Last night I got to listen to Frank's interview of Peter Listen on the July 28th edition of Gambling With An Edge. Listen is one lucky guy. He was in the right place at the right time with the requisite knowledge or intelligence to figure out the Lucky Coin Bonus Systen. He was also given bigtime jackpots with bigtime meter speed. Never before has a casino hustler been given such an easy way to make bigtime dough.
Mandalay Bay opened in March 1998. The Lucky Coin Bonus System debuted with much fanfare. But besides lucky coin the casino floor was filled with other advantage slots like the IGT Vision Series of advantage slots, The Williams advantage slots, and the Silicon Gaming advantage slots. This turned the Mandalay Bay opening into a hustlers convention.
There were about a half dozen or so Lucky Coin banks, each with three lucky coin jackpots, with meters running from 2% to 5%. At that time I had been playing machines for about a year and a half. I was still in the learning curve trying to learn everything I could about video poker and advantage slots.
At first I didn't know what to make of the Lucky Coin banks. But there was a well known couple in advantage slot circles who were playing them. I knew that they didn't play anything without big edge. So it was a "monkey see, monkey do" thing for me. I just went into action when they did and copycatted them. He was known to be highly secretive but he actually broke down and gave me a few pointers.
The rest I had to figure out on my own. I had to do a lot of thinking about the game. It was the name itself "Lucky Coin Bonus System" that gave me the big clue as to how the system worked . You didn't have to hit a line pay, you just had to bet the lucky coin, i.e., a specific coin number.
On a bank of 20 machines there might be 6 or 8 tourists playing and driving the meters up. When a meter got to a playable number the hustlers would swarm in, playing two machines each if they could , at breakneck speed. When the lucky coin was hit the hustlers hit their cashout buttons leaving the tourists there sulking.
I figure the lucky coin jackpots represented somewhere between 15% and 20% of the overall payback of the game. That meant you were racing against a big drop, which meant the game had a severe lack of line pays. The hustlers were smoking the tourists out of alot of those lucky coin jackpots. The tourists started complaing bigtime about the lack of line pays.
The Acres's Gaming folks started coming up and watching what was going on. They even set up their own table on the casino floor, probably so they could think tank while watching the hustlers swarm in and out of the lucky coin banks snapping the tourists off.
Two months after the opening Mandalay Bay stripped all the lucky coin jackpots out of the casino. I think Acres Gaming had to do some heavy thinking about how to solve the problem. Their answer, if they were gonna be able to sell the system in the future, was to cut the meter speed to a crawl. And thats how we wound up with all the lucky coin banks in Nevada that are not exploitable. Meter speed tells the whole story.
In a series of 5 posts on vpFREE I gave my take on how the system works, albeit in a fictionalized setting. For anyone new here who wants to read it you can start with post #110823and follow the thread. The thread is called "The Fremont Street Commando does Nowhere, Nevada.
