Category: Advantage Play

Not long ago Bonnie and I invited a friend to join us for dinner at a casino restaurant. The friend, a woman in the same improv group in which I participate, was not a gambler. “Sandy” was a senior citizen and was retired. 

At one point, Bonnie and I told Sandy of a time I was playing in downtown Las Vegas and had gone through all of my cash on hand. I was playing a slot machine, in significant positive territory, and I didn’t want to walk away and leave the machine for others to capitalize on. So, I called Bonnie and asked her to get some cash and take Lyft to downtown (Bonnie no longer drives.) She agreed.

Sandy asked how much we were talking about. 

I didn’t remember for sure, but I told her it was probably $10,000. It was very likely more than enough, but if she was going to make the trip, we wanted to make sure we didn’t run out again.

Sandy remarked that this was way too large of an amount not to be earning interest.

I conceded her point — but suggested that it was a different calculation for a professional gambler.

“How come?” she asked. “Interest given up is interest given up, no matter what your profession is.”

I changed the subject, but have been thinking about this. While Sandy wasn’t wrong, here is my thinking on the subject:

1. Gamblers have bigger cash swings than most people. Sometimes the swings go against you, and you need a “cushion” available for when that happens. If you have lines of credit at every casino you frequent, this can serve as a sort of short-term cushion. While I have lines of credit at a number of casinos, I regularly frequent casinos where this is not the case for me. So, I need a buffer.

2. Gamblers for “large” stakes need bigger cushions than gamblers for smaller stakes. I’ve had some monthly negative scores in excess of $30,000 over the past few years. I need a way to cope with these swings. Overall, I’m a winning player, but not every week or month (or even, occasionally, year).

3. Banks do not like large regular cash deposits and withdrawals from gamblers. Numerous gamblers have had banks terminate their accounts for such activity. I’m not sure why banks act this way, but they do. Perhaps they’re nervous about money laundering situations and don’t want to risk it.

4. Even if banks did allow large cash deposits and withdrawals from gamblers, banks are not always near the casinos and not always open when the money is needed. Casinos are open 24 hours. Banks aren’t. 

5. Sometimes casinos will lock up a machine for a few hours for a player. Sometimes they won’t. If a player has cash in a safety deposit box at a bank or casino near several other casinos, this can be used to fulfill cash needs for those casinos fairly quickly.

6. If I did run out of cash, I have gambling friends I can count on to lend me short-term money. I very much try to avoid this because if I borrow, I have to be willing and able to lend money to others. While most gamblers to whom I have lent money have paid me back reasonably promptly, there have been exceptions. I would rather not open this door.

7. I don’t know Sandy’s exact financial circumstances, but I suspect she is living closer to the edge than I am. She needs to make every penny count, so to speak, and to earn them while she can. So, she has developed rules of thumb that serve her well for this purpose. A good rule for most people is to keep your money working for you and don’t leave money uninvested.

While I don’t consider myself wealthy, I have enough money to comfortably gamble for considerable stakes without threatening my lifestyle or retirement status. So, I can afford to keep more cash around than many other people can. Very little of that is at home (for safety reasons). Most is spread out in safety deposit boxes in casinos I frequent.

I’ve been to Atlantic City on fewer than 10 occasions. I’ve taught classes at three or four different casinos there and have been there for one or two Seven Stars events. As a player, though, I haven’t played there much. I’ve found Las Vegas, where I live, has better games for me. So why travel 2,500 miles to play lesser games?

That changed in November of 2025. Based on our play in Cherokee, I suppose, Bonnie and I received significant play-up mailers from Atlantic City. A play-up promotion is one where if you play a certain number of points, you receive certain benefits. While we received different offers, I think mine was to play 10,000 Tier Credits and receive $1,000 in free play — repeatable up to 10 times in the month. Plus rooms, food, and some extra Reward Credits.

When we first got the mailers, it was hard to judge whether it would be a good deal or not. I didn’t know what machines were currently available. I didn’t know if they had Next Day Bounce Back (NDB), and if so, at what rate. Did they have any NDB multiplier days? I also didn’t know if they were having any Reward Credit or Tier Credit multipliers. The offer was for any time during the month, and so if we could double up on other promotions, so much the better. To max out the promotion, we’d have to play $2 million coin-in. Since we wanted to do it in three or four days, this meant $25 video poker.

