Similarly, a free play run (when there’s no other reason for going across town) might not be worth doing. The route you described for Brad would be about 70 miles round-trip and would consume three hours on the best of days (especially since he would have to park, go inside, play off the free play, cash out, etc.). A midsize sedan costs at least fifty cents/mile to operate, and I don’t know what you or he consider his time to be worth, but let’s consider that to be a very modest $20/hr—that means that you are spending the equivalent of $95 to pick up the “free” play. That diminishes the value of the bouncebacks in general, and since you are undoubtedly playing mildly -EV machines (since +EV machine players pretty much get nothing these days), the cost of collecting that free play/bounceback/etc. has to be factored in to an overall calculation of whether a play is worthwhile or not. I used to have a threshold for driving 5+ miles to pick up free play, and I felt better about that threshold when I figured out that picking up small amounts of free play was actually COSTING me money. Of course, if you can put that free play “on the back burner”, that makes the detour easier to swallow, as you can save it for when you’re in the neighborhood–but of course, the casinos put restrictive time frames on the free play redemption for the exact purpose of thwarting that strategy.