache it within the app for a couple of hours.
I should probably have seen this coming, when the first thing in the product description is an attempt to claim that this is a “beta” release – despite being publicly available to anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch, and carrying a 1.0 version number.
Disappointing as the app is, it’s even more disappointing that Caesars Palace would put its name on what is clearly a work in progress.
The time has come to say a tearful farewell to my Diamond Total Rewards card.
The current card is still valid until the end of March, but as I won’t return to Las Vegas until the beginning of April, that does me no good whatsoever. In order to retain it, I needed to have achieved the requisite number of tier credits by the end of last year. I didn’t get there.
The number of tier credits required to achieve or retain Diamond is 11,000 – representing $55,000 of action on slot machines, or $110,000 on video poker. Or some secret magic formula of time, money and whether or not the pit boss likes you when playing table games.
I’ve achieved this before, using a 50-line 9/6 Jacks or Better game in Harrah’s Laughlin. It takes some commitment (and some balls to trust in the numbers when you run bad), but a 99.54% game with (usually) 0.3% returned as comp means it’s a decent proposition. Cycle $110,000 on that game and you expect to lose about $500 in cash, but receive $330 to spend on food and stuff. Net cost: $170.
Consider that most video poker on the Strip is in the 97-98% range. A typical player qualifies for Diamond status with a theoretical loss in the region of $3,000 for a given year. They still only get back the same $330 as comp, so doing it my way is a pretty good discount.
Yes, slightly better plays are available. I just don’t have the bankroll for them.
Here’s one that you won’t find on the vpfree2 web site. That could be down to a lack of casino monitors, the inability to actually find what you’re looking for since the site switched to it’s new craptastic format, or just that members of the so-called community are no longer sharing data like they used to (you know, the way most of them actually got started), just reporting a handful of so-so games but keeping the best information to themselves. I liked the old site. I miss the old site.
I may get death threats for talking about it, but Harrah’s Laughlin has a 9/6 Jacks or Better in a $1 Multistrike game. Or at least it did in December 2009. It’s a slant-top, just inside the high limit area, next to the poker room.
Multistrike video poker requires you to pay for four hands at a time. If you win the first, you play the second with a 2x multiplier; if you win that you play the 3rd at 4x and – if you get there – the top line is paid off at 8x the regular win. If you don’t win on the first attempt though, you’ve just lost four times the usual stake very quickly.
Yes, the swings are big. But making some adjustments to the way you play the game teases the odds in the player’s favour. You can get almost 99.8% payback (so it’s a profitable game when you add in other benefits) and at $20 per game it’s very quick to cycle money. Perfect for a professional with deep pockets, but given that a not-insignificant part of the overall return comes from large 8x wins – including an extremely rare top line royal flush – I was only able to have a quick punt on this one.
How sweet it nearly was though. One card away from thirty two grand…
I did actually abandon an attempt to achieve Diamond in a Day at Harrah’s Laughlin (requiring only 3,000 tier credits in 24 hours) on a $1 Deuces Wild machine. Although it’s a solid play at 99.7% payback, I wasn’t familiar with the game and it was more volatile than I expected – and was comfortable with – so I bottled it, took the money and ran after hitting a lucky quad deuces.
After that, I got back to Vegas with roughly 3,200 tier credits showing for the year. There was no way I’d get Diamond now, but I only needed to reach 4,000 to ensure Platinum for the next year.
Frankly, Platinum isn’t worth much. At some hotels you can use the same VIP check-in as Diamond, but at others it looks like you have to wait in the pleb line. There’s no queue-jumping at restaurants or for taxis, and if the valet is “full” you actually have to pull cash out of your wallet to make a space magically appear, not just a players card.
You do get some kind of show tickets offer though, and an invitation to the Summerfest tournament. But mostly, well, I just wanted my players card to not be gold again.
Do you see why these tiered programs are so successful?…
It’s not (quite) all vanity. I do like the idea of flashing a shiny player’s card when I sit at a poker table to let everyone else know I gamble. I’ll then most likely turn to granite for two or three hours, by which time nobody is fooled when I check-raise with a sigh, but just in case I hit a monster early on it certainly can’t harm my action.
