Yes, you read that right! We are going to talk all about how to lose money with almost no effort on your part. The only thing easier would be to simply light the bills on fire, and that involves smoke and some cleanup. Of course what we are really talking about this week is gambling, the original lifeblood of Las Vegas. And, while you are likely to lose money, at least in the long run, we are going to talk about how to make your money last longer. And, yes, there will be some math, but you can simply ignore it and just take my word for things. Some of my advice will come directly from Gambling 101, but there will be a few surprises and some revisionist theories about the best way to play. We will touch on most all the major games in the modern casino and a few not so common ones. Most importantly, our gambling advice also takes into account the pure entertainment value of playing the games. While some of us may enjoy sitting alone for hours at a video poker or keno machine, some of you would probably rather go to the dentist! Tomorrow we will discuss a few games you just might be able to win…but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Category: Gambling
Home Sweet Home
For many repeat Vegas visitors, the city begins to feel like a second home and, though we may check out new hotels and attractions, we find great pleasure in returning to places we have enjoyed in the past. Of course, that includes returning to the same hotel or hotels again and again. One reason for returning is being given a chance to stay for “free.” For example, I have stayed at the Orleans over a dozen times and most of those times it was comped. The Orleans, along with a number of other off Strip properties, is a pretty good choice for a small time gambler. I used to get a couple of free nights midweek gambling just a few hundred dollars a day, a quarter or two at a time. The Gold Coast and the Rio, only a mile from Caesars Palace, are also pretty easy places for a low roller to get good room offers. If you are willing to stay Downtown, most of the hotels there are pretty good about comping small players. Only Golden Nugget and Downtown Grand (arguably the two nicest places) tend to be stingy with their offers. On the Strip, the expectations are a little higher but it isn’t too hard to get offers from Flamingo, Harrah’s, Ballys, Excalibur, Luxor or Circus Circus. Again, these are not the glamor spots but many are centrally located and all are just a short walk from those higher end resorts. If you play with Caesars or MGM, you might be surprised at some of the places you can get once in a while. Even though I had barely played there in years, I was able to book an upgraded Fountain view room at Bellagio one night. Of course, no one can tell you the best place for you to call “home” but hopefully our look at comps this week has given you some ideas on how to select one.
A Meaningful Relationship
After a few years of “hit and run” casino play, it all can start to feel a little empty. Sure, you know all the clever tricks to winding up with a “free” bed for a few nights, but you end up disappointing the hotel and burning a lot of bridges along the way. And, eventually, you run out of these casino “one night stands” and just wish you could return to a familiar place again and again, a place where you feel comfortable and enjoy playing, even when your luck isn’t so good. That’s when you know you’ve grown up a bit and that it is time to settle down and find the place that is the best fit for you and the way you like to play. As beautiful as it is, the Wynn isn’t for everyone. Some of us are more like Planet Hollywood or Flamingo people and that’s okay too. Ideally you can find a place that is nice enough for you and will reward you at your normal level of gambling. But even if you aren’t always getting a comp room, maybe a fancier place is where you want to be. That’s a choice you have to make and it is still a whole lot better paying a couple of hundred dollars for a room than losing thousands of dollars trying to get one comped. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up our week on comps with some good casinos for low and medium rollers. See you then!
How to Look Big
If you’ve never visited a particular casino before, you just might be able to fool them into thinking you are a bigger gambler than you really are. Even if you have visited several times before, there are ways to make yourself look big without changing the amount you play. The first trick is to always concentrate your play. Betting $100 at three different casinos on three different days is not a good strategy. Betting $300 a day at one of those casinos each day is. Now instead of being a $100 a day player at those three spots, you are a $300 a day player at each spot. This probably won’t work if you are staying at the casino in question because, whether you play or not, they know you are there. Otherwise, you are much more likely to get room offers than before. Another trick I have found to be successful, particularly when visiting a new casino, will involve changing the game you play and your average bet size. If you would normally be betting $1.25 a spin at video poker, bet $2-$3 a spin on a slot machine instead. Regardless of how long you play or how much you win or lose, the casino sees you differently and may believe that, if you were invited to stay with them, you might continue to play that way, only for a longer period of time. I have also seen an alternate strategy work and that is simply to play a long time, even at very low stakes. In lower end hotels, just playing for several hours a day can generate a couple of free nights. But either way, this works best in a place where you have never played before, so keep that in mind. Tomorrow we talk about longer term comp strategies for regular visitors.
Getting Developed
After what you’ve read the past few days, you might think that there is no way that you’ll ever get a “free” room in Las Vegas. With all the statistical formulas and computerized analyses, those casino guys are going to know that you will never gamble enough to make it worth their while. That might be true if not for something called player development and you may be able to take advantage of something casinos count on: greed. You see, like most every business, a casino is never satisfied. They want more and more gamblers in their business gambling away more and more money. That means they have to take risks and give away stuff they may not get back in order to bring in new players. That may mean sending out two free buffets or a tote bag to a local. It could mean giving you a room, particularly during a slower period, in the hope that you will start spending more time and money in their hotel. Print mailings and (increasingly) emails are a big part of casino marketing and exactly why people receive the offers they do is a bit of a mystery. While often based on previous play, it can also be because of your zip code or any number of characteristics that can be flagged in a database. And, while you can’t do much about where you live, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of a great room offer. Tomorrow we discuss a few!
