If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bleed 'Em
Casinos, Entertainment Value, and Pai Gow Tiles
I’m currently on a plane to Las Vegas to attend the HIMSS healthcare conference. Healthcare and gambling are both defined by extraordinary amounts of wasteful spending and poor returns on investment. This conference’s agenda will be dominated with ideas and pitches on how we can deliver better healthcare for less money - AI, value based care, remote patient monitoring. The list goes on.
After the sessions, many of those same attendees are going to leave the conference center, hit the casino floor, and get hosed. It doesn’t matter whether it is slots, craps, roulette, or blackjack, casinos are designed to take money and they are quite good at it. Meanwhile, Vegas casinos are raising bet minimums, lowering odds via rule changes (Hello triple-zero roulette), and worsening service.
Sure, there are ways to hypothetically make money within a casino’s walls. You could play poker or count cards in Blackjack. Both require a large amount of skill, practice, and concentration (and for card-counting, subterfuge). These can be positive expected value but have immense variance. Even on a good day, they are very hard ways to make an easy living, and not how I want to spend valuable free time after a long conference day.
We can’t beat the house, but what if we could make the house bleed a little bit. Like Rocky, we can’t win against Vegas’s Apollo Creed, but we can make them go twelve rounds. How? Pai Gow Tiles.
Before I dive more into what Pai Gow Tiles is and why it enables this, I want to establish criteria for what getting value from gambling looks like. We’re very likely going to lose money at the table, so what matters is how much entertainment we get for that money. Think about it like going to a movie. If it costs $50 for two tickets, popcorn, and sodas for a ninety-minute movie, it is effectively $1.80 per minute of entertainment. Don’t do calculations here too literally. The amount of entertainment per minute is going to vary a lot based on the movie, and I’d rarely wish that a movie is longer so that I get more “value” for my money. The point is that it is normal to spend money to be entertained, and gambling should be viewed with the same lens.
So, what makes gambling in a Vegas casino entertaining? Personal opinion, but I’d say
How fun is the game itself?
How is the atmosphere and service?
Do you leave with good stories?
Our goal is to maximize those three while losing the least amount of money per hour. No table game comes close to Pai Gow Tiles.
Pai Gow Tiles is a Chinese gambling game allegedly dating from the Song dynasty. In Vegas, it can be found in a small number of casinos on the Strip. Instead of a deck of cards, it uses a “deck” of thirty-two tiles (effectively dominoes). I’ll skip an in-depth description of how it is played, (you can find a video here), but I definitely find it very fun. It is mentally engaging (lots of strategy to memorize, recall, and apply) and tactile (you roll dice and move the tiles). It avoids the robotic right answers of Blackjack or the mindless lack of meaningful choice in Craps. The best part, however, is the pace.
Pai Gow Tiles has, by far, the lowest amount of times an hour where you will win or lose money of any casino game (excluding poker). Half of all rounds lead to a tie, where no money is won or lost. Between each round, the “deck” of tiles needs to be hand-shuffled. Imagine if the dealer had to stop and re-shuffle after every hand of Blackjack. Shuffling tiles is much more involved than shuffling cards, and much more time-intensive. This means you can sit for a lot longer while actually risking a lot less. Your expected value per round is worse than Blackjack (although better than most other casino games), but there’s an order of magnitude less rounds per hour, so, odds are, you’ll end up losing less money.
Now, sitting around is great and all, but only if the atmosphere and service makes doing so enjoyable. Pai Gow Tiles is relatively unpopular in Vegas. Only a few casinos have it, and I’ve never seen more than one table. From talking to pit bosses, the main player base for Pai Gow Tiles in Vegas consists of Asian high-rollers, which is what justifies keeping around a unique, unpopular, and intensive game to run. The singular table, combined with targeting high-rollers, means that the tables are often in the high limit room of the casino. Bet minimums are not low (e.g $100/hand) but are far lower than a Blackjack table in the same room. This, combined with the slow pace, means you can risk a relatively small amount of money to be in the nicest area of the casino.
Vegas may be squeezing most folks, but they know where their bread is buttered, and still treat high rollers well. Just by playing in the high limit room, you’re generally in an ornate area getting the best service from the best dealers, pit bosses, and waitresses the casino has. Cocktail service is much better (both in terms of speed and quality). instead of a plastic cup of club soda or a shot of Jim Beam, you’re getting bottles of Perrier, crystal glasses of Japanese whiskey, cigars, and more. This is all very fun and does also potentially impact your expected value. Getting an $8 sparkling water or an $80 glass of whiskey for “free” meaningfully offsets your expected losses.
So, do you get good stories? I’d say so. I stumbled on Pai Gow Tiles during a holiday weekend in Atlantic City where it was the only table game with empty seats. From there, to Vegas high-limit rooms watching as the person on my right bet $10,000 a hand, to this blog post, it’s led to some memorable stories over these past eighteen months. If you’re gonna gamble, you may was well get your money’s worth, and Pai Gow Tiles is a great way to do so. Check it out the next time you’re in Vegas or Atlantic City.