I wasn’t sure where that 3,200 number had come from. In the summer, I used a Macy’s gift card promotion to play a few otherwise unfavourable games with an edge and Claire and I between us racked up about 1300 tier credits. In December in Laughlin, we’d done a little more than 700 more in total.
So that’s 1200 tier credit that had to have come from somewhere…. Who knew it was from poker?
This is a new phenomenon, apparently beginning earlier this year and, according to Poker Grump, awards 28 tier credits per hour in addition to the usual 100 spendable credits (worth $1 towards eating).
A commenter on that post saved me some calculations by noting that you can reach Diamond status with 393 hours of play and Platinum with 143 hours. That’s out of reach for me. I’ve failed in three consecutive summers to reach my target of 100 hours play in a month-long trip. I’m sure I could do it with a little more focus, but as I take real work with me on long trips, I don’t go to Vegas to make poker feel like a job.
It does actually sound like a great deal though. It seems that if you lived in Las Vegas and gambled recreationally, playing $2/$4 Hold’em would be a much less stressful way to get to Diamond than any other kind of low stakes gaming. If you play poker with any kind of seriousness (and loyalty) you’ll do it several times over.
At least it feels like Harrah’s are being generous to poker players. In fact, even using a conservative estimate of $10 rake paid per hour†, a Diamond poker player is worth at least $3,930 to Harrah’s. That’s actually more than a video poker player who isn’t completely clueless about strategy, or a slot player who gets there by playing games with 93% payback or higher (which is about right for $1 slots on the Strip)!
[†20 hands per hour maxing out the rake at $5 per pot gives this number when averaged across a full table of ten players; it could be double this, which would put it on a par with penny slots].
Anyway, I’ll gladly take advantage of any opportunity to reduce the amount of machine play I need to put in to reach a player’s club tier, especially when the machines you can do it on just keep getting worse.
Last week, in a last-ditch attempt to try to salvage my Total Rewards status, I decided to play quite possibly the worst video poker game I had ever sat down at. (Well, at least since I realised that not all games were created equal.)
Imperial Palace. 7/5 Bonus Poker. 98.0% payback with optimal stragtegy. The last surviving 8/5 paytable (99.2% payback) is long gone.
Actually it was slightly better than that – it was a Super Times Pay game. STP lets you play an extra coin on each hand for the chance of being dealt a multiplier card worth 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 8x or 10x on a winning hand. The multiplier appears every 15 hands and averages 4.05x, and those numbers actually make it a slightly profitable bet. Unlike Multistrike, no change in strategy is needed to benefit from the additional payback, but it’s still quite volatile. Even on a 25c machine the long-term return accounts for hitting a 10x royal flush, worth $10,000.
Super Times Pay is a slight improvement – worth about 0.3% overall – which, unfortunately, made this machine the very best of a bad bunch.
The question was: would this gamble be worth it?
I had to give Harrah’s $8,000 more action in order to retain my level. Add on roughly 0.3% in comp credit to the 98.3% game payback and I stood to lose 1.4% of the total amount bet. That’s an expected loss of $112 – too much to pay just for a free afternoon show (of someone else’s choice) and entry into a $40 tournament (if the dates worked out right).
But because I was doing it at a Strip casino rather than out in Laughlin (where being able to count the spots on two dice is generally enough to get you a free room) there was the possibility of that action being enough to qualify my account for the much more valuable Las Vegas comps again.
It’s not surprising that I had lost my free room privileges, but it’s surprising it took so long. Nearly a year after I began booking weeks of free hotels at a time, doing little more than stealing the soap (or at least trying) and not gambling a penny in Harrah’s casinos in Las Vegas, they finally caught up and decided I needed to start paying to stay there.
What’s even more surprising though, is that it only took a couple of days after this short stint at Imperial Palace to get those freebies back again. They started showing today! It looks like almost any dates for five free midweek nights are available for at least one of: Flamingo, Bally’s, Harrah’s or Rio. It only takes a couple of nights to cover that $112 loss in full!
