10/7/2005
Several weeks ago we talked about keeping safe after you win a large jackpot. I got some good feedback from you readers:
“Occasionally a casino employee will refuse to pay you by check. Then what do you do?”
–JS answer: Brad and I have had that happen to us several times during the 21 years we have been gambling in casinos. First, we remained pleasant but very firm in our request and did not immediately take “No” for an answer. This usually worked; sometimes employees just don’t want to “bother” to take the time to get this done. If this tactic didn’t work, we asked to see the top executive on duty in the casino at the time. This usually proved successful. The only time I had to settle for taking the cash was once in a small casino late at night and they said there was no one working who was authorized to write a check. I took the cash, but we had security walk us to our car when we left later that night.
“Please warn readers to not think that you are being cautious if you take a big cash payoff straight to your hotel room. There have been many instances when big winners have been followed and robbed in the elevator, in the hallway, and even tricked to opening their hotel room to thieves. You can always deposit cash at the casino cage (or in a cage lockbox) to access later.”
–JS comment: And I guess it would be wiser not to whoop and holler so loud when you hit a big one. After 21 years of gambling and hundreds of big jackpots, I still find it hard not to be excitedly – and noisily – surprised when I hit a royal flush!
Then there was this response to my answer to the Question of the Day about tipping on Sept. 19:
“I love your book, and columns, especially being ‘frugal’ myself. However, I take exception to your answer on how to tip after a machine jackpot.
“I work security for a locals casino, and we DO in fact receive tips. We often escort performers from their room to our showroom’s dressing rooms (through the back of the house) as well as picking them up at the airport. We also do limo runs for our guests. We receive tips, and we pool the tips on the shift, usually 30-40 bucks/month for each officer.”
–JS: This is great – and I ALWAYS offer a tip to security when they do anything for us, e.g., walk us to the car or witness a jackpot payoff. It’s just that they aren’t always allowed to accept tips – that’s why I wrote the answer (below) the way I did, to cover any casino policy you might come across. (By the way, I’ve had a security guard tell me he can’t accept a tip, but that if I give it to the change girl who is giving me my jackpot payoff, she’ll see that he gets it!)
From my QOD answer: “Sharing of tips among employees is common, but you can’t always assume that. And who’s included in the share arrangement varies widely from casino to casino. Often, supervisors and security personnel aren’t included and sometimes aren’t even allowed to accept tips. You can always ask one of the employees. We use a spread-it-around method, especially if we don’t know the exact share arrangement. We keep the amount of the total tip we’ve decided on in small bills and give one to three bills to everyone who shows up (and is allowed to take a tip), including the porter tidying up nearby and the cocktail waitress walking by. This makes a lot of people happy — and makes us look more generous than if we gave the same amount to one person.”
10/13/2005
Brad and I just returned from our annual back-home trip to Indiana. We visited with long-time friends and relatives, including my 91-year-old preacher-father in a nursing home. He has Alzheimer’s and difficulty getting out his words, but he recognized us. And his bright eyes and loving touch communicated love as strong as any conversation would.
This trip always gives us a strong dose of reality. We had to actually pay for a room for six nights. That included a free breakfast, but we had to take real money out of our pockets to pay for our meals the rest of the time. And gas for the car — oh, our country does have an energy crisis!
We need an out-of-town trip once in a while to make us realize that we live a fairy-tale life in Vegas, where casinos provide us with almost all of our necessities, not to mention more luxurious extras than anyone would ever want.
Many of you have asked about the Frugal Princess and her family. They’re still loving it in Columbus, Georgia, and still reveling in the fact that they can live in their own home after 12 years in Army post housing. Sgt. Steve continues to train soldiers to become Rangers at the Fort Benning Ranger School. He’s just three years away from his Army 20-year mark and thinking about retirement plans. After 12 years as a stay-at-home Mom, Angela found a great part-time job as the administrative assistant to a local lawyer. She only works during school hours so she can continue to shuttle the two kids, now both in middle school, to myriad after-school activities.
Another thing many of you ask us about is how we’re doing at video poker. As you may remember, I’ve reported in the past that we’ve had only one losing year since we switched from BJ as our main game to VP 15 years ago — and the small monetary loss was overwhelmed by thousands of dollars of comps that year. We don’t count the value of comps in our win/loss reports, although their value would be very high. After all, when you eat out frequently on comps, you’re spending less at the grocery store. When you go to comped casino shows and events with luxurious hotel rooms, parties, and other fun activities, you spend less on non-comped entertainment options. We definitely augment our actual monetary wins with comps that keep us from spending so much of our non-gambling income.
Back to this year’s report, as usual our comp cup is overflowing. VP, however, has been more of a struggle than usual. The reason is not a mystery: We play within a large range of denominations and our royal flushes have come more often at the lower levels.
Each of the first two months of 2005 was a winner and we felt pretty good. Then in March, our record book was flooded with red ink: We had 16 losing sessions out of 21. April wasn’t much better: 14 losses out of 22 sessions. We know we’ll average losing two out of every three sessions, so we weren’t surprised at those numbers. But coupled with a dearth of royals, the bottom line for the year was very negative in spite of our good start. In May, June, and July, the royal drought continued and the bottom line got redder and redder. We’ve had bad streaks before, but this one was heading for the record books.
Much to our surprise, we got no royals in August, but managed to pull out a small profit for the month with a bunch of little wins. Our friends teased us that we were trying to dig ourselves out of a monumental hole with a teaspoon. September saw no royals, but Lady Luck must have felt sorry for us because Brad was dealt quad deuces for $10,000 on a $2 Five Play NSUD game.
Now we’re only in a little hole, one that could be filled up instantly with just one medium-denomination royal flush. We tell each other, “Just like you can’t get royal flushes all the time, you will get one if you play long enough.”
