His luck ran out on the track on Sunday with a speeding penalty and 25th place finish but it was a really good financial weekend playing the slot machines at Las Vegas.
The 54-race winner posted several Instagram posts that showed him coming up big several times. In fact, Hamlin said he won over $330,000 dollars over the weekend, the equivalent of an entire NASCAR Cup Series car.
On his Actions Detrimental podcast, Hamlin revealed how much he invested to get there.
“I’m like, Alright, I’m only willing to invest $11,000 in this thing but I’ll do $300 a hand,” Hamlin said. “I’m going to get at least 30 hands or so, 40 hands in this thing. So, I’ll give it a chance. It never went down below $8,000. 10 hands in, it was significant. …I hit the bonus there. Then I went up and up and up. So that original $11,000 never went down hardly at all.
“At the end of the night, you saw the $126,000, the win. But if you look to the right, there’s also a credit there of 50 or 60 that also was on top of that. So, take out the $11,000, I end up winning somewhere around $170,000 on Night 1.”
Hamlin said he cashed out at the end of Friday night and took home the $126,000 cash and a ticket for his remaining money. The following day, Hamlin used the remaining $50,000 and continued winning. He moved to the slot machine previously played by Austin Dillon the night before and consulted AI for a strategy as well.
“But the next night, what’d I do?” Hamlin said. “I went to the one he played with the night before. And so I didn’t play the same one. “First of all, I looked on ChatGPT. I say, ‘If I win on one Buffalo machine, does it hurt my odds of winning on another?’ Like, ‘Does the Buffalo game algorithm, does one hit take away from all?’ And it says, ‘No, they’re all independent.’
“So I said, ‘Sweet. I’m gonna go back for more.’ So I went to a different machine. And it just — I put a quarter in, I win a car. I put a quarter in, I win a car. That’s basically how it went. Every 5-10 minutes, it was just a new pay. So that’s what we did. It was a lot of fun.”
This was his first weekend ever playing slot machines.
“We won another $160,000 the second night,” Hamlin said. “And then I cashed out. The casino didn’t like the strategy of me cashing out every jackpot that I hit. What I was doing is I was using up all the credits of the $52,000 that I put in, but every time I would hit a significant win, over $10,000, I’d say, ‘Give me cash. Just give me cash, give me cash,” instead of transferring it to my balance. They weren’t fond of that. …Needless to say, it was a wildly successful slot machine that I thought I had a short in it. …We kept saying it doesn’t seem right. It’s just giving us money over and over and over and over.”