I don’t really care that my offers don’t include Caesars or Paris, or even the “Luv Tub” rooms at Imperial Palace that had tempted me so much in the past. Rio suits me down to the ground. It’s within walking distance of places I actually want to gamble at (Gold Coast, Palms) and close to the freeway for getting places. If I want to play poker on the Strip, I can be at Caesars Palace in about 5 minutes.
A good result then, but fortunately so this time, I think, rather than being a brilliantly calculated advantage play. Even that 1.4% theoretical loss on a game is too high to justify retaining Platinum – and certainly too high to justify shooting for Diamond – for next year. I’ll either have to find a better game that I am comfortable with, increase my tolerance to risk significantly, or just play lots of poker at Harrah’s casinos to bump up the numbers.
There is one more option. A cunning backup plan. It involves one of the spare copies of my old Diamond card that I started stock-piling last week and a black marker pen. Can you tell what it is yet?
My tiny video poker book is actually on the shelves of a book store.
It’s only one book store, but if I had to pick just one place to sell it, this would be it: The Gamblers Book Shop in Las Vegas.
It’s round about now that I’m starting to wish I’d bothered designing a cover for it. But still, it’s there and I’m even told that the staff have even been briefed on how to read the strategy charts so they can demonstrate its awesome power to customers in the store.
Strongly considering an incognito visit when I’m back in Vegas in December 
If you happen to be heading that way yourself, the new GBS location is about 300 yards from the Crown and Anchor so you can buy my book and then head over to the pub, stick $20 in a video poker machine and play perfect strategy while you get a totally free lunch (currently #7 on the Las Vegas Advisor top ten) and a pint of Old Speckled Hen.
How can you go wrong with that? Seriously?
Update: Also on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Video-Poker-Pocket-Book/dp/0557120454
"A genuine expert on the game, in fact a genuine expert on all things casino".
That’s how I’m introduced on the telly, so it must be true.
I have finally seen the blackjack TV show pilot I recorded in September, and it can’t be that bad as Poker Channel Europe have put the whole show online. You can watch it in its entirity here:
http://www.pokerchanneleurope.com/videos/casinojoy_tv_episode_1.htm
There’s talk of recording more shows before Christmas, but they’re waiting for some updates to the replayer software which are needed in order to reduce the production time so they can put together a show quickly enough to feature games played in the previous week.
The electronic version of my video poker book for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available for download on the App Store.
For those that don’t have iTunes, or just can’t be bothered to click through, here’s a screenshot that really doesn’t tell you much at all, and actually looks a bit poo when it’s not on a white background.
Blog readers will be like "yeah, that looks a bit poo", but if you’re reading this on Facebook or through an RSS reader you’ll be like "what’s he on about".
Anyway, there’s a bit more info and more screenshots here:
http://www.lightwood.net/ultvp.php
I should probably admit that my "new book" is not actually that new any more. I had almost completely finished writing this one over a year ago.
Call me a perfectionist if you like, but I think procrastinator is probably more accurate.
I had to jump through a few hoops (and pretend to be American) to get an ISBN so that Amazon might list it, but when it came to it this week when I decided to finally publish the book there wasn’t much more I had to do than copy a chunk of text onto the copyright page and add a barcode to the back cover.
 So, before I have chance to put it off any longer, may I proudly present: The Ultimate Video Poker Pocket Book.
It’s a grand title for something so small – and with such an unimaginative cover – I’m sure you’ll agree.
Furthermore, while I’m proudly trumpeting the arrival of a book I’ve written about video poker, it’s fairly easy to see that I’ve not actually had to write all that much at all myself.
In total, I wrote 10 (tiny) pages and I got a computer to create the rest. Although, to be fair, there was quite a bit of work involved in doing that, not least of which was teaching it how to typeset everything just the way I wanted.
The end result is, in my completely objective opinion, an essential collection of video poker strategy charts and pay table data, all compiled into one very handy, very compact little book – it’s about the same size as a postcard.