We’re playing and waiting!
10/20/2005
From Tanya, the “Happy Hawaiian”: “I followed your advice in The Frugal Gambler last December and signed up for many players club cards and played a bit in each casino. The Stardust sent me an offer of $49 for one night and the second night free, with two free buffets. I arrived very late (due to the wacko Hawaiian schedule … but the price was right), about midnight. No problem with holding the reservation, since I had called. Of course, they had given out all the rooms and, how nice for me, I’d be upgraded to a suite. When I walked in, I just started laughing and wandering around like an idiot…it was the most elegant condo-like suite I had ever seen…gorgeous. Oval bath with Jacuzzi jets, glass shower “”area”” with a shower that was the size of my bathroom at home, elegant fabrics, goose down pillows, 3 phones, and bathrobes. The rack rate on the door was $2,000 a night, but I’m guessing it’s used as a high-roller comped suite. Not bad for about $15 a night after deducting the value of the buffets.
The moral: Don’t try to figure out what the casinos are thinking. Just get in the system and take advantage of whatever comes your way — with a big grin on your face.”
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From Larry, commenting on the subject I’ve discussed in the past, whether to let your points build up in your slot club or comp accounts in case the casino brings out a more valuable cash-out option in the future. “It was mentioned that your points might expire in 2 to 3 years; however, it is likely to be a much shorter time than that, often in 18 months to as little as 3 months! A quick check of vpFREE’s Las Vegas database shows the following casinos where points might expire for someone after a shorter length of time: Bally’s, Caesars, Cannery, Flamingo, Hard Rock (3 months!), Harrah’s (6 months), Las Vegas Hilton, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Monte Carlo, Orleans, Palms, Paris, Rio (6 months), Sahara, Sam’s Town, Slots-A-Fun, Suncoast, Venetian. (Subscribe to this VP site at [email protected].)”
My comments on this subject: It pays to know the expiration date of all your casino points. This can sometimes be found on the casino’s Web site. Sometimes it’s in a casino brochure. Or you can ask at the slot club booth. Some casinos do a good job of notifying you when your points are about to expire. We recently got a letter from Station Casinos informing us that our points would soon expire, but that we could keep them safe by putting at least one point on our card before the expiration date. Other casinos have much more rigid rules, for example, to the extent that your points expire a certain time after they’re earned even if you’re still playing regularly on your card.
There’s always a danger of leaving points in your account too long and losing them. Casinos are constantly changing owners, or changing their slot club and comp systems, or even unexpectedly going out of business. A recent example is the Gulf Coast casinos destroyed by hurricanes. Perhaps some will be able to retrieve their database information, but probably not all of them will. In fact, some of the casinos have said they’re not going to reopen at all.
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One last comment, about our struggles in pulling out of a VP losing streak. I ended up last week’s column on the subject by saying: “Just like you can’t get royal flushes all the time, you will get one if you play long enough. We’re playing and waiting!”
Well, the day before that column actually appeared, we played patiently and continued waiting, even while we were going down $8,000 deeper into our hole -– but the royal did finally come. It was a nice big one, for $20,000, which not only got us out of the hole for the day, but for the year.
Now, if we can just keep out of the hole for the last few months of the year… But we know VP is always a roller-coaster ride!
10/27/2005
I haven’t written a casino trip report for a long time, maybe not since we moved permanently to Las Vegas, so I thought I would write one about our stay last weekend at Caesars Palace.
As has been happening for 21 years now, the mail brought us an offer for a great casino event, this time an invitational slot tournament.
Most of the tournaments we’re in these days are fully comped affairs, with no entry fee. However, this one was a little different: You had to pay an entry fee, but Caesars would rebate the full amount back to you if you earned a certain required number of points. So first, we had to figure out the equity — the total prize package divided by the number of entrants minus the theoretical expected loss in getting the required number of points, plus cashback and other benefits. As soon as we found that it had a much larger equity (value) than most of the tournaments we do, we cleared our calendar for that weekend.
Almost all of the invitational tournaments we take advantage of include three free room nights. For 16 years we lived out of a suitcase when we were staying in casino-hotels, which is why, these days, we prefer to sleep in our own bed, which is only a few-minute’s drive from the Strip. Therefore, we usually don’t reserve a room and if an offer requires that you be a registered guest (as it sometimes does), the room only serves as a daytime napping station. However, this time we decided to make the weekend a mini-vacation away from my computer, so we actually packed a suitcase and stayed for two of the three nights.
We were given a mini-suite high in the new Augustus Tower, beautifully decorated, with a Jacuzzi and a perfect view of the Bellagio dancing waters. However, we’ll not stay there again; the walk from our room to our car in the garage took longer than it took us to drive home! These huge casinos that are being built and expanded need to think about the logistics of getting around in them – maybe adding little trams to carry oldsters from one end to the other or having a fleet of electric scooters at our disposal!
It was a fun weekend. The thought of a $250,000 first prize kept the excitement high during tournament play. But achieving the point requirement to get our $5,000 entry fee back was a fairly strenuous task. Brad and I are no longer used to playing so many hours in one day – let alone doing it for three days straight. However, we were playing our favorite video poker game, NSUD (Not So Ugly Ducks), and we were “hot.” (Do you notice you get more tired when you’re losing?) In the 13 hours we each played this game on $5 single-line, we hit eight sets of quad deuces. This was way out on the positive side of the bell curve! We didn’t hit any royals, but $40,000 in secondary jackpots is the same amount that we’d have received for two royals and probably a little more fun, because the winnings were more spread out and kept the losing periods in between shorter and less severe.
Next week I’ll tell you how we did in the tournament and how we came out on our play to get back our rebate. I’ll also tell you how someone who should know better was taken in by a scam pulled by a couple of crooks — one that cost that person $625.