1/5/2001
I’ll title this column Bits and Pieces; one of my New Year’s resolutions was to clean out my “Good Ideas for FF” file.
Spin Poker and Fifty Play are the only two multi-line machines that I know of that allow you to play less than the maximum lines and still wager 5 coins per chosen number of lines to get the full bonus on the royal flush. (Matrix may also allow this; I haven’t played it yet.) And I’m guessing that when Hundred Play comes out (and God save us all when it does), you will also be able to play less than the max lines. One caution about multi-line machines:
Overwhelmingly, the paytables range from pretty bad to terrible. You have to look long and hard to find a full-pay. So I suggest you only play them for recreational purposes – and then set yourself a limit that you can afford to lose. I LOVE multi-line VP – but it is certainly “addictive.” I’m afraid that it’s causing many formerly “sensible” VP players to lose control. Multi-line can reek havoc on your bankroll. Tread carefully!
I just found an old letter from someone complaining that I covered the Suncoast so enthusiastically and “it’s way out in the boondocks,” while I never even mentioned the Aladdin, which is right on the Strip. I try to talk about all sort of subjects that appeal to all kinds of gamblers, but I must confess I do talk about VP – GOOD VP – more than anything else. When the Suncoast opened, it had (and still has) literally hundreds of over-100+% VP games; the Aladdin had some of the worst paytables I’ve ever seen. So we play at the Suncoast. Recently Brad and I were invited to a slot tournament at the Aladdin. (They must have gotten our name from a host or casino executive who used to work at another casino where we played.) So we had several days to explore that casino. We thought it was a beautiful property: pleasing theme in the casino (Brad likes belly dancers); comfortable luxury rooms; interesting shopping mall (but like all others in casinos – with too much “stuff” no one needs and overpriced as well). And we were surprised and pleased to find that they’ve added a number of 9/6 jacks or better on the $1 and higher level. Not over 100% – true – but good occasionally when slot club benefits and tournament equity puts them in positive territory. Which casino do I like better now? Well, I can’t be objective at the moment – a few days ago I hit an $8,000 royal at the Suncoast!
Continuous shuffler machines are never good for BJ players. Card counters can’t count when they’re in use. Bad players will lose faster. And even good basic strategy players are playing at a disadvantage, albeit a small one, so they’ll lose more money per hour because they’re being dealt more hands on tables with shufflers. From www.blackjack.casino.com
Do you know there is a difference between the Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and the Vegas Hard Rock Café, the latter being the free-standing retail store/restaurant in front of the hotel on the corner of Harmon and Paradise? The Hard Rock Hotel is a separate company from the one that includes the Hard Rock Cafes all over the world. Watch for this difference when reading the ads and using the coupons in the Las Vegas freebie magazines.
From Norm’s column in the R-J, quoting Howard Crossman, an Atlantic City BJ player: “I don’t gamble. I invest with risk.”
1/12/2001
The good and the bad!
A good quarterly Sahara funbook: You must be a slot club member before the quarter begins to get this good book of coupons. For example, you must be a member prior to April 1 to get the one for the second quarter of 2001. But it’s probably worth the effort for most people to make a special trip to join to be eligible for all future funbooks. There are dining, show, drink, food, and shopping discounts, as well as a coupon for a free painter’s hat. There’s a 2-1 coupon for Speed for you roller coaster fanatics, and 2-1s for virtual rides — for the less adventurous like me! Coupons for keno and table games include $50 in non-negotiable chips for $40 and First Card Is an Ace. A good bonus coupon gives you matching slot club points for your first 100 earned; that turns .25% cashback to .5%.
The bad: The $50 slot bonus coupon for any top-award jackpot sounded good, so I planned to keep it handy while we played a VP machine with a good paytable. However, I must give you this warning. Some people have been extremely disappointed by the Mickey Mouse way some floorpeople have been interpreting this coupon. One player got one royal on the 4-line Lucky Draws, but was refused the bonus. Why? Because “the top jackpot is getting a royal on all four lines.” Another was refused the bonus for a “simple” royal because the machine had a sequential royal jackpot.
