Q: When you talk about staying at the Palazzo we assume you are comped.  We called and it is almost $329 - $400 per night, which is out of our budget range.  We were wondering how many points per day you need to get a suite comped?  We are dollar VP players and wonder if we played there, would we have a chance of getting comped. 

A: Yes, we are comped there. And the answer to this question, like so many others, is “It depends.” There is no specific answer that would fit everyone all the time. It depends on what game you play and how long you play it. It depends on the time of year and whether the hotel needs warm bodies that might give them some play in the casino during slow times.   My best suggestion for you is to get the book More Frugal Gambling. I spend 84 pages there telling you how to get comps. One that will help a lot of people who are on a small budget is NOT to choose the fanciest/newest mega resort. You will get more comps by being a big fish in a small pond rather than a minnow in the ocean. 

Q: We are going to be in Vegas March 27-April 2. Any chance you will be making any public appearance during those dates? My wife and I are big fans of yours and would love to see you at an event like this. 

A: All our public appearances are listed on my Web site. Right now all that is scheduled is the one on March 9 at Palace Station. However, if you happen to see Brad and/or me in a casino, please feel free to stop and say hi! 

Q: I'm signed up for your e-mail alerts.  I've been receiving 4 or 5 copies of a single e-mail recently.  Can anything be done to fix it? 

A: Hopefully it is already fixed, but computer gremlins are hard to kill off! 

Q: What is appropriate to tip a casino host?  How do I get the maximum out of my host without being a pain in the backside?  How much impact does the denomination you play have on host services, if any? 

A: Oh, dear! Here we go again – it took me a whole chapter – 31 pages – to cover the “care and feeding of a host” in More Frugal Gambling. This is not a question I can answer in a sentence or two. Sorry!

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Just got home from spending two nights at Palazzo. I love staying in their suites, but I have some suggestions for their improvement.

1. A grab bar in the shower. I exercise regularly and am in pretty good shape for my age, but standing on one leg to wash the other takes a bit more limberness than I have. 

2. A coffeemaker in the room. Why are they disappearing in Vegas? So we will buy expensive drinks at expensive coffee shops? Or, use overpriced room service? 

3. Larger labels on their toiletry amenities so seniors can read them in the shower without their glasses. Brad used shower gel for shampoo – and that wasn’t too bad a mistake. But hand cream instead of conditioner? It took me all day to figure out why his hair was so greasy.

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We’re off to spend the weekend at Palazzo/Venetian, where Brad is playing in a video poker tournament and I’m taking a short vacation from my computer. We like video poker tournaments better than slot tournaments. Although the same in the short term - there is a lot of luck involved - in the long run we will have an advantage because we know proper tournament strategy, which is much different than “basic” strategy on a regular VP machine. Many players are at a disadvantage because not only don’t they know basic OR tournament strategy but they are slot players who don’t regularly play video poker at all and therefore are slow and sometimes don’t even finish their credits in the time allotted.

Speaking of slots, the late Lenny Frome, the godfather of smart video poker - and my first tutor - was always “preaching” to slot players that they should switch to the better-paying video poker alternative. I encourage players to study and play video poker but I don’t try to “convert” players if they prefer the entertainment of slot machines. But I will leave you with this clip from an Internet forum:

SLOT MACHINES:

When you rearrange the letters,

CASH LOST IN ME

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Criticism about Palazzo’s Grand Opening show Saturday night is flooding the Internet, discussing many of the negatives I had mentioned here yesterday: the late start, the no-name band that had to play “forever” between acts, the total disorganization. And there were sadder reports from people who actually paid real money for this disaster. We were frustrated because the only thing we wasted was our time since we were comped – what about those who paid $125 or more for a ticket?

Since we left exhausted about 11 p.m., I was anxious to hear a report from someone who had actually stayed to the end to catch the Diana Ross act.  Yesterday the reviews started coming in on the Internet and they were not good. Several posters on a forum said that hordes of people were walking out of the auditorium during her performance because it seemed she was only lip-synching. Everyone was commenting on the fact that the two giant TV screens on each side of the stage, the ones that had recorded every other act, including the no-name band, were dark the whole time Diana Ross was on.

In this morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal I got a more complete discussion of the Diana Ross controversy, from “Norm, Vegas Confidential,” which is my favorite column for learning celebrity dirt and what all the beautiful people are doing in my town.

I heard Sheldon Adelson stuck it out to the end and he is even older than Brad.  The things you have to endure when you’re the boss, even if you are a multi-billionaire!  

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