Originally posted by: MisterPicture
The full-pay deuces machines at Arizona Charlies Boulder now have stickers saying that no points will be earned. I'm guessing it's the same at their Decatur location. While the points to free-play option didn't amount to much, those of us who liked using them for food comps will miss it, since they were about triple in value. Also since play won't help you get to the Loyal tier, the food specials at the cafe will now cost us a little more.
We'll see whether this affects offers and comps remains to be seen.
There are a couple of workarounds:
One, I found that using my card still allowed my play to be recorded, and that generated a comped room offer almost immediately afterward (True Rewards does that pretty quickly), even though I had earned no points. And the room comp did come with a $20 food credit.
Two, you can hit them on multiple point days--currently, Friday and Sunday are 4X. Both casinos have 25/50/100-play machines with Airport Deuces and 9/7 DB at 1 cent denoms. Given that comps are awarded at 0.167%, and the games on those machines are right about 99%, you can build up a fair amount of tier points for a net loss of about 1/3 of 1% of your total action.
Whether that works more in your favor than simply plugging away at the FPDW with your card inserted remains to be seen. I can only tell you that I got offers for both Boulder and Decatur after my "pointless" play.
"Loyal" takes 10,000 points if you start from scratch, so using the above strategy, you'd lose about $100 and earn back a bit more than $65 in food comps. What would happen after that is anybody's guess.
I'll probably continue to play there because a) after all, it's still full-pay, and b) this is one of the last two casinos to offer full-pay Joker (the Plaza is the other), which is my favorite game.
