Category: Advanced Strategy

Timing is an important part of successful gambling. I include doing things in the right order. I’m going to list several examples. There are a lot more.

Some casinos require you to swipe your card at a kiosk before you play in order to get a multiplier or some other benefit. Some casinos don’t. Good players learn which is which.

Sometimes promotions begin or end at a particular time. If you’re going to start early, some casinos automatically activate your card once the magic time arrives. Others require you to remove and re-insert your card after that time in order to get the benefit.

If a promotion officially ends at a particular time, sometimes you will continue to get the benefit of that promotion so long as your card remains in the machine. 

Drawings universally have times associated with when you can earn entries, when you must activate your entries (if you must), and at old-fashioned drawings, by when do you have to have your tickets into the drum. Also, they usually have some sort of “must be present within so many minutes” should you be a lucky winner.

Casino slot clubs with tiers have time periods during which tiers must be earned. Being a few thousand points shy of the next tier is a shame if you just let the end of the earning period elapse without thinking about whether the higher tier had value for you.

Most players play at more than one casino. Often one or more of them will have some sort of time-related promotion going on. If you’re relatively indifferent between which casino to play at, you should play at the one whose benefits will expire soon.

It’s not exactly time-related, but frequently casinos have promotions where if you earn xxx points you get yyy. If you’re not interested in receiving the benefit, then it pretty much doesn’t matter whether you earn that many points or not. If you are interested, however, make it a point to collect that many points at least. If 5,000 points are required, for example, don’t be one of those people who earn 4,825 points and don’t check how close they are.

At some casinos, if 12 months (or some other time period) elapse since your last visit, all unredeemed comps and points disappear. To prevent this, some players zero out their points at the end of every trip. At casinos I visit regularly or sem-regularly I don’t do this, but I never let enough unredeemed points accumulate that it would be a real pain if I didn’t get back there in time. Even if my intention is to return to this casino every six months, for example, there will come a time that I don’t make it back. 

Some casinos have “next day free play,” where your play today earns free play starting at noon tomorrow and lasting 90 days. Let’s say the casino day ends at 6 a.m. and your free play becomes available at noon. If you’re not pretty sure you’re going to return with three months, don’t play after 6 a.m. the last day you’re there, and stick around until noon before you leave so you can redeem accumulated free play. 

Casinos will often have some sort of multipliers on a Monday or Tuesday, which tend to be the days where they have the fewest customers. If you can, arrange your trips so you can take advantage of this.

Casino restaurants, as do non-casino restaurants, often have happy hour specials where if you eat before the dinner rush you get discount pricing on several food or beverage items. If you’re flexible, your comp dollars will last longer if you take advantage of such specials.

Sometimes you can double dip on promotions timewise. I’ve seen cases where one promotion ended at 3 a.m. and a point multiplier started at midnight. For a three-hour window, both promotions were in effect. If you’re a “must be in bed by 10 p.m.” person, then you won’t be able to take advantage of this specific opportunity.

Bonnie and I each earn at least one highly discounted Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) cruise per year because of our Seven Stars status within the Caesars Total Rewards system. Cruising to the Mexican Riviera out of Los Angeles is our default trip. I have extended family in Southern California and we use the cruise as an excuse to get together. We’ll show up a day early, treat everybody to dinner, and one of them will provide a place to sleep and transportation to and from the ship. It works for all involved.

This year, we cruised on the Norwegian Bliss. The first of our two cruises was a 5-day affair immediately after the Bliss repositioned itself from its summer run in Alaska. Schedule-wise it worked for us, and in another month, Bonnie will go with her daughter and enjoy the seven-day version of the trip.

We’ve been to the ports. Sometimes we get off the ship, and sometimes we stay aboard. For us, we use it as an excuse to go dancing every night. And, of course, now I know a bit about slots, I look forward to visiting the casino. When I was strictly a video poker player, I avoided ship casinos. Not anymore.