The idea of the book is that you don’t just have one basic strategy chart to take to the casino or for playing video poker online – you have lots of slightly different ones. Then, regardless of which game you decide to play and how the pay table is set, you can be sure that you’re playing optimally and making your money last as long as possible.
The concept evolved from an ever-growing stack of strategy cards I’d created for myself, held together in the corner with a split ring. Rather than just carry a general strategy for, say, Jacks or Better, I wanted to make sure I was playing correctly if I found a machine that offered a different payback to what I was used to.
For example, the Stratosphere casino used to have JoB with a 10/6 or 9/7 pay table, which is even better than the "full pay" 9/6 game I usually like to play.
In this notation, the first number represents the payout (as a multiple of your bet) for a full house and the second is the payout for a flush. On the 9/7 game, the value of flush draws (and straight flush and royal flush draws) goes up compared to 9/6. Whereas the 10/6 version has a meatier full house payout, meaning that pairs – and even just high cards – become more valuable compared to draws.
The optimal strategy doesn’t change wildly, but it does change. Although the 10/6 and 9/7 games had a positive expectation (and the casino advertised this fact loudly), to get the maximum payback it was necessary to adjust the way you play according to the pay table.
Sadly, these games died a death several years ago and never resurfaced. Their pay tables didn’t even make it into the book (I concentrated on profiling the most popular games that exist today) but the same principle applies to any situation.
If you usually play 9/6 Jacks or Better and know the strategy well, but one day the only game you can find is a 7/5 or 8/5 machine (typical on the Las Vegas Strip) you know the payout is going to be worse than you’re expecting – but it’s going to be worse still if you don’t adjust your strategy to account for the short-paying hands.
As the payback for the flush and full house gets smaller, the value of a straight draw increases. Not by enough to affect most decisions, but some marginal hands should be played in a different way.
For example, if you were dealt 99TQK, it would usually be correct to hold the pair over the straight draw, but with a 7/5 pay table the optimal play is to draw to the straight, or try to pair the queen or king to make a winning hand.
Well, in truth the optimal play is get up and find a better game than 7/5 JoB, but sometimes that’s just not an option.
How do we know this is right? Computer says so.
You’re just going to have to trust me on this, but the strategies have been thoroughly tried and tested on real games as well as on simulators that tell you when you’re making a mistake.
Heck, I’ve been using this book for 18 months and it’s prototype for years before that. If there were an error, I’d have found it by now.
Here’s how the book looks when you hold it open on a particular page. If you have really good eyesight (or just the initiative to click the image to enlarge it) you can have this strategy for free!
When held this way round, the upper page shows various pay tables for one type of game. In this case it’s Bonus Poker. One of the pay table variations is shaded and as you flick through the pages the shaded column moves. When you’re looking at a shaded pay table that’s the same as the one on the game you want to play, the strategy on the lower page in the book is the correct one to use.
The book also lists payback percentages, so you see how your chosen machine compares to pay table variations of the same game. This allows you to shop around and find the best games more easily.
Or if you already know which game you’re looking for, the shaded bar along the edge of each page contains that information and makes it easy to find.
If I may say so myself, it’s quite ingenious.
So, how do you read the strategy charts? The book explains in a bit more detail what all the abbreviations stand for (you can read the whole introduction in the preview, here), but once you see what’s going on it’s logical and quite straightforward. Here’s an example.
Suppose, when playing Bonus Poker with an 8/5 payable (corresponding to the picture above), you are dealt: 7s 8h 8c 9h Jh.
Your hand contains one pair, a four card straight draw with one gap and a three card straight flush draw with one gap. However, the draws each also contain a jack, which is considered a "high card" as this game pays out for pairs of jacks or better.
The relevant sections of the strategy chart are items 15 and 19, enlarged here:
Item 15 is "1P (2-T)", which means "one pair (as long as it is between twos and tens)".
Item 19 groups two similar types of hands into one item, and the second one is our draw. "3SF (8-Q) 1GAP 1HC" translates as: "A 3 card straight flush draw (having all cards between 8 and queen) with up to one gap allowed, but it must also contain at least one high card".
