I doubt one player's good luck was the tipping point. Maybe if Todd hit the top $200K award so that particular bank of machines took a beating for the month or quarter.
The location of the 99.67% DSTP machines at Rincon weren't a big secret and had been listed on VPFree2 for almost 4 years. There is also frequent discussion of San Diego County video poker on the [harrahscasinos] Yahoo group.
Interestingly, I ran into a group of WSOP Circuit poker players at Harvey's Lake Tahoe in 2013. They were all Seven Stars members from SoCal, and the casino where they grinded tier credits exclusively? Harrah's Rincon (and their 50c DSTP Bonus Poker machines).