casino side bet

I think it’s fine to play a +EV lottery. If you’re spending 40 bucks an hour on the promo and make more than that, your poker bankroll should be fine.

If you’re a breakeven player you’ll probably need a few 100K if not more to play this assuming you’re there 40 hours a week. You’re paying around 83K a year and probably not recouping much from the small payouts.

What happens if there is no flop? Does the side bet push?

I miss Flop-a-Lock at Imperial Palace 😉

If they take the bet w/ no flop, I'd decline. I might make sure we get to see all five cards before they take the bet.

That said, I'd play occasionally just for fun.

In New England, this is the spot where you tell the dealer to "spread the pot" so the villain knows to stay to see all the cards.

As others have noted, the odds might be longer because a full board won't run out frequently. However, running with the 2.5m to 1 odds, and if we assumed the winning board was ran out when it is possible from the flop - if you played 2.5 million times, you would win at least once approximately 60% of the time. If you played it 5 million times, your odds of winning at least once goes to the mid 80%s. To be approximately 99% to win at least once, you would need to play 10 million times.

So to bankroll just this game, you'd need $10 million to go broke less than 1% of the time. With $5 million, it would be like putting your entire bankroll in a pot with AA vs KK. Odds are in your favor, but we've all eaten that loss.

More than the money, would be time. Just to get to 2.5 million hands would take 30+ years of very dedicated poker playing. Doyle Brunson probably didn't reach 10 million live hands in his lifetime.

The best argument for making the bet is that you know if you would have won. Kind of like when I worked in an office that has a lottery pool - Even though the odds were really bad, the risk of being the only sucker to show up to work while everyone else is millionaires is worth the $10 insurance payment.

Apart from the problem where you need to see all 5 cards, your last line is a terrible assumption. With powerball/etc. it's known that when it becomes so big it's close to even that you still have to factor in the chance of multiple winners (and there have been multiple winners of large jackpots).

Saying that, if the rule was something like "only the last preflop aggressor can make the bet" I'd probably do it anytime I didn't block it and not care about sane bankroll management.

Yeah, there is something to be said for this. Although at 30 hands per hour we're paying $30 an hour into a lottery fund that I'm guessing isn't paying off remotely that. Even if it pays of $10 an hour, so we're "only" down $20 per hour, that's going to obliterate our (or at least my) hourly winrate in the game, which is a heavy toll to pay to avoid perhaps being the sucker who loses out.

GcluelesssuckernoobG

Oh man, I completely missed that. This and the fact that not remotely all hands see a river dealt make this a horrible bet, imo.

GcluelesssuckerbetnoobG

If this is like the side bet I've seen, it is settled based on the flop and if there is no flop, your bet rolls to the next deal.

With the rare but large payoff, even if it's +ev, you still have taxes to account for. But if it adds fun to your experience then $1 isn't a bad bet to make, especially since the smaller payoffs will hit about 1 in 25 times

In addition to what others have pointed out, I'll also ask you about the card removal effect coming from people who are seeing flops. Since people are seeing the flop more often with high cards than low cards, it's disproportionately likely that your jackpot will be blocked when there is a flop.

Another factor is that we will be forced to call bets drawing dead when 3 diamond royal cards flop.

Nice catches, imo.

Way back in the day me and my equally stoopid cousin wandered into a casino as noobs and got interested in the Caribbean Stud table game. We got home afterwards and started dealing ourselves the game just to see how well we would do. To our amazement, we were crushing it at home. So we excitedly went out to the casino to take it down, win millions, and retire in our early twenties. Turns out we had the payout structure all wrong. Details matter. 😀

GcluelesssidebetnoobG

Taxes make the -EV without question.

Why can't we just play poker?

It's all fun and games, until someone puts 3.2 million on the table.

This is why we can't have nice things.

just to settle some of the details,
-they dont take your $1 unless you see a flop.
-if you see a flop of 3 diamond royals, they rabbit hunt the turn and river for you even if the hand ends on the flop.
-you get to see if other players at the table are also making the bet so you can just not make it if someone else is also betting it.

im mostly interested in this from a bankroll standpoint.

this is very interesting. is this math real?

well ive been pondering this bet for a while and what i realized is that 2M or 3M or 5M dollars are all about the same to me in terms of how they change my life. So it really doesnt matter that the bet is +$EV, because if I win, 3.2M or 2M its the same. Its an interesting thing to consider, because its almost like reverse ICM

I’ve seen those side bets hit big a few times, but most of the time they're just rake killers. I skip them and put the money toward the actual poker game.

I’ve seen some players make a few bucks off those side bets, but long run they’re just raking more from the table with terrible odds. I skip them completely.

So has anyone ever hit the 3.2 million yet?

Thank you everyone for identifying so many great points so that there isn't a ton to add here.

I'll add an additional one: the utility of money. Having $3.2M isn't "worth" twice as much to an individual as having $1.6M. (Just think of impact on quality of life).

There are very slight diminishing returns for how much utility is in each dollar after your first. Playing with numbers, I'd estimate each dollar is worth ~99.9999% as much as the one before it. That means it'd take until your 10, 001st dollar for this factor to make a difference of a full penny. By $100, 000, your next dollar is worth 90 cents on the dollar, and your millionth dollar (now that you've long-since paid off your house and all other debts and already have enough leftover to go on a year's sabbatical from work) is worth 36 cents.

Using this framework, the 3.2 millionth dollar is only worth 4 cents compared to the dollar you're wagering to make it (even though that dollar isn't literally your last dollar, it's worth very close to a full dollar assuming your net worth is less than $100k).

(Of course, none of this is pertinent to a poker game; it'd be like accounting for the curvature of the earth at the shooting range.)

I couldn't actually find a calculator that would rollup the cumulative worth of the $3.2M score and I don't feel like making an Excel sheet with 3 million rows in it to do it myself, but sufficed to say it's not worth it. (Even if it weren't for the myriad reasons above that point out why the odds are actually longer than 1-in-2.5mm and the score is less than $3.2mm, which all frankly make this moot.)

Unfortunately, human psychology is almost exactly inverted here, where an initial small buy-in seems like meaningless money while the potential payoff seems like meaningful money. But that's because we don't intuitively count the value of our wager/return on a per-dollar basis. (This is why the natural human tendency in poker is toward playing loose passive preflop.)

It's going to be difficult to talk about this without sounding like a bougie pos, but...

$1M isn't what it used to be, and I could understand arguments that $3.2M is enough to instantly quit your 40h/week job but $1.6M "just" helps you out a lot.

Would assume a correct-ish graph has steps, Eg.

$0-$2k 100%
$2k-$20k declines slowly and linearly
$20k-$200k declines less slowly but still mostly linear

...then somewhere between $200k and say $4M you get to the point (for most people) where passive income on easy/safe investments with the money means you have "infinite money", unless you start spending more, so the value drops off a lot.

Damn, I was all excited and then you guys took the stuff I was gonna say.

Well, here's a thought. Maybe if you become rich enough, things shift back. If I was Bill Klein, indifferent to losses and donating all wins to charity, I think I probably would just take the ev.