Still, you can for the time being play FPDW at Sam’s, Palms, most Stations, Aliante, and a few others. You get virtually no slot club benefits, and you get nothing in the mail, but at least you’re playing at a slight advantage. Of course, the recent torching of most of the good VP at Fiesta Henderson may signal that Stations is finally going to kill good VP once and for all.

The downgrades at Tuscany signal some extreme paranoia on the part of management. IF you played the best machines on 10x point days, you got back to breakeven. IF you played on the very occasional pulltab days, you had a tiny advantage. I guess they can’t stand the idea of anyone getting a 100.2% payback one or two times a week. Sheesh!

It appears that the dodge of pumping in play during promos and Xpoints and then hoping to get mailers to bring you back to breakeven (there are very few such plays that get you back there by themselves, and then only barely over 100%) is dying out; the slot club managers seem to be much more adept at sniffing out advantage players, especially those locals, whom they hate with a white-hot fury.

It was fun while it lasted!