3/2/2001
A new month — new promotions! Check out “Slot Club Promotions” under Free Stuff on this Web site’s homepage. We’re trying to keep this as accurate and up to date as we can, considering that casinos can and do change and/or cancel promotions without notice. If you notice an inaccuracy or find a new promotion, we would appreciate an e-mail to [email protected] (this will be amended to a more specific e-mail address within a few days).
And if casinos will cooperate, I’ll try to get as much promotional information as I can in advance, to assist out-of-towners in planning their trips. This will not be a 100% success, since many casinos plan their promotions only about a month ahead, some with even less lead-time. But I’m going to work on it; I remember my frustration when we lived in Indiana and I had to guess about the best dates to come to Vegas because of a lack of advance information from the casinos.
I’ve just been working on the chapter about promotions that will appear in Frugal 2. I’ve changed by mind since The Frugal Gambler. Promotions aren’t the gravy in a casino “meal.” They’re the vegetables in a hearty stew called smart gambling. To use another figure of speech, promotions are the lifeblood of our gambling, and even more so since we’ve become Vegas locals.
BRIEFS
The Castaways is running a promotion that gives me another frugal tip to share: Always keep your slot cards when a casino is sold. The Castaways is giving a coffee mug and key chain, plus a chance to win cash and cruises, to anyone who brings in a slot card from the Showboat (the former name of the Castaways). This doesn’t apply only when a casino changes owners or names; it’s also happened when a casino merely changed the name of its slot club. And since casino paraphernalia-collecting is all the rage now, I wish I’d kept every slot club card we had ever had. I bet some of those oldies of long-gone casinos are valuable.
Are you mourning the removal of the popular 10/7 Bar at the Hard Rock? Don’t be discouraged. There are eight new multi-denomination slant-top Game Kings on the main casino floor, just below the VIP room, that include quarter 10/7 DB. Since these are IGT machines, not Bally, the straight flush is the standard 250, not 400. But this is still the best quarter play at the Hard Rock (except for one lonely fuzzy quarter deuces wild machine). Learn very accurate strategy, and with the slot club cashback/comps for VP at .5%, you’ll be able to play with a half-percent edge in a very cool casino.
Do you find that Bob Dancer’s articles in Strictly Slots and Casino Player help you play VP better? Then bookmark http://casinogaming.com/columnists/dancer/index.html and find a long list of very interesting and helpful weekly VP columns that he has written for this Web site over the last year.
A comment on the Internet about the Suncoast by an out-of-town visitor who puts in quite a few hours of VP on most days he is in Vegas: “Their coinless machine system easily (makes it possible) for me to add an hour a day to my playing time.” I’ve been hearing a lot of good reports about being able to get a room comped at the Suncoast with far less play than at other locals and Strip casinos.
A comment posted on the Internet after a Vegas visit, staying at Circus Circus: “All my nightmares are now in pink!”
3/9/2001
Last week I wrote about how important promotions are for the smart gambler. I would like to continue on that subject this week and give some examples of good promotions that are going on in Las Vegas this month.
Vegas locals have an edge in this department, with a large choice of promotions all month long. If they’re retired, they can be very flexible in their playing schedule as well.
Visitors, on the other hand, don’t have as many options. They often can’t take advantage of drawing tickets they earn because the drawing takes place after they leave. They rarely know about promotions far enough ahead to schedule vacation time or get bargain airfares. They often don’t rent a car, and public transportation can be time-consuming.
However, everyone, tourist or local, IF THEY WORK AT IT, can use promotions to put more money in their pockets. Let’s look at some examples:
1. Gold Coast — Double points all month 24/7 is probably the best “all-purpose” promotion this month — a great .5% cashback (CB). There’s good VP to boot — full-pay deuces on the quarter level and 10/7 DB in dollars. Brad and I, as locals now, will play there a lot all month in order to get our lifetime points up to the max level, where their monthly mailing for locals will net us the highest benefits, including $25 each. Visitors staying on the Strip who don’t have a car can take the free frequent shuttle from the Barbary Coast to take advantage of the double points, even though out-of-towners don’t get the monthly mailing coupons.