The Bliss has the best casino at sea I’ve ever experienced — out of possibly 80 separate cruises. Perhaps other ships have the same or similar features, but this is the best for me so far. The top feature of it is that two-thirds of the casino is totally non-smoking, and the smoking part of it is behind sealed doors. Although some smoke drifts through when people open the doors to the sealed area to enter or exit, it’s by far the best cruise chip casino arrangement I’ve enjoyed so far. There are machines and table games in both areas. Although I walked through the smoking area once to see what was there, I avoided playing there. The cigarette smoke is much more concentrated in that sealed room than in a regular casino. Even when I could find no more playable machines in the non-smoking area, I left the casino rather than check out what machines were then playable in the smoking area.

It used to be that NCL would give you a green casino player’s card along with a separate card you could use to get a free drink in the casino. You were supposed to be playing when you ordered the free drink, but they didn’t always check very closely. These cards no longer exist.

Now you tap your room keycard on the machine (very similar to the way you can pay for things with your smart phone at some locations) and you’re logged onto that machine. When you’re done playing at that machine, you can either cash out into a TITO ticket or tap your card again and the money will go to your account.

The next time you play (it could be in a day or two — it could be at an adjacent machine), if you have money in your account, you can simply download it at the machine. On this particular trip, I was able to build credits to an excess of $2,000. I downloaded $200 of it and carried it between machines in a TITO, which I find much easier to deal with. If it went to zero, I’d download some more. If I hit a sizeable jackpot (but less than the W2-G threshold), I’d put all the money on my card and download another ticket for $200 or so. If I dropped a ticket and lost it, I’d rather it be for $200 than $2,000.

On the last night of the cruise, I turned slot points into free play, played them off, and collected all of the money in my account. I was told I could leave both slot points and money on my card and the next time I sailed on NCL both the money and slot points would be there safe and sound. I’d be willing to risk that if I were sailing on two back-to-back cruises, but not if, as in my current case, it’s going to be a year or so until I return.

Just as in an out-of-town land-based casino where I plan to return again and again, I know for certain that at some point I’m going to die or otherwise not be able to return and redeem accumulated points and money. I’d much rather that money be in my estate and distributed according to my will than being left in the NCL account forever. I’m not sure what the NCL does with abandoned cash and slot club points, but I’m sure it doesn’t go to my heirs.

The third feature I appreciated was that there were nine Super Star machines in the non-smoking area, each including Ultimate X, among several other games (like Super Times Pay, Spin Poker, and several other video poker games, and Keno).  

The Ultimate X games came in Triple Play, Five Play, and Ten Play — and each had five separate denominations — and each of those came in Double Bonus, Double Double Bonus, and Deuces Wild. That’s 45 separate games to check per machine. To fully load such a game requires 10 coins per line — five coins to collect money as you normally do in video poker and five additional coins to build new multipliers.

These games could return 95% or so to the player if played perfectly with ten coins per line. (Playing perfectly is extremely unlikely due to the difficulty of the strategies and the fact that strategies aren’t published for pay schedules that bad.) If you can find a game with unredeemed multipliers, you play one dealt hand and each time you do so you’re playing at least a 105% game, and it can exceed 1,000%. The latter number is rare and usually occurs when a 10-coin-per-line player was dealt a flush or full house and left the game immediately afterwards.

Over the five-day cruise I found 300-400 playable situations on this game. I certainly wasn’t the only person checking, but the good situations kept getting created over and over again by the not-so-knowledgeable players. When you have this many opportunities and always played at an advantage, it’s close to impossible to end up behind. And, with a little luck, you can end up way ahead. Over time you’re going to hit 4-of-a-kinds and royal flushes. Those are always good, but when you hit such hands with a multiplier, they’re even better.

There were playable slot machines as well. Some rather new ones that many players didn’t know how to exploit, and also some oldies-but-goodies like Scarab. This is a game that is well known, and I never check in Vegas because so many players know about it. But on a cruise ship? I checked regularly and found several playable situations.

My biggest score ($1,000) came on a slot machine, as well as my biggest losses (about $400, twice). Overall, though, I was easily ahead on both video poker and slots. I need to juggle my time so that I can eat and go dancing with Bonnie, but there’s still time for me to go check out machines in the casino a few times each day. I didn’t hit any W2-Gs this time even though I was playing machines where they were certainly possible. Maybe next time.

Next year around this time the Bliss will be assigned to the Mexican Riviera route again. That’s good news for Bonnie and me.