Jimmy Jazz wrote about the promotion and figured it out based on 9/6 Jacks or Better (JoB) — a 99.54% game which requires $25 coin-in to earn one Tier Credit. He concluded that it wasn’t a worthwhile play on those machines. A friend did the same promotion at Caesars Atlantic City a few months before Bonnie and I did and it turns out they have $25 9/6 Double Double Bonus (DDB), a 98.98% game that requires only $10 coin-in to earn a Tier Credit. That game allows us to do the promotion in 40% as much time as on 9/6 JoB. Before the play-up money was received, playing $2 million on 9/6 DDB cost considerably less than playing $5 million on 9/6 JoB. The value of the play-up was more than the cost of earning it. DDB does come with bigger W-2Gs, which was not a factor for me, but may well have been one for Jimmy Jazz. He lives in Michigan and they have a very different state income tax situation than I face in Nevada.

So, we signed up for the promo — went there — and lost a considerable amount. We “forgot” to hit four aces (with or without a kicker) and neither did a royal flush appear on the machines we were playing. We had the edge, I believe, but this time we ended up with a very expensive result. That’s pretty much the nature of DDB. If you don’t hit the big hands this time, you won’t like your score. Still, if they offered us the same promotion again, I’d try it again. 

Based on our play in November, we started to receive mailers for January and February. We each receive $1,000 in weekly free play — plus a free hotel room and more food than we could possibly eat — but of course that free play is only available if we go to Atlantic City. Getting $4,000 free play a month apiece might sound like a lot — but it doesn’t come close to what we lost in November. Still, it’s too much to pass up. As is true on the calendar, the free play week begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday — so if we’re there on the weekend, we can pick up two weeks of free play per trip. It’s a five-hour flight from Las Vegas to either Philadelphia or Newark, which for me is not a lot of fun. If you’re driving, Philadelphia is one hour away from Atlantic City, while Newark is two hours away — but flying into Newark is considerably cheaper than flying into Philadelphia.

On my first such trip there in January, we arrived in Newark at about 6 p.m. on a Saturday — and the trip home left Newark at 7:30 p.m. Sunday. After renting a car I arrived at the casino at about 9 p.m. Saturday night, which was plenty early enough to collect the free play before midnight. Future trips, though, will be lengthier. Weather can delay flights at this time of year and conceivably there could be traffic issues. Getting to the casino too late loses $2,000 in free play. That’s too much to risk cutting it close. If I plan to arrive on Friday night or Saturday morning, that mitigates most of the risk.

Plus, I don’t want to “hit and run,” meaning playing just the minimum amount to pick up the free play and then leaving. (Maybe sometimes, but not all the time.) Casinos offer the free play in order to get you to come in and play — and if you don’t play, some casinos cut you off. My mailers in March and thereafter will likely be larger if I play after picking up the free play. Since there are three separate casinos in Atlantic City that are all connected to this program — Caesars, Harrah’s, and Tropicana — it makes sense for me to walk around all three of them and see what I can find to play. 

These three casinos are not next door to each other. I’ll have a car, so traveling among them is not a big issue, and there is also a free shuttle that runs in a continuous loop among the three casinos. For our trip in November, we didn’t have a car, and we learned it can be a fairly lengthy wait before the next shuttle comes.

Since our normal practice is to spend up to two weeks at a time in Cherokee, it makes sense for us to bookend our Cherokee trips with Atlantic City visits. While these two cities are about 650 miles apart from each other, they are both in the Eastern time zone — three hours earlier than Las Vegas. As I write this, I haven’t yet made the 2½-week trip from Las Vegas to Atlantic City to Cherokee to Atlantic City to Las Vegas — but one is scheduled soon. If we’re still getting Atlantic City mailers in March and beyond, we’ll do this trip more than once.

This makes for a long and intense gambling experience — which is definitely not for everybody. I thought such trips would be over for us because of the tax situation, but I’m glad we found a way to continue.

Author’s note: After I wrote this, I scheduled a trip starting on Saturday, January 24, to do the Newark to Atlantic City to Newark to Cherokee to Newark to Atlantic City to Las Vegas trip I mentioned above. Beginning January 25, there was a huge snowstorm affecting many parts of the country. Because flights were cancelled and I still wanted to get to all of those locations, I ended up with a much longer journey than I had planned. I’ll write about it in a few weeks.

Three weeks ago, I addressed end-of-year considerations about emptying your slot club accounts — or not. Today I’m addressing a different, albeit related, subject. And that subject is reaching a specific tier level.

Some casino slot clubs have tier levels — silver, gold, platinum, or whatever. Often these are annual awards earned January 1 through December 31, although they don’t have to be. 

I was prompted to look at this for personal reasons relating to Caesars Rewards. As I wrote this, I was planning one last trip to Harrah’s Cherokee in order to reach some not-well-known goals — and I needed to plan accordingly. It may well be my last trip to Cherokee, ever. The planning I’m doing may be applicable to some of my readers. Some of this is speculation because as I write this, I haven’t received the December mailer yet.