2. St. Patty’s Day will be a Coast property promotional overdose for us — as is true on most holidays: double points at the Orleans (.4% CB) and the Suncoast (.5% CB), 3X (.75%) at the Gold Coast, and a whopping 4X points (.8%) at the Barbary Coast. All Coast properties have quarter full-pay deuces, and all but the Barbary Coast have dollar 10/7 DB. Holiday bonus-points days are good times for locals to work at moving up to higher levels for the valuable Coast property monthly mailings and/or to put some play on their cards to keep qualified for the mailings. Visitors who can play on holidays will qualify faster for room comps.
3. Silverton has 3X points on Tuesdays and Thursdays all month. You can also get 5X points on Mondays IF you ask for a coupon sheet at the club AND you register with the 5X-points coupon before you start playing. Don’t count on these extra points for use right away — it may take up to a week for them to manually add them to your account. Silverton no longer gives cashback, just comp points, so we don’t play there much; Brad says we probably won’t live long enough to use all the comp points we already have in our Silverton comp bank. That fact — and the thought of very long lines — kept us from getting excited about one coupon on the sheet — a totally free (not buy-one-get-one-free) brunch or dinner buffet any Sunday in March. We also didn’t get to use one coupon that we would have liked; a 4-to-a-royal “miss” gets you a pewter keychain, one that we would have added to our growing collection of casino keychains.
However, there’s one coupon on that coupon sheet I mentioned, one that all slot club members can get at the slot club, that got us back to Silverton fast: Earn 1,000 points on one Friday in March and you can get a $25 Home Depot gift certificate. We double-dipped this promotion by using the LVA 50-coin-bonus coupon while we were earning our 1,000 points. This promo is worth the drive for locals, as well as tourists with rental cars. I suggest you don’t wait to do this on the last Friday of the month. Silverton is known for “running out” of both the coupon sheets and gift certificates.
There are bonus point days at many other casinos– click on Slot Club Promotions at the top of the homepage — and many other promotions around town. Are you getting your fair share of all that promotional money?
3/16/2001
ALL BRIEFS
St. Patty’s Day is tomorrow and many casinos have special promotions. The biggest might be the free St. Patty’s Two-Day Bash downtown, sponsored by the Fremont Experience. They advertise free entertainment on two stages: on Friday March 16th from 7 to 11 p.m., Kinship and Craicmore are playing, and on Saturday March 17th from noon to 3 p.m., it’s the Twilight Lords and Craicmore, then from 4 to 8 p.m. it’s Brother and Kinship. (Never heard of these bands — but then I don’t think there has been any good music since the Four Freshmen!) At the block party will be food and drink specials and, of course, green beer.
Terrible’s Casino has some terribly good promos. If you got a copy of the February/March coupon magazine, that alone will keep you busy. The best coupon for us was the one where you trade 500 points (worth 50 cents if you turn them in for cashback) for a $5 gas coupon — we got one each for a $9 bonus. However, a warning. You cannot use the gas coupons at just any Terrible’s. It must be one that does NOT have a car wash — the girl at the slot club desk says all the stations with car washes were sold, although they get to keep the Terrible’s name. How confusing!
Other good Terrible’s specials, and you don’t need a coupon for them, include a 6-pack of Pepsi (diet or regular) for 50 points (limit 2 per person per week). A case a week for us for 20 cents! We’re going to have to give it away or float away. There are also ridiculous wine specials and food bargains. We go and play at 5X points after 9 p.m. and earn enough in a few minutes to get all the specials we can handle for the week. That means just one trip to the slot club, so we can be patient if there’s a small line. Food comps are good for a week.
Never book a room or spend money in a casino restaurant or retail store or any casino facility like a spa, childcare center, movie, etc., without whipping out your slot card and asking if it entitles you to a discount. You’ll be surprised at the number of places where this saves you money. It’s yet another good reason for getting a slot club at a casino even if you never plan to play there.