Sometimes I play video poker at the Eldorado in Reno. The Eldorado, along with the interconnected Silver Legacy and Circus Circus, make up the ROW, and they are the only Caesars Total Rewards properties in Reno. Some of the machines at the Eldorado are pretty old, but gradually they are being replaced with newer model machines.

During a recent trip, I hit a jackpot in the high limit slots area and was waiting for an attendant to come deal with it. I went to a nearby bank of Triple Play/Five Play/Ten Play machines to check pay schedules. Although I checked them several months ago, new machines are being added at this casino all of the time.

The machines were multi-denomination, from quarters to Five Dollars, and the pay schedules varied by denomination — with the best pay schedules on the $5 machines. So those are the ones I checked. And I found a pay schedule too good to be true.

It was 10/6 Double Double Bonus Poker (DDB). This is a 100.06% game if the straight flush pays 50-for-1, and about a tenth of a percent tighter if the straight flush pays 40-for-1. This was the 50-for-1 version! Although the casino has looser-than-average games in their high limit room, a game requiring $75, $125, or $250 to fully load returning more than 100% is downright juicy!

I carefully checked to see that the royal paid 4,000 coins. I’ve seen pay schedules where you only get 2,500. I also checked three-of-a-kind to verify that it paid 15. I have seen games which were otherwise identical, only paying 10 instead of 15 for three-of-a-kind, and the difference is huge.

The Total Rewards slot club there adds significant value. In addition to the normal slot club, the ROW offers Reward Credit and Tier Credit multipliers more frequently than many other casinos in that system. Add this on top of a 100%+ game — now we’re talking!

I’ve played many versions of DDB and have the strategies on my computer, which was upstairs in my room. But not recently. It’s been a while since I’ve played this game and I’ve played several similar-but-not-identical games since, so I figured I needed a refresher course.

I went upstairs and spent perhaps an hour refreshing myself on 10/6 DDB. It’s a fairly simple game, and I’ve played it a lot during the past, but I especially wanted to refresh myself on all of the straight flush draws. I’ve recently been playing games that return 5-for-1 for the flush rather than 6-for-1, and the draws are different. I also reviewed the A versus a suited JT, and the unsuited AQJ. When I was comfortable with the idiosyncrasies of this game, I went downstairs to have a go at it. 

There were three identical machines in the high limit room, and one was taken by another player playing a different game. I decided to play $5 Triple Play. This was a $75-per-play game. This was more than I had planned to play this trip, but the game was looser than I knew existed, and I had a line of credit there in case things went badly. Which they can. Most of you know that DDB has a “heaven or hell” type of variance. Not as large of a variance as some other games, but if I fail to hit enough quads, especially the premium quads with kickers, I’m not going to like my score at all.

One of the “problems” with this game is that all quads are hand pays that range between $1,250 and $10,000. Each one requires the intervention of a slot person (or two, for the bigger jackpots). If I have two or more machines available to me, I can hop over to the “spare” while I’m waiting for any machine containing a jackpot to be reset.

I was stuck about $2,000 when I hit my first quad — which happened to be fives. I knew my machine would lock up with the $1,250 hand. Except it didn’t lock up!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

I examined things more closely and discovered I only received $1,000 for the jackpot rather than $1,250. The ‘only’ thing shorted in this pay schedule was quads between fives and kings, paying 200 coins rather than 250. This changes the pay schedule to about 98.5%. No thanks! That’s not a terrible return for most high limit video poker, but the Eldorado has some games better than that. I went back to the machine I was playing originally.

I had looked at the pay schedule closely — but missed this particular change. I was simply not aware that this pay schedule, with this one change from the “regular” pay schedule, even existed. It cost me $1,000 to “learn my lesson.” This was not a disaster, but I’m Bob Dancer and am supposed to see these pay schedules instantly. Well, I missed this one! But now I’m aware of it,. I won’t miss it again.

Through the years, I’ve been to Harrah’s New Orleans twenty times or more. They used to have dollar Triple Play, Five Play, and Ten Play NSU Deuces Wild, and if you played enough, you got nice mailers including food, free play, and airfare. The casino was within walking distance to the French Quarter and the Mississippi River, and it was an enjoyable city to visit. They had a Diamond Lounge where if you planned it right, you could easily consume a high proportion of your calories for free every day — and the menu varied from day to day.

