Originally Posted by tableplay View Post
Originally Posted by monet View Post
Originally Posted by tableplay View Post
Yes. It was naive thinking to be sure. As you say, a better reason is because you can safely churn more playthrough with the added 50/50 bet (as for beating it, well that's a hell of a good reason to stop it too.) - just like the odds bet in craps if a player is being rated for their play (that's why a few casinos limit the max odds bets to 2 or 3 to 1). But retrospectively, I now believe the primary reason was the Nestor/Kane bug that Ron discovered independently. The reasons you gave are valid and are most likely secondary and tertiary (with my reason only a very small fractional quaternary component of its elimination) motivations for eliminating it (I'm sure it can be found in small shops around the country on very rare occasions like convenience stores, bar tops in dive bars, rural/smaill indian casinos, etc.).
I agree. I think it was the bug that was the main reason.
I remember talking about it to a few pals when they were taking them out but we just figured what I said earlier because that information wasn't known yet.
The other thing about double up, though, is you don't get rated on that play, so it kinda defeats the purpose if playing flat.
However, to get even money in the Casino is always worth investigating... am I right?
Double Up is still around... it isn't completely taken out in Vegas.
It isn't very wide spread though.
Yes you're right IMHO. I think there were some casinos that did count the double-up towards tier points and player's club points. IIRC, many originally did this and then got wise to it and changed the system to not count it. But for the sake of argument let's say it never counted for tier or rewards points. The casino is still exposed to greater risk since a small bet can be turned into a big profit with a lucky streak. Casino management wants to manage risk and (unlimited) 50/50 bets jeopardize risk management - making it much more difficult. They would love to have high variance on all bets, but of course no one would play if it gets too out of balance so they have to have variance at the "not too tart, not to sweet level". Anyhow, I believe they could limit the double-ups in the settings menu (I am not positive about this) and if they did, I think that I remember seeing 3 double-ups max occuring at a couple shops back then.
Yes, there were double up machines that gave points for doubling up. but not many that I know of, and all the ones I knew of were for comps only, so, it wasn't really worth doing just for that reason. I guess, before my time there could have been more around that were giving cash back.

The Willams Blackjack was over 100% and had let it ride(different than double up since you are playing your wins into the next hand) and they had some places with very generous comps and some with cash back. It was only really worthwhile if you played the $1 version, but they only had those in a few places. The $1 versions were mostly in Reno and Lake Tahoe, some of best comps ever for me, including mall shopping, limos anywhere and the casino paid for it all, I would use the comps to buy gold jewelry from the gift shops (good times).

There were a few places that were giving points on the old multi-game machines when you feed in coins and banked them in the credit meter without ever having to play.

The Stardust had a slot machines that whenever you lined up 2 blue sevens (3 blue sevens was the top jackpot for 1k) it allowed you to feed in 3 more coins for a chance to spin the 3rd reel. it counted the coins going in and gave points when you did this. You could decline the 3rd reel spin and just cash out the coins, You could just keep doing that over and over without having to make any more spins. They had a 1% cash card on slots and comps, they also had various multipliers and point contests as well. Ithe hourly on that was very good and it wasn't very fun but I think it was worth about $15 to $20 an hour(perhaps $6 more per hour if you fast fed coins like a maniac, I can't remember now exactly what it was worth) with very little risk. And sometimes when you were finished and made the final spin you would connect with the $1k