Originally Posted by coach belly View Post
In the case of a VP progressive, where the expected value is positive...Even though only one player can hit the jackpot, are all players playing with an edge? I asked this question several months ago. If the bank of machines feeding the progressive is full with players in every seat, is each player playing at +EV until the royal hits?
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I did a lot of royal racing in Laughlin, Las Vegas and Reno. There was a lot of royal racing going on at the Cal Neva/Reno. The Virginian bartops, keno lounge bartops and skywalk bartops all had great progressive set-ups. Each bar had it's own meter. They were multi-game progessives all on the same meter. The keno lounge and Virginian meters ran at 1.5% and the skywalk meter ran at 2%. The games were all bad pay except for 9/6 Jacks. With meters that fast plays developed all the time. Winston's team came in when a progressive hit $2300 but only took half the machines. They knew better than to try to monopolize. The rest of us were independent agents.

So there would be ten guys pounding away at about 1000 hph and each using an aggressive royal strategy that produced a royal about every 34,000 games.

I was right in there with them and my expectation looked like this. At 1000 hph I was running a $1250 an hour wager. With the strategy I used I was taking a 3.4% drop between royals. That's a cost of $43 an hour. My expectation was to hit a royal every 34 hours of play. So the cost was $1460 per royal. The average royal went at $3000.

Some people suffer delusions that royals never hit and you could still be there 24 hours later dozing off while playing from lack of sleep. That's all bullshit. You got ten guys cranking out 1000 hph. That's 10,000 hands per hour. The royal is gonna go within 3 maybe 4 hours. If you get stretched out it might go 5 or 6 hours. A worst case scenario would be 9 or 10 hours. But it usually went off within 4 hours.

Four hours of play without getting the royal was an expected loss of about $160 to me. And most of the time I didn't get the royal. But there were a lot of royal races at the Cal Neva. I got my share of royals.