So, a surprising number of Las Vegas video poker players regularly made the 2,000-mile journey to the Crescent City. Players from all over the country came as well.

 Almost a decade ago, the NSU games were removed. The loosest remaining video poker I knew about (other than 9/6 Jacks or Better at $150 a hand, or more) was what I called Pseudo NSU, and others called Airport Deuces — among many other names. It’s a 98.9% game that might be acceptable with the right promotion and slot club. Although occasionally I would go for a Seven Stars trip, the tighter games precluded me from attending regularly.

This summer, however, Bonnie and I both received too-good-to-pass-up mailers — so we didn’t. These offers were presumably based on our play at Harrah’s Cherokee — which is also in the Southeastern part of the country. In late September we booked a total of four days — two in my name, two in hers — into the hotel — immediately before a stay in Cherokee. New Orleans is, more or less, on the way to North Carolina from Las Vegas.

Although the hotel is still called Harrah’s New Orleans, the casino has become Caesars New Orleans. There is a new Caesars Hotel that will open in a few months that is slightly smaller than the existing Harrah’s Hotel (350 rooms compared to 400), with 50 of those rooms branded Nobu Hotel, which is a higher-end experience. I was told that the Harrah’s Hotel will be refurbished, possibly renamed, and will continue to be part of the casino-hotel complex there.

The casino itself was barely recognizable to me. Brand new carpet featuring Julius Caesar’s head over and over again covered the casino. When we were there, we saw plenty of empty floor space that will presumably be filled over time with slot machines. The buffet is gone, and a food court area now takes the place of where I think they used to have a theater. 

When I was there previously, I was not a slot player. Today, there are a number of good machines that are sometimes positive, and presumably more to come. Percentagewise, there are far fewer video poker machines than there used to be, although it’s possible that ratio will change when the additional machines are installed. While I didn’t do an exhaustive search, I did see some machines with pseudo NSU on them — which isn’t what it used to be but decent enough by today’s standards. 

Using your Reward Credits (RCs) for dining is a bit tricky. Your RCs are redeemed at one-for-one at the Steakhouse, Manning’s, and the food court. Most other restaurants are redeemed at two-for–one, except Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse is redeemed at three-for-one. This means a $100 check at Ruth’s Chris will cost you $300 in RCs.

There are a number of restaurants throughout the city where you can eat using RCs, at the two-for-one rate, only you have to redeem your RCs first and get a voucher. If your voucher isn’t big enough, you have to use cash or credit card to pay the rest. If your voucher is too big, you forfeit what you didn’t use.

The French Quarter retains its charm. One of my “go-to” stops every trip has been to attend an hour-long concert at Preservation Hall — a venue dedicated to playing New Orleans jazz music in its various forms. Preservation Hall itself is closed now for refurbishing, to add air conditioning among other things, but the Preservation Hall concerts still exist at the Toulouse Theatre, a few blocks away. 

There is a United States National Park on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Every day that they were open, they used to have tours of the French Quarter at 10 a.m. I’ve been on several of them over the years — and each one was slightly different. They no longer have those, but they have free daily ranger talks about the history of New Orleans music — with each ranger giving his/her own take on it. We caught two of those — one from a lady using a piano to describe things and the second from an upright bass player who used that instrument in his talk. It was a surprise to me that the park rangers were experts on New Orleans Jazz. I thought park rangers were generally out-doorsy sorts who knew about forests and animals. But these folks know their music! The talks were enjoyable, informative, and free. 

Bonnie insisted on one snack consisting of beignets and chicory coffee. “The” place to have these snacks is Café Du Monde. This time, however, Café Beignet had no line, so we stopped there instead. Even after dusting off all of the powdered sugar that I could get off of one of these donuts, just being there caused me to ingest killer amounts of second-hand sugar. I ate one powder-free donut with a small chicory coffee to keep the peace. I’m grateful Bonnie didn’t want to go there more than once.

We’ll return to this casino — possibly just before or after a Harrah’s Cherokee trip — again. New Orleans is a unique place to visit — and one of our favorites. In my opinion, we stayed away too long.