Collecting free money

Edit: SlotMasters has changed their business model, so much of this article is no longer relevant. I hope you collected your free money while it lasted!

Last week I posted about three apps I have been using, one to make you smarter, one to make you money, and one to make you better at poker. The apps to make you smarter and better are poker were obvious.

Read more books and get smarter. Yep, that makes sense.

Study common poker situations and memorize the GTO play. That also makes sense.

But play a slot app to make money? Has Jonathan lost his mind?

I fully understand the skepticism. I mentioned in last week’s post that I have never played a slot machine in my life, and I don’t plan to. I don’t think many readers fully understand what it means to “play” on SlotMasters. It is certainly not the same as pulling up a dingy chair to a slot machine and mindlessly pressing buttons while other patrons blow smoke in your face and tell you bad beat stories.

Two readers left comments last week that illustrate a lack of thinking outside the box and not understanding the opportunity at hand:

“SlotMasters? Really Jon……”

“As i understand it, this is an app that intends to bring profit by showing ads, and in short time when players accumulate it will have a very low hourly rate, kind of like poker freerolls.”

Let’s ignore the fact that this is a slot app for a minute and think about this situation logically.

Last week I had $95 in my SlotMasters account:

This week I have $138 in my SlotMasters account:

This means that over the last week, I made $43. I am sure some of you are already thinking “That is nothing! You are wasting your time!” You must understand though, that I actually played on the app for about five (yes 5!) minutes each day for a total of 35 minutes over the last week. This works out to making $73.71 per hour. While I cannot put in very much time, even I cannot pass up that hourly rate, especially when I implement my truly genius system, which I am happy to share with you…

If you have already downloaded SlotMasters, you know that each tournament that awards money actually takes a decent amount of time to “play”, often lasting 250 spins or more. Instead of manually adjusting my bet size and pressing the “Spin” button 250 times, I press and hold the “Bet Max” button for three seconds (to set it to bet max automatically) and walk away. Truly genius, I know.

Each day I wake up, turn on my iPad and iPhone (yes, I multi-table), navigate to the games that award real money, hold “Bet Max”  for three seconds, and then take a shower and have breakfast. I come back an hour later and either see that I lost all my credits (and lost the tournament) or I am out of spins (and I  have lots of credits and a decent amount of equity in the tournament). I then navigate to the next tournaments that are paying money and press “Auto Bet Max” and walk away again. I do this a few times throughout the day and at the end of each day, apparently I win about $6 in equity (I am actually up over $500 since the app launched its beta version).

I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not sit there and sweat each and every spin (or any spin, for that matter). This is very different than the experience of playing freeroll poker tournaments that actually require you to sit and play. SlotMasters takes almost no time and attention.

It is worth noting that my truly genius strategy certainly leaves some profit on the table, but my goal is to maximize my hourly rate, not my profit, because the marginal increase to my profit by paying attention to stack sizes and choosing bet sizes intelligently will cause a huge hit to my hourly rate. If you care about maximizing your profit, I suggest you start the app and check in on it after 15 minutes or so, when it is clear if you are making a deep run or not. If you are, you can then play intelligently to maximize your profit. You certainly do not need to anything besides bet max during the first 90% of each event.

So, it is “worth it” to not be on my phone for a few hours each day in exchange for $6? I actually make a point to try to NOT be on my phone, so having it “occupied” doing something else is an additional reason to put it down, allowing me to clear my mind. How much is a clearer mind worth? Of course, if I actually need my phone, I can simply go to it and use it. You do not have to use all your spins in one sitting.

So, back to that whopping $6 I win each day. What can it buy?

It could get you this tea sampler:

Or it could get you this 12-pack of toilet paper:

Free tea or toilet paper each day? Sign me up!

It should be made clear that I signed up for a “VIP” account, which costs $8.99 per month, in order to not have to deal with being shown ads. Having to click through ads REALLY puts a hurting on the $73.71 hourly rate. Clearly the membership fee should be taken out of your winnings. At the end of the month, assuming I win at the rate of $43 per week, I will be up $172 minus the $9 fee, for a total profit of $163, cutting my actual hourly rate to $69.86.

While $163 may not sound like much, it can buy you this nifty computer monitor:

$163 can also buy you 326 rolls of toilet paper:

Multiply this 12-pack by 27 to get 326 rolls. I am not sure what you would do with this much toilet paper. Use your imagination.

Even if you don’t have much use for a new computer monitor or a pile of toilet paper, if you decide to practice delayed gratification and save up all your winnings over the course of the year, you will end up with $1,956. Maybe this is chump change to you, but isn’t to me.

