The following thread is NOT about the Turd and his war crimes

Awesome thanks I'll look more into all that. Hopefully I can convince a majority of the group to do Reno this year

We spent 56 nights in Vegas last year, all comped but 2 resort fees.  We already have the next 3 trips booked, all comped.  With cheap airfare, cheap rental cars , and cheap rooms it is hard to pick a better place for the money  We are doing an Alaska cruise this summer, but plan on more days in Las Vegas this year than last

PJ  the last time you were going to Vegas you said you were going to try some of the rooftop restaurants.  I was hoping you would do a trip report.  Did you find some good ones ?  And Mark i hope you are having a great trip.

I respectfully suggest that if you have all those comps, your Vegas trips were a lot more expensive than you thought. If you got 56 "free" nights, you got pounded through the floor when you gambled.

Here's the math. Casinos nowadays comp as a percentage of "theo," or theoretical loss. Actual results are irrelevant (unless you're South Point). That percentage used to be 40 but nowadays, it's more like 20. So whatever you were comped, you figured to have lost about five times that much on average. Call it $100 a night for the rooms if you were paying rack rate: $5600 x 5 = $28,000. That's the loss you need to incur to get them yummy comps.

I don't know what your actual results have been over the last year, but I know you don't get 56 free nights without paying for them in blood. Doesn't really look like a bargain to me; each comped room night had a true cost of about $500. That's how they getcha.

Sorry Kevin but you are way off.  If those are your results, then I understand why you dislike Las Vegas so much..  We do play where we get good offers.  I understand that you grind it out with the very best paytables, but sounds like you don't  earn many comps  Maybe you should shop around.

Would you be comfortable disclosing your average gambling budget per day or trip? What games do you generally play? 

Uh uh. I'm very familiar with the casino comp system. Gone are the days when you could do a Jean Scott or "Turn the Tables on Las Vegas" and get more comps than your play and expected loss should warrant. They're extremely good at figuring out how much you should lose and rebating 20% of that, and no more.

My "results" in Vegas have been very close to expectation, amounting to a lifetime profit of about 0.5% of my action. I get comps from those places where I have an overall losing record, and nothing from those places where I'm a lifetime winner. But I shouldn't get comps at all, because my "theo" is a positive percentage. That does raise the possibility that you might be getting over-comped. But it's a certainty that your overall theo is negative and the true cost of your comped rooms is the loss you have to incur to get them. That might make Vegas rooms not cheap at all.

Without knowing what games you play and how well you play them, I can't calculate your theo. I suspect, because of your somewhat disdainful remarks about my play, that you don't care much about EV and just play for fun. That's perfectly fine. But no way are you comped that heavily without incurring substantial -EV.

And because of the 20 percent rule, there's no point in playing -EV games just to get room offers. They've finely calculated that you'll lose five times as much as the value of those "free" rooms you'll get. There's no escaping it.

It hasn't been a good trip so far  courtesy of Delta airlines. Two days left and the incident has been so tramatic I'd love to leave early as it has been hard to have a good time.

What happened??

I would like to give a quick thank you to Kevin for this thread. The somewhat divisive title notwithstanding, we now have a thread with 29+ posts, in the SINK  that is not about politics and has not devolved into ad hominem attacks. It's kind of nice.