One good promotion that the Stationization of the Reserve has not changed: You can still eat free, meaning the points don’t come off your account, by earning them on Friday for a meal that day or during the next week: 500 points for the buffet, 750 points for Serengeti’s, and 1,000 points for Tusks.
Been hearing some bad reports on the Monte Carlo comping policy — TIGHT! No casino rate upfront, even if you have a history of play there.
Good information from an Internet friend on the Skip Hughes VP List: “You can almost always find phone numbers (and more) for any casino in the world at http://casinocity.com/. Click on Casino Directory, then Location, then either the state or country. (For example, it lists 18 casinos in Romania, in case you ever wanted to know such a thing.)
One can sometimes snag a free room offer by applying for credit at the casino. It doesn’t have to be a large amount — usually $500-$1,000 is enough if you stay away from the major resorts. And you don’t have to use the credit line. This will not work at every casino, but it’s something to try at a casino where you’d like to stay.
I noticed that Vacation Village has a new ad in a recent issue of What’s On, a good freebie magazine. The ad increases the time period, after you arrive in Vegas, during which you can do the free-spin promotion. Without this ad, it’s only 12 hours and that often doesn’t work out for many visitors. But the promo is extended to 48 hours IF you bring a copy of the ad. Look for freebie magazines at the car rental desks at the airport and near bell desks at many hotels.
From the Internet: “In the film Twenty Eight Days, starring Sandra Bullock, one of the characters defines insanity as ‘repeating the same behavior over and over, but expecting different results.’ If this is true, does playing video poker qual”
3/24/2001
I was going to talk about something other than promotions this week. I don’t want to run a subject into the ground. However, Brad just brought in the mail and he had a big smile on his face. He said, “I love being a Vegas local,” then handed me two letters from the Venetian, EACH with 4 coupons of $75 in free slot play at the bottom. We get casino offers almost every day in the mail, but rarely one worth $600 from one casino! No, this isn’t actual cash—but free play in a casino where we plan to put in a certain amount of play anyway is as good as cash to us.
The amazing part of the offer is that Brad and I each got the same amount. We have used Brad’s account, both of us playing on his card, almost exclusively to build up our level of play to where we would get invitations for all their free tournaments and upscale suites and food comps for out-of-town visitors we wanted to impress. In fact, I didn’t even have a card in my own name for a long time. It was only when “Dateline” was filming us at the Venetian last July and we wanted my name to scroll across the card reader that I applied for my own account. (We follow the advice in The Frugal Gambler: when Brad signed up, he did NOT add my name to his account. Therefore, I was able to easily get a second different-numbered account later. Don’t know about the Venetian, but some casinos give you a very hard time if you want to change a joint account to separate ones.) And the only time my card was ever played was when I was “tutoring” Bob McKeown, the “Dateline” correspondent, in proper VP strategy — probably 10 minutes at the longest.
These identical mailings illustrate two important facts. First, we probably doubled our cash value because of having separate accounts. Some casinos do consider the individual play of each person in a joint account and reward EACH of them with separate mailings. However, the majority of casinos will send only one offer per joint account. This is especially true with room offers; we would have never been able to stay in casino hotels for such long periods through the years if we hadn’t used the separate-account tactic.
Second, never expect to understand completely the criteria casino marketing departments use for promotions, such as type of offer, timing of offer, or recipients of offer. These Venetian coupons are for April. That is not ordinarily a slow month for tourists in Vegas, but I could guess maybe that the Venetian doesn’t have as much convention business booked as usual. Or, maybe the stock market drop or the expansion of Indian casinos in California IS making Vegas casinos scramble to fill rooms, as some financial experts say. In the letter that came with the coupons, they say, “There’s never been a better time to be a local than spring in Vegas,” so I know it’s a local-only offer. But then they say they’re “rewarding you for being such a valued player.” Brad’s I can see — we’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars through their machines and are net losers there at the moment. There’s only 10 minutes of play on my card there last July — true it was $5 Triple Play (we were playing with NBC’s money) — but we won over a thousand dollars. When I can’t figure out why Brad and/or I get an offer, I just kick back and enjoy the money!