Maybe Your Room is Already Comped
A surprising thing about some Las Vegas casinos is that they may already be ready to comp your room, even if you have never visited before. Or, at the very least, you may receive a nice discount. Of course there’s a catch. You have to have some sort of record of gambling with a casino owned by the same company to get that deal. But that isn’t unusual at all. There is a pretty good chance that your local casinos are part of a larger gaming company. Caesars Entertainment is everywhere but MGM, Boyd and Penn National Gaming are all large national concerns with some presence in Las Vegas and, if you’ve played a little bit with your local affiliate, you might get an offer to stay with them in our favorite gambling destination. Caesars is famous for gving away rooms to most anyone who smells a little bit like a gambler so it is worth logging into your account online and looking at the calendar. Keep in mind that these are likely to be the least desirable rooms at their less glamorous properties but free is free, except for the hefty resort fees and you’ll pay those most anywhere. But regardless of the company, if you’ve played with them at all, it might be worth checking to see if they’ll give you a break on a room at one of their Las Vegas properties. But what if they don’t know you at all? Tomorrow, we explore some strategies for turning your first visit to a casino into great room offers!
“Free” rooms
As I begin a week of discussing how to sleep for cheap or free in Las Vegas, I should state the obvious: there is no such thing as a free room. No one in the casino/hotel business is that generous. Everything has a catch and this is no exception. A better way to describe it is as a comped room. A comped room is given to a hotel guest with the expectation that they will gamble and (eventually) lose significantly more than the value of the room. If you consistently fail to gamble enough to more than cover the cost of the room, they won’t be “free” anymore. Casinos use their player’s club to track your average bet size, number of bets and type of game played. From that, they estimate what is called an ADT, the Average Daily Theoretical. This is their estimate of how much you are likely to lose. Whether you lose more than that amount or actually win is pretty much meaningless to the casino. They know, in the long run, approximately how much money you will “donate” to the casino. Using that number, a casino will typically be willing to give you complimentaries adding up to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of that amount. Those could be meals, logo jackets, casino play or a place to sleep. In the long run, it is never going to be worth it for you to gamble just for a comp but, if you are planning on playing anyway, you might as well take advantage. Tomorrow we start to learn how!
Getting Carded?
No, I’m not exactly nostalgic for having to show an ID, at least not yet. The cards I am talking about are the old slot club cards. Since most every casino was separately owned or operated, you literally had to have a different card for every single casino you visited. It was pretty cumbersome to carry them all. Nowadays, there aren’t even ten separate cards you would need to cover every casino on the Strip. And you could do every casino between Wynn and Mandalay Bay with just six. As a certified (and certifiable) pack rat, I kept all of the old ones and they easily fill up a book designed to hold business cards. Not only were there so many. They would keep changing the designs all the time. In addition to remembering old casinos that are no more, the changes in the cards over time reflects the increased concentration of hotel properties in fewer and fewer hands. Maybe it isn’t just the cards I miss. Maybe it’s the variety of experiences they represent.
Benny & the Bets
Hard to think about Las Vegas nostalgia without a few memories of the old Binion’s Horseshoe. An unholy hodgepodge, consisting of several old casinos, the Apache hotel and, eventually, the fabulous Mint hotel and casino, Benny Binion built an empire that spanned an entire city block. Inside may have been the best example of an old school gambling joint you could find anywhere. It was no limit madness, from the craps table to the roulette wheel and on to the poker room. Oh yeah! Benny invented what would become the World Series of Poker and the casino hosted it for years. I stumbled upon the festivities one year and it was just a massive, awful room packed full of sweaty guys playing cards. The hotel was just a place to crash and there was always good, cheap food to be found. If you wanted to be classy, you rode to the top and hit the Steakhouse. If you were poor, you crowded into the basement late night for a steak special that would only run you a few dollars. The hotel is closed now. The casino no longer hosts the event that made it famous and feels half abandoned. The games aren’t even good anymore. And it hasn’t been the Horseshoe for over a decade. There’s still a few waitresses and bartenders around who look like they remember the good times, but fewer and fewer each year. If you hear a whirring sound late at night, it might be Benny himself spinning in his grave.
Grumpy Old Man
Well, so far this week I’ve complained about not having a comfortable place to sit, a cheap meal and a bathtub. I think this officially makes me a grumpy old man! But I’m not through bitching about things in Las Vegas that get on my nerves, so here we go again! You know, the first thing any smart gambler learns is that the odds are against you. Oh sure, you hear about guys who can count cards in Blackjack and find enough advantage plays to win big over the long haul. You hear about video poker pros who play long enough and at a high enough level to earn a living. And, of course there’s the horse player, the oddsmaker or the poker star who figures out how to make gambling pay. Few of us would be willing to put in the work or take the risks these people do. We know we will lose in the long run. We just want to play for a while and have a chance to come out on top. But the casinos don’t even want to give us that! Try to even find a game of 21 on the Strip that pays 3-2 or a halfway decent paytable for Deuces Wild. And don’t even get me started on the one armed bandits! It is one thing to lose $20. It is another to do it without even getting a couple of small hits along the way! Isn’t it enough that we you all have mathematics on your side? And now you want to make sure we are losing fast enough to pay for that “free drink!” There’s an old saying that being penny wise can be pound foolish and too many resorts are penny, nickel and diming their patrons to death. In the end, it will come back to bite them!
Vegas Tips and Tricks 