Once you know that SF is a straight flush draw and HC stands for "high cards", you can read the chart very quickly.
The hands are listed in order of their expected return, with the most valuable first. So the optimal play in any given situation is to hold the cards that correspond to the highest ranked (i.e. lowest numbered) item on the strategy chart that features in your hand.
So this tells us that your pair of 8s is a better hold than 8-9-J for a possible straight flush.
If a combination of cards isn’t on the chart, you don’t hold it. The inside straight draw (7-8-9-J) in your hand doesn’t make an appearance – it would be represented as "4ST 1GAP", or possibly "4ST 1GAP 1HC" if having the jack made a difference. It’s correct to hold an inside straight draw in some video poker games, but not this one.
The only other listed hand you have is "1HC (J)", which is way down the chart at number 32. The pair and straight flush draw are both better holds than just the single high card.
This may all sound a little dry and the book is certainly not going to be to everyone’s taste. It’s designed to be a useful companion, not something you’ll want to read cover-to-cover.
I’ve also realised from how long this post ended up being that it’s going to be quite a difficult sell. If you’re still with me this far, you probably deserve a medal. I need to work out how to explain what the book is all about (and why you need 80 different strategy charts in your life) in a couple of sentences!
But at least I’m using a publishing on demand service so if nobody buys it, I won’t have piles of the thing sitting around gathering dust…
You can buy The Ultimate Video Poker Pocket Book from lulu.com: 
This is pretty sweet – it’s a mobile phone optimized version of the Harrah’s web site:
I know everyone’s doing it these days, but I hadn’t seen this before. Harrah’s web site has always been way ahead of the game for communicating with players and their mobile version is no exception.
The lightweight site has virtually everything you get on the full scale web site, except it doesn’t bombard you with pictures of Bette Midler or adverts for the latest poolside debauchery. You can access to your Total Rewards account – including all your offers, and it lets you make reservations. Very nifty.
The site address is mobile.harrahs.com and I’ve bookmarked it already.
It actually took me a while to find the address for this even after I knew it existed. I only came across it through their iPhone app, iSpin, which is a Harrah’s branded slot machine simulator. You can actually choose how you want it to look from 8 of their casino brands.
The game itself is OK I guess. Reels spin and you win or lose fake money. Of course it’s rigged heavily in the favour of the player to make you think you’re eternally lucky, so when it’s a close call on whether or not to take out a third mortgage to go to Las Vegas with, you’ll think back to some happy memories of pretending to gamble on your phone and decide that you can’t possibly lose.
In fact this game lets you hold up to two of the three reels to increase your chance of winning. As there’s a prize for just one cherry on the pay line, all you have to do is wait for that symbol and hold it indefinitely to get at least a 100% return on investment on every spin.
Needless to say, there’s no actual casino slot machine that plays this way.
There’s a few annoyances, like it plays irritating casino background noise which you can only turn off once you’re into the game. So if you were already listening to something on the iPod, it stops when you launch the app. I hate that.
The thing crashed on me a couple of times already too, so it’s not that stable. But it does a fine job at helping you to kill a few minutes, and I guess that’s what it’s there for. A free play slot game was always going to have a limited lifetime for me. I was really just curious as to what they were giving away and how they were using it for casino marketing.
It was the Total Rewards integration that really caught my eye though.
I thought that was interesting. A Total Rewards app for iPhone? Even if you have to access it through a slot machine game, it’s still a pretty good idea.
Unfortunately, this is the extent of the information you can get from the app.
Then the orange links take you off to the mobile site on the web where we started, except that the site is irritatingly locked in landscape mode whether you like it or not – and you have to log in again. Forget that – just to skip the game and go straight to mobile.harrahs.com.
The only other thing of note about this app is that it asks for the iPhone’s location at start up. This has absolutely nothing to do with the game or anything else in the app.
Big Brother at Harrah’s is watching you. They not only want to know that you have downloaded and run their app, they also want to know where in the world you are.
They probably just snagged your phone number too.
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