As far my YouTube channel goes, the group slot pull is one of the earliest and most consistent elements that exist on my channel. Fans love watching them and participants love doing them! And it’s one of those great opportunities for various members of our community to come together and play a high limit slot together.
Today’s question is one that looks to dive a bit deeper into the behind the scenes of them:
What goes into a group pull prep? It looks so easy when the guests arrive, register, and start the group pull.
How long does it take to convert $100 bills to all those $1k titos?
Does Brian and the staff feel nervous about carrying around the thousands of dollars?
Carolyn C.
At this point, after hosting hundreds of group slot pulls, our system is a pretty well oiled machine. It wasn’t always that way, but we’ve evolved and refined things over time. For instance, we have a digital way of capturing acceptance of the group pull rules that we didn’t have when we first started. This way, we have less to do during check in, since generally everyone has already taken those steps.
As far as preparing tickets, it can depend. When you have 30 people doing a $200 group pull, that’s $6,000. But we do ask people to come with a ticket made already, so instead of inserting 60 $100 bills we have 30 tickets to combine. That’s even more helpful when you get to something like a $500 group pull, where you get 30 $500 tickets vs. smaller bills from every person. It also eliminates the issue of when machines don’t accept certain bills that are graffitied or old.
We have the luxury of sometimes being able to prep tickets even before the group pull, and just break out the amount needed. Since we’re already making them for filming videos, we can do a few more to prepare for the group pulls without holding things up when everyone arrives.
Of course, while people are checking in, we can also have one of us making tickets while another of us is checking people in. So there’s a few ways we can keep things moving and focus on our wiiiiiining group pulls!
Where things can get the most hectic is Mega Group Pulls, where there can be hundreds of people contributing money. But even then, oftentimes the contribution is $100 a person, so it’s really about preparing in advance where we can, having extra staff on hand, and then breaking out the correct amount of tickets for the event. For Rudies Weekend, we have check-in begin early enough so that we can be in a good position to start on time.
Finally, as far as carrying money around, this has been something that we’ve dealt with for a long time. Back in 2018, when I won $10,000 on Wheel of Fortune, which at the time was my biggest win ever, that budget covered a month of travel, and that meant having thousands of dollars with me as I visited casinos throughout the East Coast.
It’s gotten easier in some respects as some casinos have good cashless systems that I can fund upfront, and just digitally put the amount into each slot I need. Similarly, fast pay reduces how often I’m handed cash, sticking to tickets during the visit more than I could in the past. This avoids the need to carry around more cash.
Unfortunately these options are not available yet everywhere I visit, and so for now, cash remains king. A final option is to request a check rather than cash, and immediately cash it on my bank app while still on premises.
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