A Textbook Trip Report Part 2

In my last blog, I talked about my extensive planning for our recent visit to the Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in North Carolina. This made for a smooth and relaxing start to our family vacation, a pleasant six-hour trip north through the beautiful Georgia scenery I still enjoy as much as I did when the lush greenery was such a welcome change from the stark landscape of our Las Vegas desert home. Because Brad and I are tired of our fine-dining-style dinner every night at Legacy, we got to choose a fast-food favorite, Arby’s, for a leisurely lunch, then our usual short stop later for a Dairy Queen ice cream treat. I’m addicted to their no-sugar-added Dilly Bars!

Also making this visit easier was the fact that we’d made this trip many times before. When we still lived in Las Vegas, for years Brad and I both usually reached Seven Stars tier status, which gave us two completely comped trips a year to any CZR casino in the country. It worked out perfectly for us to choose Harrah’s Cherokee; we could tack on a family vacation with little additional expense, since our flight from Vegas to Atlanta was comped. We could spend a week or two with the family in Columbus, then take the road trip to Cherokee where we had two or three comped rooms or sometimes a huge two-bedroom suite, depending on how many in the family were with us. Seven Stars benefits fed us the whole time and sometimes we had comps we were “forced” to use in the shops. The family loved to help us out with those use-or-lose benefits!

We didn’t have nearly as many extra benefits on this trip as when we were flying high as Seven Stars, since now only I’m Diamond Elite, but happily my host could go the extra mile and get us two comped rooms. I also had a $100 Celebration Dinner, a Diamond Elite benefit I hadn’t yet used, plus quite a few Reward credits that I accumulated with my heavy play on the visit to Reno last March. (I’d planned to use them for food comps there, but to my surprise, my room-charge bill was completely zeroed out by my host rather than Reward credits being used first, the usual CZR policy.) So when we were ready to check out of Cherokee, those carry-over credits covered most of our food charges, with a very small out-of-pocket balance left for us to pay.

Now for the subject for which many of you are waiting, the actual gambling part of this trip.

Some of the nitty-gritty details I’ll be discussing may seem too technical for some of you. Many say that thinking about math takes the fun out of their casino experience. However, I take the view that I have more fun when I can win more and lose less. So although not a math wizard myself, I’ve learned to take the information from the wizards and apply it to my own play. And in most cases, like the one I’ll be describing here, it’s not complex calculus, just simple arithmetic. And it’s one of the most important and basic foundation stones in Brad’s and my casino success for 39 years.

For this trip, I knew in advance, as I almost always do, what game I’d be playing, the same one I’ve played at Cherokee for many years: $5 NSUD (Not-So-Ugly Deuces, the nickname for the 44-deuce game with an EV of 99.73%). I checked in advance on vpFREE2 for the machine locations and was happy to find there hadn’t been any major changes since we were there a year and a half ago.

Most importantly, I also planned my playing schedule, which for me, at a CZR property, is 99.9% based on maximizing the players club tier bonus system. (A reminder – the tier system is separate from their Reward system, although you’re earning both tier and Reward credits at the same time. It can be easy to confuse the two!)

500 base tier credits earn 125 bonus tier credits
1,000 base earn 1,000 bonus
2,500 base earn 5,000 bonus
5,000 base earn 10,000 bonus

You can see by this chart why I almost always choose to earn either 2,500 or 5,000 (no more no less) tier credits per day. Those both earn double bonuses; lesser amounts of play earn a smaller % bonus. I’d already earned about 53,000 tier credits this year in Reno, so I needed about 22,000 more for the 75,000 per year to reach the Diamond Elite tier level.

From past experience, I knew that on these $5 machines, I earned about 1,250 credits per hour. So on our arrival day, I planned to play for about two hours, reasonable after six hours of tiring travel. That would get me 7, 500 credits (the base 2,500, plus the 5,000 bonus). On the next full day of playing time, in about four hours I could get 15,000 tier points (5,000 base and 10,000 bonus). With the total of those two days of tier earnings, 22,500, I’d reached my yearly goal of 75,000 and be Diamond Elite until the end of January 2024.

I know that most players don’t have the same goals and/or bankroll or play the same games that I do. But I want to emphasize that this same general principle can be used on lower levels. CZR video poker usually takes $10 of play to earn 1 tier credit. (You must carefully look for any machine labels, because many casinos are making pocket-emptying changes with good or even halfway decent VP paytables requiring $20 or even up to $50 coin-in to earn one tier credit.)

However, on almost all slot machine play, most casino players clubs give twice as many (or more) points than on VP; at a CZR property, it usually takes only $5 to earn 1 tier credit, half of much as for VP. This means slot players earn tier credits (and reward credits) much faster than VP players, not just because of the better bonus rate, but because most play faster than the VP player who has – or should have – more thinking time between hands.

Of course, I feel compelled to mention the cost of this rapid road to higher tier-point accumulation. I’m not judging any player in terms of what game they want to play, but I must repeat this mathematical fact, probably for the hundredth or thousandth time in my writings: A slot player over the long term will lose a lot more than the VP student.

But all machine players (on slots and VP) who have a goal of climbing the CZR tier ladder can reduce their cost by using the bonus chart to their advantage. That doesn’t mean betting over your bankroll, but planning your play schedule carefully. This usually means bunching bigger play on fewer days to reach daily total requirements that have a bigger bonus percentage.

Some couples do this by playing on only one of their cards each day (usually permitted if they have the same address). They hit the goal tier level on one card, perhaps in two days. Then they start the climb on the other card. If you aren’t part of a couple, instead of lighter play for three days, you might take that same bankroll to do heavier play on your card one or two days to reach your tier level goal, then leave the other days for sightseeing or other non-gambling activities.

The bonuses are so important, because they don’t cost you any extra after you have played for the base. Those are credits earned when you don’t have to fight the casino edge. And there are other ways to earn these “free” tier credits. CZR properties run many tier-credit multiplier promotions. You must read the details of these carefully; they aren’t standard across all properties, with varying dates and many different multipliers.

Sometimes it’s one multiplier casino-wide. Sometimes multipliers are graded up the higher tier you are in. Sometimes you have to swipe at a kiosk to find your mystery multiplier. But in almost all cases with bigger multipliers, like 5x, 10x, or higher, you’ll often find – usually in the fine print – that multipliers on video poker are capped, usually at 3x. But whatever you play, these multiplier promotions reduce your cost of reaching higher tiers as they help you get to your goal faster.

I get many questions from readers when I write about our experiences in the CZR tier system. Why did you go down from the Seven Stars tier to Diamond Elite? Does it pay to always strive to go to a higher level? How do I decide what tier to aim for? Are all casino tier systems similar to the one at CZR? Can you use the same methods in all casinos to maximize the benefits you will receive?

There are no simple answers to many of these questions; they’ll take more time and space than I have here. But I’ll tackle them in the upcoming Part 3, along with the questions I know you all have: “How did your play results turn out this trip?” and “Is it really true that you’re retiring from video poker advantage play?”

And I can’t wait to share with you an amazing Brad story that put the cherry on the top of this wonderful family casino visit.