Is the Panda Beatable This Time?
I recently wrote an article on our WizardofVegas.com site about two promotions that had been rolled out by the Royal Panda Casino, so please take a look at that here if you like.
It turned out that neither of those promotions were beatable for any meaningful amount of money, and furthermore, that they would require long hours of play in order to be able to take advantage of them. Ultimately, I determined that neither promotion was likely worth doing unless the person in question likes to play live dealer games to begin with. If that describes you, then by all means, have a look at those promotions.
With that out of the way, the Royal Panda Casino is now offering an eminently beatable (in my opinion) promotion on the 21st day of every month.
They call the promotion, ‘Lucky 21,’ and the way it works is that any player who plays at Royal Panda’s Live Casino and gets dealt a natural Blackjack will be entered into a drawing in which three winners are selected to receive $210 each:
According to the special Terms & Conditions for this casino, the number of blackjacks that a person gets as well as the amount bet is irrelevant. According to the terms and conditions, any player who gets a natural Blackjack shall receive one drawing entry.
I would hope that nobody needs me to tell them the optimal way to play this, but just in case you do, the answer is: Get one Blackjack and quit while betting table minimum!
There’s really no other way to do it, the promotion states that any bet allowed at the table (i.e. the minimum) shall qualify for the promotion if the player receives a Blackjack. I believe that the minimum is $5, so you will simply bet $5/hand until you catch a natural.
What remains for us to do now is to try to approximate the value of this promotion. That process will be difficult, however, because we don’t know how many people will actually participate in the promotion. Instead, what I intend to do is to illustrate what the value is depending on how many people DO end up participating. At that point, you can make your own speculations as to how many people will actually do it.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Before we get into that, I do want to point out that this promotion pays an all-cashable $210 to three players with no wagering requirements whatsoever. That money, as well as the player’s balance, can be withdrawn immediately if the player so chooses. Quite generous!
BACK TO THE ANALYSIS:
Unfortunately, U.S. players are not accepted (or I would totally be doing this!) but another downside of U.S. players not being accepted is that I cannot determine the rules for their Live Blackjack game. Instead, I am going to base it on a 99.6% RTP, which is equal to one of the video blackjack games on their site.
From the WizardofVegas article, conveniently, I have already determined that the probability of getting a natural Blackjack is:
.047489488
Therefore, a player is expected to get one every 1/.047489488 = About 21.057 hands.
If the player must make an average of 21.057 bets at $5 per bet, then the total amount bet is roughly $105.29. If we assume a 99.6% RTP, then we can determine the expected loss like so:
105.29 * .004 = $0.42116
In other words, the player expects to lose roughly forty-two cents in the amount of time it takes for that player to be expected to get a blackjack.
We also know that a total of $630 is to be given away (three prizes of $210 each) in this promotion and that each player may only win once. With that being the case, it becomes a simple matter to determine how many entrants there would have to be before the player no longer has the best of it.
In order to keep this digestible, we will first solve as though there is only one $210 prize:
210/.42116 = x
X = 498.62
As you can see by dividing 210/498.62, we get roughly .42116. In other words, if there was only one prize of $210, then it would require there to be 498.62 entries before the prize ceased to have a positive expected value for the players playing the promotion.
Better yet, there are three prizes, which means that there would need to be 498.62*3 = 1495.86 entries before those entering the drawing experienced a negative expected value on the blackjack played.
If you would like to determine the value based on how many players you think there will be, then in order to do that, you would simply divide 630 by the number of players you think that there are going to be. If you thought that there would be 630 players, then the result would be an expected:
630/630 = 1
One dollar value on the play for each individual player less the expected loss of .42116 which makes the overall value .57884.
Conclusion:
I don’t know how many people will ultimately play this promotion, but my guess is that it will be significantly fewer than 1,495, or even 630. If I had to guess, then I would suggest that maybe 200 would end up playing the promotion diluting the value of the prizes to $3.15/person for an overall expected profit of $2.72884 per person.
I understand that doesn’t seem particularly lucrative, but as far as online promotions go, this is definitely a generous one as the casino is guaranteeing itself a loss of $630 in straight cash given away no matter what happens. The actual dollar value is, of course, not very high in terms of expected profits for the player, but the percentage expectation is likely HUGE and it will probably only take between twenty minutes and a half hour to get the natural Blackjack.
I wouldn’t drop everything to play this promotion, but the percentages are strong enough that, if I was sitting around on the 21st of the month (and not from the United States) and I had a few minutes with nothing to do, I would log in and play really quick until I hit a natural Blackjack.
If you’re already a Royal Panda player anyway, then it doesn’t matter what your game is, you shouldn’t leave value on the table! Even if you are normally a slots player, if you are playing and notice that it is the 21st of the month, use the WizardofOdds website to make sure that you are playing optimal strategy for blackjack and go into Royal Panda’s Live Blackjack and play really quickly until you hit a natural!
The promotion may not be super advantageous in dollar and cents, but I also like to look at percentages, and in terms of percentages, it would be really hard to find anything better!
