In the spring of 1997, I came across a good dollar pay schedule for Joker Wild at the Tropicana. It was a 100.65% game very high for dollars. The Trop’s slot club was hard to figure out (a perfect example of what Jeffrey Compton calls a “don’t ask, won’t tell” slot club), returning about .2% in cashback, plus comps. Since you could get $3,000 per hour through these machines, the return on the game, including cashback, was $25 per hour (.85% of $3,000 is $25.50).

The problem was that Joker Wild is an extremely difficult casino game to play. Bradley Davis, Lenny Frome, and Dan Paymar each had published strategies. They weren’t perfect, but they were better than nothing.
Paymar’s was probably the best and I estimate it generated a return that was still at least .25% less than perfect. That’s $7.50 an hour. Since I was considering playing hundreds of hours on this game, I needed to produce a better strategy.

At the time, the only way for me to accomplish this was by trial and error. Video Poker Tutor was the best computer product available. I started with a synthesis of the Davis/Frome/Paymar strategies and played on the computer until a hand came up that wasn’t explained correctly. I logged all the exceptions and added rules to explain them. Eventually, I’d formulated a pretty good strategy (although not as good as the one that Liam W. Daily and I produced two years later) and was ready to play.

I played about 10 hours a week. The game was difficult and I wasn’t doing well. The best thing that happened early on was that I met Liam and Katherine Daily. I’d written about this game in the Las Vegas Advisor. They’d seen the write-up and, by chance, were playing next to me when they mentioned either LVA or my name. I introduced myself and a valuable personal and professional relationship was launched.

On June 1, the Tropicana announced that it was giving away 50 all-expenses-paid trips to the Atlantis Casino in the Bahamas. These five-day mid-November trips would be given to the players who accumulated the most slot club points between June 1 and August 31. The Trop likely had a deal with the Atlantis, whereby the Atlantis would pick up some or all of the expenses for the trip in order to fill the casino with 50 proven gamblers. The Atlantis, the Tropicana, and the players were all happy with this deal. Win-win-win.

This gave me an excuse to play many hours on a game where I had an advantage. I even played two machines at once. If a slot supervisor or host asked me why I was playing so much, my answer was that I wanted to go to the Bahamas. Since they didn’t believe I was actually a favorite at the game, this explanation made sense to them and they let me be.

The Trop had some $5 progressive games that accrued slot points five times as fast as a $1 game. Unfortunately, most of the time the progressive wasn’t high enough to play profitably. Some players qualified this way, but not me. I didn’t have to have the most points. I only had to have more than the 51st person.

For the second (and hopefully last) time in my career, I hired someone to play on my card. I paid “Joyce” $15 per hour with a promise that I would cover all W-2Gs. She put in many hours over the next three months and ended up losing quite a bit. It was certainly a possible result, although not a likely one. A few months after the promotion, she all of a sudden had enough money for a down payment on a house. Mere coincidence? I don’t know. But I discovered that I’m not trusting enough to hire people to play for me.

After about a month or so, the Trop decided the dollar Joker Wild machines weren’t making enough money for the casino. So they replaced them with full-pay dollar Deuces Wild machines. This was a move they thought was better for them, but I knew it was better for me. Joyce and I played 50 hours a week between us.

By late August, the Deuces Wild machines were gone, too. Also, the casino decided that three months wasn’t long enough to decide who the top 50 players were. So mid-promotion, they extended it to four months. This wasn’t fair to the players who’d been playing based on the old rules, but we had no recourse. We complained to the man in charge, to no avail. Fortunately for these players, the top 40 or so of the 50 places were already locked up. And since the casino games removed all of the dollar-and-higher positive- equity games, anyone who wanted to earn a trip to the Bahamas had to play a game where the casino had the edge. Not many players were interested in doing that, so if you were eligible to go on August 31, you’d probably still be eligible on September 30.

Of the 50 people who won trips to the Bahamas, at least 30 were video poker professionals, and most of us had come out ahead while earning the trip. These couldn’t have been the players the Trop wanted to take to the Bahamas, but that’s the way it turned out.

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