Parting Shot: Researchers at the University Of Minnesota have found that a drug named naltrexone, commonly used to treat alcoholics and drug addicts, often reduced the urge to gamble in people with a gambling addiction. I like the reaction to this, on Skip’s Internet VP List: How about a “”winning pill”” to treat long losing streaks in VP? Now THERE is a useful pharmaceutical research project.
*** FLASH * FLASH * FLASH ***
We’ve just heard from “”Dateline.”” The segment featuring Jean Scott is scheduled to run this Tuesday evening (March 27). Check your local listings. You can also go into the Frugal Friday’s Archives to read about the shoot.
3/30/2001
The flood of e-mails is threatening to drown me. So to save my sanity — and not delay the finish of Frugal 2 even more — I’m using this column to discuss the ““Dateline”” show of last Tuesday night.
First, I want to thank everyone who wrote to say nice things about our segment — and who didn’t criticize those much-too-busy touristy outfits we were wearing. Next time I won’t depend on the fashion judgments of an all-male crew!
Although we felt the 10-minute piece (if you don’t count all those “hook” previews) gave a good overall view of what our life in a casino is all about, obviously there were some inaccuracies and significant gaps of information. Someone wondered if “Dateline” purposely gave it a more positive “spin,” as the media is often accused of doing — and is often guilty as charged. I didn’t see any of that here; inaccuracies were the result of a whole crew who knew almost nothing about gambling in general and absolutely nothing about “smart” gambling. They were with us for two long days (last summer) and I was “teaching” as fast as I could talk the whole time — I’m sure you can believe that!
Someone wondered why they wouldn’t have had us look over the piece before it airs. Sounds like a good idea, but it just doesn’t work that way. You would have to be a world leader, I imagine, before you would be permitted to “edit” a story; the media prides itself on its independence.
Okay, now to the specifics. No, we don’t “make a living” gambling. And no, we did NOT buy our condo with one monster jackpot hand; we grind out small wins that turn into big figures — sometimes! — over a period of a year or two. No, “Lucky Lady” was not a good title for the piece. I would have liked them to show more clearly how I was teaching Bob McKeown proper strategy and how I kept him from keeping a pair of nines in that dealt 4-card straight-flush hand. It WAS luck that on this particular hand we made that one straight flush. But it was skill that allowed that luck to happen. Someone suggested a better name for me would be “Frugal Optimizer.”
One glaring error was saying we usually play $1.25 a hand, 600 hands an hour, and sometimes for eight hours a day. I’d told Bob that this was the way we did it when we first started many years ago. Obviously, you wouldn’t get all those luxurious comps they showed, at the Venetian or any other high-level resort casino, playing single-line quarters. The crew never did really understand how much money we would put through a machine when we play $1 Five Play at $25 a hand just a few hours a day, a more common routine for us these days. And we don’t do that every day.
Do we ordinarily play $5 Triple Play? The camera crew spent two hours setting up the cameras before I came along and saw that they had chosen a FIVE-DOLLAR Triple Play machine for me to use to teach Bob how to play VP. (The previous day I mentioned just in passing that it had a good VP schedule.) We balked at playing $75 a hand. We’ll make some sacrifices for a TV shoot, but we do have our monetary comfort limits for such a short period of time. So the producer ponied up $1,000 of NBC’s money — and the United Way ended up being the real winner.
Do we do TV shows for the money? Actually, it always costs us because they’re very time-consuming. We have NEVER been paid to be on any TV show. My appearance on “To Tell the Truth” was under the same arrangement as for any other guest: What you earn depends on how many people don’t guess who you really are. I fooled only two of the panelists — so I got $666.66.
However, usually (not always) The Frugal Gambler is mentioned and even prominently pictured, as it was on “Dateline.” And so we benefit by the increase in book sales; Frugal jumped to #2 on amazon.com (it’s hard to beat that Harry Potter kid!) and, as I write this Thursday afternoon, it’s still #3.
In case you missed the show, you can go to http://www.msnbc.com/news/549115.asp#BODY where they have a still shot and