Rating: damn decent-.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Red Rock is just about the most beautiful hotel/casino I’ve ever laid eyes on. The hotel entrance and lounge bring to mind the sort of New York hotels that I don’t enter because I know I can’t afford them; extremely stylish and easy on the eye. And yet the place feels comfortable to a guy like me, who is not extremely stylish and whose easiness on the eye depends on the beholder. I sometimes feel like I’m underdressed to play poker at the Borgata in Atlantic City; the Red Rock doesn’t have the same pretensions. Like the Suncoast, it’s way out in the middle of nowhere so far as tourists are concerned; likewise, it offers a range of amenities geared to making sure you don’t need to leave the building for months.

The poker room is spacious and had 4-8 with a half kill running on both days I attended; on Sunday there was an 8-16 half kill. The 8-16 was the highest game I’ve played to date, and the first time since 2003 when I felt outmatched at a limit poker game; that said, I’d love to take a crack at this game when I come back for CES next month. Meanwhile, the 4-8 had the highest variability of any game I’ve seen in a single casino; on Sunday, it ranked among the softest games I’ve ever played, but on Monday it was only marginally easier than the 8-16 (possibly because 3 of the 8-16 players joined me there over the course of the evening).

Red Rock had a nice innovation at their tables. Instead of clocking in at the front desk, the dealer swipes your card at the table to track your time. A small LCD screen then tells the dealer the names of all the players, so he can say, “Your turn to act, Jeff.” It’s a small thing that greatly increases the friendliness of the game, since the players can pick up each other’s names over the course of play. Slight downside: the system also allows the dealer to clock you out when you’re out of your seat, so you can’t lock one up and keep the comp clock running while you’re in the bathroom or grabbing a smoke.

The casino itself resembles a theatre in the round: a central bar, followed by an inner circle of table games, a large outer circle of machines, followed by restaurants, shops, and spokes out to the rest of the hotel. It’s an easy place to get lost, but with a clear field of view to landmarks, it’s also an easy place to get reoriented.

Red Rock offered one game of note: a video poker machine that sells blocks of hands rather than the standard one bet per hand. At the quarter machines I played, $40 purchased 200 hands at any of six different games; games with weaker paytables compensated by offering more hands, up to 200 extra at the Jacks or Better. Once you start a round, you can’t change games or reduce your bet from the maximum.

For your forty bucks, you get a countdown from 200 onscreen, and your credit meter starts at zero. This is decremented by five every time you deal, and will go negative if you’re losing. At the end of 200 hands, you cash out whatever is on the credit meter. If you hit quad Aces on the first hand and you’re afraid you’ll put it all back, you can quit and cash out at any time, forfeiting the remaining hands.

Here’s what was fascinating about this structure: it’s not a video poker game, it’s a one-person tournament. You basically have two goals: one, finish with a credit meter above zero to get anything back; two, finish with a credit meter above 160 to win money. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter if your credit meter is zero or the theoretical maximum of negative 1,000; both scores leave you down forty bucks. I played three rounds, and lost them all with final scores of -360, -120, and -60; do the math and you’ll see that I did marginally better than I would have done playing the game straight, provided I played the same number of hands. On the flip side, towards the end of each round, there was absolutely no value in hitting trips or worse; these hands weren’t big enough to get my credit meter back towards positive.

I don’t have the calculus to do a mathematical analysis of the variance involved here, but I think it makes sense to play this like a tournament game rather than a straight video poker game. First, play the highest variance option you can find; with your losses capped at forty bucks, it makes sense to shoot for the bigger payouts. (On the machines I played, that was Double Double Bonus, paying 9-5-4.) It seems to me to be a poor bet to play the lower variance games like Jacks or Better; they give you more hands but a weak paytable, so you’re likely to lose money to the churn.

Second, adjust your play as you near the end of your session, if you’re negative. On the second-to-last hand of my last session, I was down 80 credits and was dealt four to a flush; I kept two to the straight flush for the Hail Mary. My guesstimate is that aggressive play adjustments kick in when the negative credit meter is just over the hands remaining times five; i.e., if you’re down 300 and you’ve got 50 hands left, it’s time to kick it up a notch. I’m not sure the exact inflection point where you keep 44 on a deal of 9944x, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

Point lost: okay, so I know I sound cheap when I say this, but Red Rock is the first casino where I’ve asked about a poker rate and was told no. The impression they give is that the entire place is first class, so I can understand the marketing decision behind not discounting the rooms–that said, that’s the sort of bennie that is likely to get my butt warming one of their chairs in the future.