4/3/2003
It was good last week to be “”back home in Indiana,”” as the song goes, but it’s even better to be back in Las Vegas. Actually, we have felt more at home in this, our adopted city, since long before we actually moved here permanently.
Some people have wanted details on what I talk about in these seminars for casino executives, like the one I just returned from at Caesars Indiana. My main purpose is to give them some input as to how patrons feel about their casinos and policies; so many operate in what seems to be a vacuum of personal customer contact. Each seminar has a different focus. Some revolve around the slot club or the host systems. This latest one zeroed in on casino promotions.
Brrrrrother! After participating in casino promotions for 19 years, I didn’t have to work up my emotions to talk about what’s wrong with so many of them. Although I did cover the first part of the good, the bad, and the ugly, I was soaring high on the rant scale by the time I got to the end. I not only had hundreds of nightmare examples from my own personal experiences, but I’d received scores of e-mails when I went on the Internet and asked other players to tell me about their experiences with promotions from hell.
The list is unending: drawings that took more time to fill out entry blanks than to earn the entries in the first place; casino employees who had no information; long waits for everything from drawing entry tickets to tournament registration; tricky offers with paragraphs of fine print; insultingly cheap gifts after promises of luxury items; unorganized activities that were more bother than they were worth; last-minute decisions by the casino that made advance planning for customers impossible; and long slow lines everywhere. Needless to say, I ran out of speaking time before I ran out of examples.
Does my ranting do any good? I’m surprised by how many of these seminar participants come up to me later to thank me for opening their eyes. “”We didn’t know our customers had all these negative feelings.”” They felt that their promotions were great and the customers just loved anything and everything that the casino gave them, not realizing that many promotions did more harm than good. Their bottom line may have looked good during the actual period of the promotion, but they never got how the promotion may have impacted future business negatively. And in the workshops later where the executives dreamed up new promotions to present to the whole group, invariably they looked at me to see if I thought that their ideas were customer-friendly. What an amazing concept — that casinos would actually think about how the policies and plans drawn up in their ivory-tower offices actually made their flesh-and-blood customers feel.
By the way, do you remember I told you last week that I was going to visit my 88-year-old father on this trip and we would probably play Scrabble? He’s getting a little forgetful, so I thought I might have to take it easy on him and not play so hard. This is a little embarrassing, but I’ll tell you the truth: I played my heart and soul out, but he beat the socks off of me. I just hope that in 24 years I’m not any more “”forgetful”” than he is now.
4/11/2003
This one’s a Frugal Friday Lite with no math and no technical stuff.
On the Web site www.dicedealer.com/celebrity_stiffs.htm, there’s an interesting discussion among casino employees about good and bad celebrity tippers.
From CasinoWire — One gambler to another: “”You think you have problems? I loaned a friend $15,000 to have plastic surgery done on his face and now I don’t know what he looks like.””
How important is a casino’s carpet? From the Reno Gazette-Journal:
According to Bill Eadington, a professor of gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, casino carpet is taken pretty seriously and there’s much lore concerning patterns that keep customers focused on the games at hand. “”The carpet should be ugly,” said Eadington. “”The basic idea is you don’t want your eyes to look down. There is generally some dissonance involved. You want them [players] concentrating on the action.””
Eadington also says a big casino replacing five-year-old carpet that is not necessarily in dire need of replacement is a prime example of “”refreshment capital”” expenditures: “”The concern is that without refreshment capital, the customer is going to get tired of [the venue] more quickly. The other side of that is that new carpet alone will not bring in new customers.””
The Atlantic City Hilton recently had to pay $25,000 to settle a charge that it repeatedly operated a slot machine that had failed regulatory inspection. The Division of Gaming Enforcement discovered that one of the Hilton’s nickel Yahtzee slot machines always recorded 16 credits when 20 coins were deposited. And this is the funny part: Although the slot gypped gamblers, the Hilton actually lost money on the machine during the malfunction.
It was a breach of tradition when the Wild, Wild West casino at Bally’s Park Place in Atlantic City erected a gigantic clock smack dab in middle of the casino floor, thereby breaking the taboo against clocks in casinos — a taboo that originated in the early days of Las Vegas, when casino designers sought to insulate gamblers from the distractions of the real world. However, the clock was no big deal to one customer, who reasoned, “”If you can’t afford a watch, you shouldn’t be in a casino in the first place.””
From the the MGM Grand Web site: The MGM Grand is the “”world’s largest casino.”” It has 18,000 doors! There are approximately 771,700 gambling chips in its casino. If stacked, the chips would create a tower that rose 1.5 miles into the sky. In addition, more than 800 decks of cards are being shuffled at any given moment throughout the four casino areas of the property.
Sign in the no-smoking part of the casino on Caesars riverboat in Indiana:
“No smoking. Violators will be fed to the lions.”
4/18/2003
A little knowledge can be dangerous. I remember the first time Brad and I came to Vegas, 19 years ago. Although I knew nothing about basic strategy, much less card counting, I played blackjack because I’d heard that it was smart to play the tables, that only dumb gamblers played the machines. Brad was under the impression we were in Vegas to have fun, so much to my dismay, he was merrily playing slot machines. Well, the final score was a tie- we both lost our bankroll. But we did learn an important lesson: you need to study something a long time before you become an expert at it.
