MYSTERY BONUS - Another game from the IGT Visions series. They worked the same way as the Times Pay Games. The one I will use as an example was in the Ramada Express (now Tropicana Express). It was a two-coin $1 Five Times Pay game and every so often you were awarded a random bonus between 50 and 100 coins.
There was a bar in about the center of the Ramada. It was a little high roller room of sorts, but it wasn't completely walled in so you could see around the casino pretty good. It was a hustler hangout. We'd sit at the bar drinking coffee or coke, trading war stories or whatever, and we could keep an eye on any action the advantage slots located around the bar were getting.
There was even $2 and $5 10/7 DB in the room. It was way above my bankroll so I left it alone. But those machines didn't get much action. I figured the Vegas pros didn't pound it because they didn't know that locals got 5X CB. Non-locals only got .06666%, but locals got .3333%. And one day a month we got .6666%. I was paying $35 a year for a mailbox at the Riverside at the time. I think if the Vegas pros knew that they would have pounded the 10/7 out of the room.
The configuration on the Mystery Bonus was 450 coin-in to move it from the "Watch for" phase into the "Coming Soon" phase. Then you could trigger the Mystery Bonus on anywhere from the first coin-in to the 200th coin-in. The average was 100 coin-in. The average bonus was 75 coins (50 + 100 divided by two = 75).
I always used 90% overall payback to do approximate calculations on advantage slots. But in the case of the Ramada it wasn't an approximate calculation. Their dollar slot were literally 90 percenters. If you run $1000 in action on one of their dollar slots, go grab a house phone and call a slot host. They'll come running to give you a room comp for the night. That's how it was then anyway.
I had more room comp than I could use anyway. Sometimes I would have two rooms for the night because of overlapping offers. One casino might send me a mailer for the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of the month, while another one would send me a mailer for the 23rd and 24th. So on the 23rd I would have two rooms for the night.
The Ramada, Pioneer, River Palms and the Riverside would use any excuse in the world to send you room comp mailers.
"Come celebrate Easter...."
"Come celebrate Memorial Day...."
"Come celebrate Cinco De Mayo...."
"Come celebrate our 9th anniversay...."
So on and So on. We used to make jokes about it like "Come celebrate St. Francis of Assisi's birthday! Had he lived he would be 804 years old!"
Anyways, on the Mystery Bonus game an average 550 coin-in got a 75 coin bonus. Anytime a ploppie would put it into "Coming Soon" mode then get up and leave I was on it like white of rice. It was a 51%+ advantage to spin it off.
I had another trick the other hustler's didn't have. You could see the coin-in/coin-out meters just to the right of the third reel. Anytime I finished a play I would write down where the coin-in meter was at. And every so often I would go by and check how many coin-in had been made by the tourists since the last time the Mystery Bonus was awarded. I got a lot of plays where I only had to do 20 or 30 coin in to trigger the "Coming Soon" phase.
