The Myth of the High Roller
In Las Vegas, “High Roller” is a relative term. Sure, I’ve seen people place some crazy wagers in the times I’ve been there - $500 slot pulls (each time), $800 Horn bets (a one-roll bet in craps), $1000 set onto a single number in roulette. But a true high roller whose bankroll can maintain that level of betting for days on end is rare. Vegas casinos live for this type of player, and the largest among them are called Whales. Whales often put enough action in play that the outcome of their sessions can literally affect a casino’s quarterly shareholder reports, for better or worse. And they’re treated like royalty. Private jets that are on call to come fetch them from anywhere, at any time. Top floor penthouse suites. Multi-million dollar credit lines. Comped tickets to events that were thought to be sold out. It’s said that there’s only about 200 true whales floating around worldwide at any given time, and competition for them is fierce. But when things go their way, they can also become a very dangerous beast for the casino operator.
Kerry Packer, the late Australian media mogul, was widely feared after he caused the Desert Inn to briefly close after winning $52M of their money in one day. Known for his bravado and temper, he would routinely bet $300,000 per hand in blackjack, and tip the dealer six figures if he walked away a winner. With a $20M credit line, he could weather several consecutive days of losses. But if he got up by a significant amount - Boom, he was gone. On the day of September 11, 2001, he was getting ready to leave up several million dollars when all flights were grounded nationwide. By the time his jet was cleared to leave Vegas, he had found himself down $6M instead. It didn’t matter. Packer was worth about US$4B. Once, while sharing a high-limit blackjack table with a wealthy Texas oilman, the Texan bragged to him that he was worth $60M. Packer pulled out a coin and said “toss you for it.”
The next level down from the rarified world of whales are the hardcore gamblers with $1M credit lines. From there it’s the players that might be rolling with a $100k or $250k marker. Those are whom I’d call high rollers, and I’m not one of them. But I have a friend who tried to be one back in 2021, if only for a while. This was a guy that I had been to Vegas with a couple of times over that past year but recently he had come into some money. How, I don’t know, he never would tell me. But he wanted to get back out to Vegas in the worst way, and me being me, I said Sure, let’s go. He claimed that he’d developed a system for playing roulette that he thought could turn the advantage over to him.
Spoiler Alert: there is no advantage system, for any game. Whoever tells you otherwise is either deceiving themself or trying to sell you something. 1
Now, roulette has a house edge of 5.26%. That means for every $100 wagered, the player is statistically going to lose $5.26 on average. A roulette wheel in the US contains the numbers 1-36, plus a 0 and a 00. If you hit a number that you’ve bet on, it should pay 38:1, the true odds. But instead it pays the player 35:1. That difference is what’s known as the house edge, and it’s the way that casinos make their money. So let’s say that you plan on placing $100 worth of bets across the board for each spin. The average pace of the croupier is usually one spin of the ball every 90 seconds, for a total of 40 spins per hour. Whether Lady Luck happens to be smiling that day or not, the math will grimly predict that after an hour of action at $100 per spin the player’s going to walk away with a $210.40 loss. That’s just the way it works. Sure, some will buck those odds and come out a winner, in fact people do it all the time. But not all of the time.
In the months leading up to our trip, my friend built a mockup of a roulette betting field and ran some simulations. The ones I witnessed didn’t look promising. But our departure day in October finally came to try it out, and when we landed in Vegas a casino limo was waiting. Circa had comped him a 1200sf panoramic suite. I had been comped one of their regular rooms, but wasn’t complaining one bit. Circa is great. It opened in 2020 and was downtown’s first new casino in 40 years, a Strip-styled resort planted smack dab onto Fremont Street.
We goofed around at first with some craps and slots just to get acclimated, then the time came to put his plan into action. After informing his host that he would start off with 10k in chips, a roulette table was roped off for him. I had planned on watching but my friend let me know that he preferred to play alone, so I found a spot at a nearby craps table where I could keep an occasional eye on him. 30 minutes later I saw him walking over to me with his hands clasped together, holding something. He parted his hands to show me a stack of chips.
The yellow chips are called “bananas”. They’re worth $1000 each. The purples are called “Barneys”, they’re worth $500 each. The black chips are $100. My rough count showed about $25k there in his hand. He was kind of in a daze. I guided him directly to the cage where after an ID check, paperwork, and what seemed like a very long time on the phone, the teller counted out $25,475. We went to go get dinner, then I watched him pack his bags, and afterwards I made sure that he did indeed get into the limo to go catch his flight.
Back in Portland afterwards, my friend’s Vegas exploits were all the talk at our poker table. The system! He was determined to try it again. We put together a plan for a January trip, just two months away. I duly booked my flight, as I had already planned to do a research session at UNLV for a historical fiction book that I was writing. January came, and I got a call from him the week before our trip. He wasn’t coming. Something about work, or something about something. That was over two years ago and he hasn’t been back since. His spigot of enthusiasm for Vegas had suddenly been turned completely off, not even a drip. Part of me wonders if there might have been an under-the-radar solo trip that happened before that January. One that he didn’t want to talk about. Maybe a trip where the house edge caught up to him.