If you play at a Harrah’s or Caesars property, you know that Seven Stars is the highest tier level and that level requires 150,000 Tier Credits (TCs) per year. For slot and video poker players, these TCs are earned in one of three ways: playing the machines, receiving bonuses for reaching predetermined daily levels, and TC multipliers — which are promotions occurring periodically throughout the year. In the last few months of the year, TC multipliers are more common as players strive to reach the next tier.

Making it to Seven Stars is huge — with their $1,200 retreat, five $100 dinners, highly discounted cruises, and some other goodies. Ending the year with slightly less than 150,000 credits is a big mistake. But we’re played a lot of high stakes video poker at several Caesars properties, mostly Reno and Cherokee, and we’re far beyond the 150,000 level. For the past few years, we’ve reached this level before the end of February.

Most players don’t realize that you can earn quite a bit more than the 150,000 TCs required for Seven Stars, and get rewarded for doing so. For every 250,000 TCs earned, you get one Seven Stars Experience Credit (SSEC), which may be redeemed for a variety of things. For Bonnie and me, we redeem each of these SSECs for $450 in free play at either a Las Vegas or Cherokee property.

While the following numbers aren’t exact, they’ll give you an idea of how I went about my decision making — and may well be applicable to you in a similar situation. I planned a 10-day trip. At the start of the trip, Bonnie needed 90,000 TCs to reach the next SSEC and I needed 260,000 TCs. (Actually, I only needed 10,000 but I figured I could complete that and make it all the way through the next one as well.) There was one TC multiplier where you received 5x TCs up to 25,000 points. And I can comfortably play about $180,000 per day, split between Bonnie’s card and mine. At Cherokee, $180,000 played on video poker will result in 18,000 TCs. I play primarily video poker, but also some slots, which accrue TCs twice as fast.

For the TC multiplier, I don’t know if the bonus is 25,000 or only 20,000 and they count the 5,000 I’d earn as part of the 25,000. I’ve seen it both ways at various properties and sometimes the people at the booth don’t understand the difference and so can’t give precise answers. At Harrah’s Cherokee, they usually have one or more high level people at the booth, so I expect to get accurate answers there. But for planning purposes, I’ll assume the “worst case,” which is that I only receive 20,000 extra TCs. I don’t want to assume the best and possibly miss the next SSEC (and my $450 bonus) by 5,000 TCs.

For normal daily play there, earning 5,000 TCs ($50,000 coin-in) per day is pretty standard because doing that earns a 10,000 TC bonus. Here, though, Bonnie only needs 90,000 TCs and the multiplier day she’ll earn 35,000 (the 5,000 played, 20,000 multiplier bonus, and the daily 10,000 bonus). That will leave her needing “only” 55,000 other TCs to accumulate over nine days of play. So, I’ll play on her card 5,000 TCs for four days and skip playing on her card the rest of the trip.

On my card, ten days of 15,000 TCs (earning at least 5,000 daily with the 10,000 per day bonus), plus the 20,000 TC multiplier bonus means 170,000 out of the 260,000 needed. Earning an extra 8,000 TCs per day for the five days I’ll play on Bonnie’s card earns me an extra 40,000, and earning an extra 13,000 on the five days I don’t play on Bonnie’s card gives me an additional 65,000 TCs. This adds up to 285,000 — which is more than the 260,000 needed. Good. I can always play less.

They have Next Day Bounce Back (NDB)at Harrah’s Cherokee, and I think the current rate of free play is earned at 0.375%. I will try to earn my points by the ninth day. I don’t want to earn it for the 10^th day I play because our plane leaves before the NDB is available for me to play. Playing $180,000 coin-in on a day when I’m not getting NDB costs about $675 in EV. Doing that to earn $450 in free play doesn’t make sense. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll have met my goals before the 10^th day and so I won’t have to play at all that day. It’s also possible that playing $50,000 that last day and earning the 10,000 TC bonus will be required, but that’s only around -$165 in EV so it remains an option. Or, better, maybe $25,000 will be enough earning half the amounts as $50,000. That will only cost $80 in EV for missing out on NDB.

NDB on your card lasts for 30 days there, so if I were a local and planning to come back within a month, I could play right up to the last minute. But since I’m not planning on coming back, I sit out playing on the last day of my trip — other than picking up NDB from the day before and any other free play that might be available. If the mailer has weekly free play starting on Monday, for example, I might well plan my departure for a Monday.

While this trip actually ended the first week of December, and I have three additional weeks to earn the SSEC goals in Las Vegas, there is a Great Gift Wrap Up that ends December 14 where every Reward Credits earned throughout the year at any of the Caesars or Harrah’s properties counts towards gifts (or free play), I want all of my play done before that. 

My lesser play on Bonnie’s card compared to mine will mean she’ll receive lesser offers down the road from Cherokee than I will. But unless the tax law changes, we won’t be going there anymore so how big the offers are is irrelevant.