I plan to write an article one of these days for a magazine that goes to casino executives. You can bet that I’ll talk about casinos that make their coupons and promotion so complicated they defeat the very purpose of them in the first place — to get people into their casino and feel good about playing there.
BRIEFS
Mandalay Resort Group, a la Harrah’s and Station Casinos, is planning to launch a new slot card system in the spring, one that will connect many, if not all, of their properties in earning and using slot club points. The company is, however, very secretive about the details. (I’m waiting anxiously to use my Mandalay points to see the Blue Man Group at the Luxor. It’s against my religion to pay for a casino show!) I hear that MGM Mirage also has a similar plan in the works.
Read in Casino Player: According to Websense.com, there are 21,000 gambling-related Web sites as of August 2000. This compares to approximately 7,000 such sites just one year ago. No wonder I just can’t keep up.
CAPS (Certified Airline Passenger Service) now has 13 locations where you can use their service. They will take your baggage from a hotel to the airport and check it in with some airlines — all for $6. Airlines include Southwest, American West, Delta, Canada 3000, Royal, Skyservice, Sun Country, and Virgin Atlantic. Participating hotels are the Aladdin, Bally’ s, Flamingo, Imperial Palace, Las Vegas Hilton, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Paris, Riviera, Sahara, Bellagio, and Mirage. They will also pick up luggage at Alamo.
If you tend to overspend while gambling, take some advice from columnist Andrew Glazer: “”If you can’t leave your ATM and credit cards at home altogether, then find a friend to be your designated card-holder.”” http://www.casinowire.com/archive/200012/2140.shtml
From a friend who is putting off visiting Terrible’s, the new locals casino: “It’s just hard for me to imagine going to a place that tells you up front it’s going to be awful.”
1/19/2001
Andy Rooney said, “Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.” I think if Andy had lived in Las Vegas he might have used another word picture — something like life being a perpetual-motion machine whatever your age!
People sometimes ask us what all we do in Vegas. Well, let me tell you about this last week or so.
First, we spent the better part of two days with a camera crew shooting a series on Vegas for the Travel Channel, which will air in May or June. They wanted to show our lifestyle, so they filmed us in our condo and in our garage, which Brad has fixed up as a “casino comp museum.” Then they filmed us in several casinos, explaining and playing “good” VP machines, collecting cashback, asking for comps, and couponing.
We’ve been asked to do many these TV projects recently. They’re fun, but time-intensive and tiring. No, to answer a frequent question, we do not get paid to do them, but hopefully they will mention The Frugal Gambler and help sales of the book The only time I was ever paid to be on TV was the “To Tell the Truth” appearance — and since the impostors and I fooled only two panelists, my share came to $666.67. I may appear in reruns — but there’s no contract for residuals.
My sister and her husband, from Indiana, were in town for most of the week and we guided them to good video poker and helped them learn how to use the comp system, while sharing some of our abundant food, room and show comps. All four of us had an LVA coupon book and I’d collected coupons from various other sources, so we were well prepared for one of our favorite team activities — coupon runs.
We didn’t play as much video poker ourselves this week as we usually do. We played so much in December because of the abundant promotions that we were taking it a bit easier this month. But we did play for five hours at the Orleans on Wednesday since they were giving double points. The Orleans is one of our core casinos, not just because it’s an easy one-mile walk or drive from our condo, but it offers a very good choice of VP games and their slot club benefits are very generous. We also played a couple of three- to four-hour VP sessions at the Rio, since they’ve launched a new very aggressive program of mail benefits for locals. We receive a cash and food coupon a couple of days after each day we play.
We attended two parties at the Hard Rock, the first a special one put on by Peter Morton, the HR #1 guy. The second was a monthly VIP party for very frequent players and it provided me the answer to what to give Brad for his 69th birthday on the 18th. My ticket was picked in a drawing and the prize was a man’s classy black-leather Hard Rock jacket, price tag $395. Brad now calls it the “ultimate” in his casino logo jacket collection.