This lesson often hits home when people ask me for advice on playing video poker. Some quarter players, for example, read a little bit about playing full- pay VP. They find out that some games have a long-term average return of over 100%. So they diligently look for 9/6 schedules or Double Bonus or Deuces Wild. Then, when they lose on these machines, they can’t understand why.
The problems can be many. Maybe they found a 9/6 Double Bonus game, which has a low expected value, rather than 9/6 Jacks or Better, whose EV is much higher. Maybe they didn’t realize that a game can be called full pay and still not have an EV of over 100%, like classic 9/6 Jacks or Better, and therefore cannot be beat in the long term unless you add cashback or other slot club benefits. Maybe they didn’t realize that there are many games called Deuces Wild and many of them have low-paying schedules and only a few are over 100%. Even if they find a game that does have an EV of over 100%, they may not realize that they must learn a specific strategy for each and every pay schedule and many of these strategies, like the one for 10/7 Double Bonus, are very complicated and best learned and practiced on VP software.
And the biggest problem may be that beginners who haven’t studied video poker in depth don’t understand the volatility of the game, that they will have more losing than winning sessions and that they need an adequate bankroll to survive the inevitable long losing streaks. Some quarter players, especially if they’ve been lucky and won in their first few sessions, will think that the little knowledge they’ve picked up could be used for bigger profits if they went up to the dollar or higher machines. This is almost always a disaster. Just a few losses–or even one big one–at this higher level will wipe out all those wins on the quarter machines so fast that their heads will spin and their bankrolls will be devastated.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t start playing video poker until you’ve proven to yourself on tutoring software that you’re good enough. If you’re playing slots, a switch to almost any video poker machine, if you stick to the same coin-in per hand, will keep you from losing so quickly. For one thing, video poker usually has a higher EV than most slot machines of the same denomination. And secondly, because you have to think about each hand to decide what to hold, you’ll put your money through at a slower pace, so it’ll last longer and thus extend your playing time.
And if you only have time to study one thing about video poker, concentrate on how to read the paytables and choose the best ones. This will decrease your losses with the least effort. Bob Dancer, one of the foremost VP experts today, says, “”Surprisingly, choosing a machine with the right pay schedule is the most important element in winning video poker. Playing so-so on a good machine is much better than playing perfectly on a bad machine.””
However, I strongly urge you to stick with the lower denominations, especially quarters where the best schedules are usually found, when you first play video poker. In More Frugal Gambling, which will actually be coming out in this century, I talk about Lenny Frome’s great illustration of video poker as a three-legged stool. Choosing a good game is the first leg, but I warn about sitting on this one-legged stool–unless you’re very close
4/24/2003
Last week we attended what some might think is a strange event in a casino, an Easter Week presentation of the “”He’s Alive”” passion play, for which the Riviera Hotel and Casino had donated, for the sixth year, the use of a large ballroom. More than 100 men, women, and children from the Las Vegas community appeared in a fully costumed production, retelling the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.
This is just one small example that shows, although the casinos are lately pushing the sex envelope to make Vegas even more of a sin city, the majority of the residents here are much more interested in being upright citizens and good neighbors than being sexy. There are nine pages of churches in the Las Vegas Yellow Pages. A significant percentage of residents spend more time volunteering than gambling. We’re concerned about our homeless, want to have good schools, and think voting is a privilege. Remember, if you only visit the Strip when you come to town, you aren’t really seeing our city.
If you’re interested in seeing this free Easter presentation another year, you can go to http://www.passion-play.org/ or call the Riviera box office for more details.
FROM MY INBOX
“”My brother has a $6 Gold Coast pay ticket that he forgot to cash in when we were in Vegas. I’m mailing it to you, and you guys can have it. It expires in two months and we won’t be back before then. The casinos probably make a lot of money this way.”” I bet it’s very common for people to take home chips, winning sports books bets, and tickets from cashless slots.
This next one tickles me, especially since Brad was seen in a casino soon after he got home from the hospital where he was recovering after a heart attack.
“”True story: A friend and I were playing poker on a busy night. Around 2:30 a.m. or so, he tells me that the woman next to him mentioned something about her husband having open-heart surgery early the next morning.
“”Shouldn’t you be at home with him?”” my friend asked.
“”Oh, he’s playing at the next table over there,”” the woman answered, nonchalantly.
By the way, Brad is feeling fine and is back on the treadmill and our other exercise activities we have done together for the last 18 years.
“”Since you wanted to hear other cheapo things people do on their trips to LV, here’s one I just did (which I’ll probably continue doing). I carried home (to Los Angeles) as many of the plastic water bottles I used as I could and recycled them. Not only was I doing a good thing for the environment, but since most of those bottles say “”CA Redemption Value,”” I got 2.5c for each bottle that was less than 24 ounces (bottles that are 24 ounces or more pay 5c each at recycling machines). Why shouldn’t I make more money if I can?”” I see no problem here. In fact, I think you have out-frugaled me!
Brad and I are on the road again in May. On the 3rd we’ll be flying to Mississippi, where I’ll be speaking at a seminar for casino hosts at the Gulfport Grand Casino. Then, from the 18th through 20th, we’ll be at the Raving’s 5th Indian Gaming National Marketing Conference, at the Ohkay Casino-Resort in San Juan Pueblo, north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, my presentation topic will be “”How to Have Happier Players Club Members At Your Indian Casino.”” You can go to www.frugalgambler.biz/calendar/frugal_calendar.htm to find out the details of informal meet-and-greet sessions at these places. We love to sit down and chat with other frugal gamblers.