After I wrote about daily average earlier in the month, I received this e-mail from a reader: 

One thing you might warn your readers about is “what is a day?” for the computation of a daily average.  I’m a night person so I like to play all night when I have the full range of VP machines to pick from and no distractions.  I have been tripped up on the what-is a-day question enough times to make it my business to 
TRY to find out the answer. I have quite a lot of experience trying to extract information from players clubs, hosts, marketing departments, and whomever else I can grab, but it isn’t easy to find the answer to this question. 

Some casinos start their player day at midnight.  Many, many start at 2:00 AM. (It took me forever to find out Fitzgerald’s starts at 4:00 AM.) If you’re in a casino that starts at 2:00 AM and play from 10:00 PM  ’till 3:00 AM. You have played for TWO player days, thus diluting your daily average.  95% of the time, if you ask at the player’s club, they will tell you midnight, but for the sake of computation of daily average, thist isn’t always true. To make matters even more complicated, if a casino is offering point multiplier days, these almost always start at midnight.  Anyone starting to play at midnight in the hopes of getting lots of points is running the risk of ruining their daily average. 

I personally make it a point to start any new play after 2:00 AM (the 
Fitz after 4:00AM) and hope for the best.

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I got a lot of questions after my September 7th blog entry, most of them about the subject of casinos using daily average to determine what rewards and offers to send you in the mail. Here is a sample: 

How do we, the players, know if our play is based on daily average? Will the players club disclose that information? What about a host?  

Do you by any chance have a list of casinos in Vegas that use daily average? It would sure help us to know. 

I wish that there were simple answers to these questions, but there aren’t. I’m forced back, as I am so often, to my old standby statement, “It depends on the casino.” And in this matter, I must also answer, “And it’s not easy to find out. 

Occasionally, you can find out at the slot club as you can at the South Point Casino. Ask them what the requirements are for the various mailers they send out (to locals only) and they will give you the figures that you can write down and tell you what the qualification period is. (See my September 2 blog entry for more details.) This is one casino that does not use daily average; you can play as much or as little in any one day of the month. Only your monthly total counts. 

However, the front-line slot club personnel usually are not privy to marketing department policies and details. But it is worth a try to ask to speak to a slot club supervisor, who can occasionally be knowledgeable and helpful. 

What about hosts? Sometimes they can enlighten you and sometimes they just shake their heads and say that marketing is as much a mystery to them as to you! 

One of the ways I find out about puzzling casino policies is to peruse gambling forums, particularly vpFREE and/or one of its regional forums. Lots of people reporting on their experiences sometimes give one enough information to put the puzzle together. 

I do have some specific information,   Harrah’s – they do worship the God of Daily Average but they have lots of more minor gods, including Theo. I study them constantly and still can’t exactly figure out why they do anything! 

It used to be true, in Vegas, that Strip casinos mostly used daily (or trip) average – and that is still the way it is. Locals casinos almost always used monthly or quarterly totals. However, that is changing. The Stations seem to be tinkering with their system and sometimes (always?) include daily average as a factor. The Palms has always used daily average – a major frustration for me and many locals who want to go in and play more often. But if we can’t play big on some day, we just don’t play at all there. We will go to another locals joint where we don’t have to worry about ruining our daily average. 

A rule of thumb I use if I don’t know for sure whether daily average is a factor in a particular casino: I assume it is and try to give as much play as I can in as few days as possible. When I want to establish myself in a new casino, I play big one day and try not to be tripped on any other days. Then I have a high average whether that is important or not. 

So no, I can’t put a list of casino here to help you. I wish I could but the way casinos change, it would be out of date before I finished typing it!

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I don't understand how this Tuscany thing works. Why do players pull
their cards out? What do they have to gain from this? 

I have been questioned about this since my last entry here. The short answer is that casino bugaboo called “daily average.” I dislike this casino policy probably more than any other. Here is part of the section in More Frugal Gambling where I discuss “The DAILY AVERAGE TRAP”:  

Be especially careful when any casino benefits are based on your daily average. This can be a huge danger area not only for the player who uses the host system to get comps but also for someone who is depending on bounce-back cash from the slot club or room offers through direct mail offers.  

The obvious meaning of daily average is the amount of action (coin-in or slot club points earned) you give on the machines in one casino divided by the number of days you played on their machines. If you are staying in the casino-hotel where you are playing, this might be figured as a whole trip average. But whether it is called a daily average (for a day visitor) or a trip average (for the multi-day tourist), it is quicksand territory. 

The main problem comes in determining what a casino considers a “day” or a “trip.” We have a high-roller friend who is an expert in avoiding this problem. Writing under the nom de plume of Royal Cat, he gave a long list of ways you can run afoul of being “tripped,” meaning doing something that the casino might count as a “day” or a “trip” even if you don’t actually put any money into a machine. 

1.      Sticking your slot club card into any casino machine or kiosk, even to merely view your point balance.

2.      Presenting your card in the pit. 

3.      Any slot club transaction, including checking point balance, redeeming cashback, having free play put on a machine, or getting a comp for your points 

4.      Use of ANY coupon that has your account number on it, including gift shop or buffet discounts

5.      Playing on your card later in the day after checking out from the hotel, triggering a second trip rather than a continuation of the first one. 

6.      Inquiring about or paying off a marker

7.      Making a reservation for a hotel stay or event, even if you later cancel it. 

8.      Signing in to a VIP lounge 

There are ways that a savvy machine player can avoid being punished by an unreasonable use of technology (and hopefully some casino executives will read this and see how irrational rules keep gamblers from playing as much as they would like in their casinos). NEVER give “walk-through” play in a casino that worships the God of Daily Average. If you can’t give a substantial amount of play in this casino, don’t give any. You get in from the airport late your first night for a 3-day stay at this casino or you have only an hour on the last day before you have to check out and go to the airport, don’t ruin your average by playing for a short time. Sometimes a host is authorized to take these short periods into consideration, but you can’t talk to a computer to “explain” when they send out your next room offer based on a “ruined” daily or trip average. Instead play next door where they welcome your play, whether for long or short periods of time. Some couples with individual slot club accounts, as I always recommend, solve this problem by using one person’s card for their major comp play in a casino and the other card for these short sessions in the same casino. 

With all my experience in this area, I still can’t avoid this problem completely. A new casino opened quite near our condo here in Las Vegas. It would be handier for us if we could establish ourselves there and perhaps drop playing in a couple of casinos much further away. But we would have to see whether this new casino could offer the same benefits we had been getting elsewhere. There was no cashback so we would have to depend on bounce-back cash and there were no brochures on this to help us know what it took to get what. So we would have to “experiment.” After our early play, they started sending frequent “free play” coupons, sometimes 3, 4, or 5 times a week. Okay, we wouldn’t be pikers; we wouldn’t just play out the free play and then run.   Every time we used a free-play coupon, we would play for an hour or two – so we were putting in some serious weekly coin-in. What happened? Our free-play coupon amounts started decreasing. We had friends who were putting in the same coin-in as we were each week, but all in one day. They were getting much bigger free-play coupons. Oops, we were caught between getting “tripped” for using a coupon without playing and having a low daily average.

At some casinos, if you pull your card after you download your free play, the software used does not record a “play day.” That would be the reason why you might want to pull your card if you don’t plan to do any play that day except running the free play through once and then cashing out. However, this will not work at casinos with more recent software and all “action” is recorded in the machine records. 

In any case, casinos definitely frown on card-pulling - and sometimes take severe measures against players who do this, including cutting them off from getting all mailers. You are taking a risk if you do this.

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