$1,956 can buy you this fun seemingly over-priced watch:

$1,956 can also buy you 3,912 rolls of toilet paper:

That would be more than enough toilet paper to completely fill my apartment. I am not sure what I would want to do that, but perhaps that sounds fun to you.

You may also notice that I have drastically increased the amount of MasterCoins in my account over the last week, from 413k to 745k. While these coins are currently not worth much because if you lose all your coins, you get 15k at the start of each day, if SlotMasters decide to run events with buy-ins of more than 15k, I will be in great shape to capitalize on the opportunity. Let’s start running 100k buy-in events please!

It should be obvious that the main issue with scooping all this profit is that as more users join SlotMasters, your equity will decrease, unless they continuously raise the amount of cash they give away each month (currently $25,000). This means that the easy $69.86 per hour will come to an end and eventually dwindle to nothing (or even a negative hourly rate). That said, I think it will take quite a while for your hourly rate to dip below $10. While I will not play for $10 per hour, I imagine some readers will be happy to press a few buttons at that rate.

By making this blog post, I have certainly hurt my profitability on SlotMasters, but hopefully you all know by now that I am more than happy to give my time, resources, and energy in order to help my followers. Do not be one of those close-minded people who think “Slots! You are an idiot!” or “You only made $43 in a week! You are wasting your time!” When someone presents you with a little side income at the cost of almost no time and resources, you should be happy to accept their gift.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you feel like giving your friends some free money, please share this post with them. That will help both me and them. Be sure to check back next week for another educational blog post. It will be about poker, don’t worry! Thanks for reading!

Update! One week later:

I am happy to hear that a few of my followers have started collecting their free money using my truly genius strategy. I assumed my win rate would go down, but SlotMasters added a few additional real money games, so instead of winning less this week, I actually won a decent amount more. To be fair, I won one event and I also cashed for $20 (I think) in one of their “major” events, so I probably ran hot.

I won $55 over 30 minutes of play, for a nice, clean $110 hourly rate. Za Zing! I also have over 1 MILLION coins. I sure hope those become worth something at some point! To be clear, I have been playing every event, not just those that award dollars. That said, I am still spending essentially no time each week.

Update! Two weeks later:

I have now been told by at least six of my followers that they are collecting the free money. That makes me happy! This week was my most profitable yet.

While I actually lost 17,000 coins (oh, the horror!!!), I won a hefty $75 ($150/hour!). Playing SlotMasters is similar to playing multi-table poker tournaments. If you put in enough volume, you are certain to win some amount of tournaments, but you don’t get to choose which ones you win. Sometimes you win the $10,000 buy-in events and are rich and other times you win the $500 buy-in events and are poor. This week, I was fortunate to do well in the events that awarded cash. Worst case though, it seems like I will at least win some coins. Cha-Ching!

Update! Three weeks later:

This week I was fortunate enough to win $20 in their “big” event each week, where first place gets something like $200. I profited $65 this week in 30 minutes of play. Shiiiiip! I also ground up my coins a bit. I am starting to sound like a broken record, but if you aren’t collecting your free money, you are missing out.

Update! Eight weeks later:

Things were going great until SlotMasters changed the tournament structures such that you will not frequently run out of chips before you run out of spins if you simply bet max and walk away. This has put a hurting on my profitability because now I only do well when I get a ton of chips (when I run so hot that I don’t run out of chips before spins). As a point of reference, I would run out of spins before chips about 30% of the time (usually cashing) before this update and now I run out of spins before chips about 8% of the time.

So, for the time being, I am going to let my VIP membership lapse and take a break from my few minutes of “work” each day. SlotMasters has tinkered with the structures in the past, so I remain hopeful that they will alter with them again so I can go back to betting max, walking away, and shipping the dough. I already knew I would take the WSOP off, so this structure update has me taking a break a few weeks before I initially planned.

While it may sound like doom and gloom, over the last five weeks I won $170 over about 2.5 hours of play ($68/hr), despite no great scores and lighting about 100,000 chips on fire over the last week due to using my genius strategy with the new structure. All in all, I am happy with the result. If you don’t mind watching the reels spin, there is still significant money to be made (perhaps even more than before, assuming some player keep betting max and walking away). Don’t be afraid to collect your free money!

That is all of the updates for now. If I resume playing after the WSOP, I will let you know. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I hope you collected/are still collecting your free money from SlotMasters. I know of at least $2,500 that my followers collected. Well done!