Mohegan Sun

Recently I received two emails from readers, one from Tom Howze and one from William McAnirlin, reacting to my January article about the Rio and the gaming show.  Thanks for writing guys; I appreciate the feedback.  Not only do letters from readers help me to know your interests but quite often I learn of things that would normally escape me.  Such was the case here.  One of the emails pointed out that the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut had 9/6 Jacks or Better video poker.  For those of you who might not be familiar with the 9/6 designation, it refers to the per coin payout on the Full House and Flush, respectively.  It is common to rate five-card draw games using these numbers since they are the ones that frequently are altered to adjust the average payout of a machine.  For example, in the game Double Bonus it is common to see 10/7, 9/7, or even 9/6 payouts.  Jacks or better games can be found in 10/6, 9/7, 9/6, 8/5, 7/5 or 6/5 payouts.  The reason that 9/6 is of interest to players is that with perfect play the game returns an average of 99.54% to the player.  This combined with a decent player's club can give the player around a 100% return, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less.  10/6 and 9/7 Jacks or Better, which can be found at the Stratosphere in Las Vegas,  return over 100% as does 10/7 Double Bonus.  Anyway, the news about Mohegan Sun piqued my interest and I decided to take a look for myself.  Here is my report.

Mohegan Sun is a beautiful property; it is spacious and tastefully decorated.  I had lunch at The Cove restaurant and thought it was excellent.  That is about the end of the good news.  Blackjack is all 6 and 8 decks except for some four-deck games dealt from a continuous shuffler.  It was 11:00 AM and the smallest table minimum in regular Blackjack I could find was $25.  I say regular Blackjack because there were some $6 and $12 games but the reason for the odd amount is that 1/5 of the bet on the main hand is forced on a side bet.  I didn't investigate these games further.  The regular Blackjack I saw included double after splitting, late surrender, and dealer standing on the soft 17.  Reasonable Blackjack if you can take the high minimums.

Now for the Video Poker.  I had a great deal of difficulty finding the 9/6 Jacks machines but they were there.  I finally found them in the high stakes areas on multigame type machines.  These were all $5 machines, which meant that playing 5 lines cost you $25.  There were a dozen of these in the Sky casino high stakes area and 6 or 8 in another high stakes area.  I found it curious that in the high stakes area in the Sky casino the two most prominent machines, that is visible to the walkway, were 8/5 machines.  So much for the old machine placement theory.  All of the full pay Jacks machines also carried a Double Bonus selection so with full pay on Jacks or Better I thought that perhaps they had full pay 10/7 Double Bonus as well.  No such luck; they were all 9/6 Double Bonus games.

Having found the 9/6 Jacks I resumed my search for lower stakes Jacks or Better games.  Now I can't say that I had time to check out every machine in the casino, but from what I saw I believe that there are no full pay Jacks or Better machines other than the $5 machines in the high stakes areas.  If you play here this is what you can expect.  If playing $1 Jacks or Better machines you will get an 8/5 payout; this is a 97.3% return to the player.  If you play a 25¢  Jacks or Better  machine you will be playing a 6/5 game that returns 95% to the player.  Nuf sed!

Mohegan Sun is a beautiful property but it is no Las Vegas.  See you next month.