Then there was working on Frugal 2, writing a Strictly Slots article, and reading and answering a ton of e-mails each and every day. There were our yearly doctors’ visits, the complicated record collecting to close the books of Low Rollers, Inc. to give to our accountant, and talking to our broker about whether to sell one of our casino stocks.
We listened happily to our grandchildren chatter on the phone how excited they are that we can come and visit their school while we’re in Hawaii next month. We did aerobic and weight-lifting activities every few days in our condo complex exercise room and took brisk walks other days. We ate a late breakfast at home every morning and an early dinner every night in a casino, always available free somewhere in town. Brad watched a lot of TV with his eyes closed (his special skill); I read the newspaper every night with one eye on a TV show if it was about Vegas.
And if there was time, I slept, which is what I am going to do when I get this column finished. Good night.
1/26/2001
Last week in this column I mentioned that my sister and her husband, Starr and Garvie, were here in Las Vegas for a week, learning how to play video poker and utilize the comp system. This was the first trip on which they felt they “knew what they were doing.” One or both of them had been in Vegas several times before, but they’d either paid for their rooms or we used our comps to get them free for them. They’d dabbled in video poker and slots some, but craps was their first love, especially for Garvie.
However, since their last trip a year ago, after seeing the condo that we bought with our video poker winnings, they decided that maybe they’d try to follow in our footsteps. They dug out their copy of The Frugal Gambler and started studying. They bought the Dancer Video Poker Reports, Dan Paymar’s book Video Poker — Optimum Play, and WinPoker. They subscribed to Strictly Slots, Casino Player, and the LVA. They soaked up information like a couple of sponges.
I recommended, as I do to all beginning VP players who are going to play in Vegas, that they play only quarters and learn only one game to start, deuces wild. They studied the strategy chart and practiced endlessly on WinPoker until they felt quite confident that they knew the right strategy.
Starr surfed the Internet for information on Vegas, and e-mailed me her questions frequently. She wanted to be as prepared as she could be. “We don’t want to always have to depend on you; we want to start getting comps on our own.”
For hotel rooms they employed a technique that I have found very successful in the past. Through our host at the Orleans, they reserved a room for four nights and were given the casino rate as a courtesy to us. Most casinos will give a casino rate to friends/relatives of good customers (that means gamblers who have a fairly long history of heavy play there). Our host also put our name on the room in addition to theirs. That way, although Starr and Garvie logged a lot of quarter play, which will probably qualify them for future room comps, Brad’s and my higher level of play added enough that they could get all four nights of this visit comped. It’s difficult for a quarter player to qualify for a free room in many “deluxe” casinos on their first visit — especially if they win. Many casinos want to see a history of play over several visits, which I can understand. And they aren’t as willing to comp a winner as much as they do a loser, a growing casino policy that I do NOT understand. (But that’s a subject for another column.)
Their other two nights were at the Frontier, in Brad’s name only, and he played enough both days to keep him qualified for future room offers. However, this allowed them to have time to establish a history at other casinos. They did play enough at the Frontier to qualify on their own for future comped rooms and, at my suggestion, played at the Barbary Coast and Gold Coast, hoping to get mailed offers from those marketing departments. Hopefully, when George Maloof opens The Palms next December, there will be lots of good video poker opportunities and it will provide another casino to add to my list of good places to play.
We have an abundance of food comps to share since we now play at the dollar-and-up level, so we took care of many of our meals together. But they were excited to learn that on one of their days at the Orleans they could earn double points. They earned enough cashback and comps to cover all their meals we hadn’t covered. They agree with us — cashback is king!
All four of us love to coupon together. It’s a great “team sport,” since both couples contribute to the coupon kitty, then divide it at the end of the visit.
Starr and Garvie are back in Indianapolis now, but they’re already studying and planning for their trip here in April. I’m proud of them! They’re doing all the right things. I am happy to continue to be their teacher. After all, what’s a big sister for?