I have a friend who was interested in trying to make Diamond or Seven Stars.

He is not really deeply bankrolled, so negative variance could be a big deal to him.

I warned him that VP has a lot of variance if you are playing at the $5 level in order to earn 2500 tiers in a day, but he shrugged me off and played anyway.

It is important to know that this friend never had a TR card before, nor did he have a player's card at any other casino.

He was new to VP, but studied it carefully and even carried a cheat-sheet with him so he knew he was always making the mathematically correct plays.

Oddly enough, he chose the 99.96% 10-6 DDB at the Rio. I warned him that the machine had even bigger variance, but he was obsessed with the 99.96% return and kept saying, "But that means I'll only lose $4 per $10000 bet", and I couldn't talk him out of it. Even my tale of getting beat down at the machine myself around that time didn't dissuade him.

I went with him while he played, and like me, he got absolutely clobbered. He did one misclick but other than that played perfectly.

It was an epic beatdown and he didn't even play that long. He lost $1500 in that session and quit. (It's funny that the only two sessions I've ever witnessed at that machines, one mine and one his, were both brutal beatdowns in a short time.)

He yanked his card out and disgustedly said, "Fuck this. I don't know what I was thinking. I'm never playing this shit again." He tossed his TR card in the trash as we left.

I just got an e-mail from him today.

Apparently he is now getting offers worth $450-$500 each, throughout August, September, and October. He was gleeful in his e-mail, stating that he could actually make back twice what he lost by simply redeeming these offers and never playing again.

Keep in mind that I am a Seven Stars member and my offers are like $50 each, or at best $100. I get a little bit more in the casinos where I played (Laughlin, Tahoe, Rincon), but nothing like this guy.

Also keep in mind that he barely earned any tier credits because that machine only gives you one per $50 in, and he quit so soon.

So this is an interesting situation.

Even when I played heavily over a few-month period at places like Rincon, my offers were still crap because I had already established a pattern of both optimal play and overcomping.

This guy shows up once, loses $1500 when running WAY below average luck-wise, and gets lucrative offers that far exceed mine.

So this made me wonder....

Did the computer give him these offers because it erroneously pegged him as a bad VP player (since it can only go by results)?

Or did the computer give him these offers because he showed up and spent $1500 right off the bat?

Or is it a combo of both?

I have long maintained that the computer analyzes VP results to make a skill approximation, but I didn't know that it applied to single sessions, where literally anything can happen.

Theories?