The irony is, my own spigot of enthusiasm got twisted open by a few turns since that time. Between my book research, car auctions, and some other business that I was trying to develop there, I ended up taking five trips to Vegas in 2022. And then another five in 2023. I’m on track for four this year. I’m still getting my rooms comped at Circa, and actually now I’m the guy getting the limo service. But how? I’m no high roller, right? Let me tell you how someone who’s never even considered getting a casino credit line can still get comped in Las Vegas.2
If you plan on visiting Vegas regularly, you absolutely have to choose your play based on the house edge. Baccarat has a 1.06% edge, it’s almost an even money game. Blackjack is even lower if you are skilled at counting cards. Most video poker games range from between 1-2% with perfect play. The house edge in Craps can be as low as 0.3% if you back up your pass line bet with a 5x odds bet. Alright, but what do we all know is the most popular game in Vegas, the one that takes up the majority of the casino floor? Yep, slots. Slot machines generally hold around 8% and the people that play them at high limits are the darlings of the casino. If perks and comps are what you’re after, you can have it all as a high limit slot player. But it’s gonna cost you. In 2023, Strip casinos collectively took in $4.8B of revenue from slots. Take 8% of that number and you can see who pays for those fountains.
My game is video poker. In the years before, I’d bounce around from the craps table to the slot machines, just going for kicks and bringing a small bankroll. And that’s all good. But if you want to put a little work into mastering the strategy behind a low-edge game, you’ll have what I consider the ideal Vegas experience; the one in which you’ll at least have a shot at coming home with more than you brought.
Video Poker is a skill-based game. Its computer randomly deals five cards from a 52-card deck and it’s up to you to decide which cards to keep before the draw. It’s no different than sitting at a poker table, other than that there’s no opponent. The opponent is within, it’s your level of skill at making the correct holds. In fact, that solitary aspect of the game colored my initial impressions of it. Who were these weirdos sitting at the bar, playing hand after hand when they could be playing real poker instead? Well, for starters, it’s the casino poker rooms where most of the actual weirdos are found, so you won’t have to be dealing with bluffers, sandbaggers or maniacs. The only person you’ll have to answer to is the bartender when they ask if you’d like another. Then there’s the pace of play. The typical video poker player goes through about 500 hands an hour in their quest to land premium outcomes. There’s a rhythm to it, a constant flow of opportunity that is wholly dependent on the choices you make. Kind of like life, in fast motion.
The birth of video poker contains one of the best Told You So stories in business history. Back in the ’70’s, William “Si” Redd was Bally’s top distributor of mechanical slot machines in Nevada. Already wealthy, he was a serial entrepreneur who was always on the lookout for the next angle or idea. Inspired by the craze behind Atari’s release of Pong in 1975, he flew to Chicago to pitch Bally’s top brass on a groundbreaking idea that he believed could revolutionize the gaming industry. I present to you… Video Poker! They laughed at his idea, but stopped laughing when Si offered them $50,000 to sign a five year non-compete agreement. He believed in his idea that much. They gladly took his money. Si then sold his distribution business and used the money to acquire a number of small businesses that were all working towards developing an electronic slot machine. Now under his ownership, Si folded them in to SIRCOMA (SI Redd COin MAchines) and directed all R&D towards a poker-based game instead. “Draw Poker” debuted in 1979 and by 1981 it had become so popular that he changed the company name to International Game Technology and took it public. Five long years went by for Bally’s, and by then it was too late. IGT’s name was now synonymous with video poker, and along the way they had started developing electronic slot machines as well. Today, IGT is a $4B company with 11,000 employees worldwide. Aside from their slot machine and state lottery business, IGT controls 95% of the market for video poker, as it should be.
As it’s been for decades now, if you get outside of the glitz and glamour of the casinos on The Strip, you’ll find that the game of choice at every locals’ tavern is video poker. Within the metro Las Vegas area there are 1,482 businesses that have been granted a restricted gaming license to offer a small number of them. Those include gas stations, convenience marts, and even grocery stores. So if you need to stop in at a Safeway for a quart of milk you can play a little video poker while you’re there. It’s a thing.
What you’ll find in those places will be the quarter games, or even some at a nickel denomination. The bet is 1-5 credits, but for the best payout schedules you always play 5 credits. You can find quarter games at casinos, but anyone playing for keeps is at the $1 denomination (x5 credits) or higher. Some go way higher. I spied this guy at The Bellagio playing a 5-handed version at $625 a spin ($25 x 5 credits x 5 hands). Looks like he got a good hit. How much he was down before he got that hit, I don’t know. These are the high rollers of whom I speak.
I play at the $1 denomination, sometimes $2. Not really in the realm of high rollers. All of my play is tracked through a rewards card, and at those wagers it’s enough to get me into the tier levels where my rooms are comped. I prefer mid-week stays when Vegas is less packed with partying drunk people, and some properties even offer tier point multipliers when you play on a weekday. That’s what got me into the tier that includes limos. Weekday flights are cheaper, too. On the flight home, I enter the results of each day of my trip into an Excel spreadsheet. My totals for 2023 showed an $1100 loss. Two of the trips I left up, three I left down. I had a total of 18 room nights comped, all of my food was comped, and I never paid for a drink. My biggest expense was tips. Divide $1100 by 18 and that’s $61 a night to go have some fun in The Entertainment Capital of the World. Any high roller will tell you that’s a pretty good deal.
Advantage play is different than an advantage system. Advantage play takes into account variables such as pay tables, comps, free play and promotions on a low-edge game that can bring it up to a positive expected-value proposition for a limited amount of time.
Casino credit lines are only for people who don’t want the hassle of bringing $100k+ in cash with them on their trip. For us regular people, only bring the amount of cash that you are prepared to lose. Because there’s a very good chance that you will.
So far this is the favorite of your work. I almost lost my coffee this morning while reading it. I thought I recognized the guy in the image, the one bellied up to the machine at the Bellagio. He is video poker junkie, but he stopped playing in Las Vegas (he lives there). When he wants to play he jumps on a plane and heads to Reno/Tahoe - that's how he controls his play. He'd be broke if he still played in town. Anyway, the article gave me a reason to call and chat with him.
Great article. I lived in Nevada several years and saw first hand the jubilation of winners and despair of losers. I wasn't a big gambler, so I love reading your insights!