10/5/2007
If you’re not getting any mail offers from a casino where you play, you shouldn’t just assume that the casino doesn’t like you. However, this might be the case; some casinos bar video poker players they consider professional or skilled. (Or they put them on their “No Mail” list, which effectively achieves the same result, since it’s usually marketing offers that make a play attractive to the knowledgeable, not just the game itself.) The problem with this is that casino executives often don’t know how to spot someone who is actually a threat to their bottom line.
• They often look at a short-term higher-than-average win for one customer, not realizing that skilled and unskilled players alike can have “lucky” short streaks.
• Sometimes they bar a player who has “too many” royals in a short time. They don’t know that an unskilled player often actually gets more royals than a knowledgeable player. Why? He often goes for a royal more often than accurate strategy dictates, thus loses more in the long run than the skilled player, in spite of pulling down more royals.
• Here’s a situation that happens quite often. A casino puts in one or more video poker machines with better-than-average payback paytables. This could be done purposely so that they can advertise these high returns to bring more customers in. Or it could be accidental: Perhaps a slot technician makes an error when he’s setting them up. Players come in and play these machines heavily. Is it surprising that many customers will always be looking for their best chance to win? Instead of re-evaluating paytables or just fixing mistakes, the casino often punishes the customers who had the audacity to play these machines. The same thing happens when a casino runs a good promotion. Woe be it that too many customers take advantage of it.
• One of the strangest “reasons” casinos might take away mail offers happens when someone gets dealt a royal on a multi-line machine. Hey, marketing people, do you really think any player, skilled or not, can make a machine deal a particular 5-card hand? That’s about as likely as someone being able to stand in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard on a clear sunny day and do something that will cause him to be struck by lightning.
What can you do about the situation when a casino decides to “punish” you? Talking to your host is rarely an option, because he/she usually has no power in these sorts of matters. Some players have had luck in reversing things by taking the matter to upper management. Some punishments have seemed to be a violation of printed slot club rules and regulations (if it involved taking away past benefits rather than future ones), and some players have appealed to the state Gaming Control Board with some success. A very few have taken it to court, with even fewer winning their cases.
In most cases you have to just learn to live with the situation and instead of worrying about it, spend your time finding other casinos that look more favorably on you and will send you mail! Some years ago I was put on a “No Mail” list by one old-timer slot manager. One of his employees showed him an online review of one of my books, a review that unfortunately reported that I’d given some information about how to do some “sneaky” actions to get more slot club points, when in actuality I’d said the exact opposite, that this wasn’t ethical. I explained this to the slot manager, but he wasn’t computer-savvy and held the position that if it was on the Internet, it was true. I even brought him the book and showed him the passage that was misquoted, but he remained stubborn. Since I had no recourse, I dropped the matter, although his influence spread throughout the whole casino chain and to this day I get no mail from any of the sister properties.
So you may have to do as I’m doing in this case: Wait until this dinosaur dies or retires, then try to salvage my reputation with these casinos.
10/11/2007
Last week I discussed some reasons you might not get mail offers from a casino if you got on its bad side, even if those reasons aren’t not logical — and how difficult it is to turn this situation around. This week I talk about more logical reasons for not getting casino mail –- and how this is often easier to solve.
Some casinos will send mail to anyone who has played at their property, no matter where they’re from. Others will market only to customers who are within driving distance, perhaps 300 miles or less. Therefore, you might live in an area to which the casino just doesn’t market. For example, it used to be that Vegas Strip casinos didn’t do much marketing to locals and the locals casinos didn’t market to out-of-towners. However, this is slowly changing. As locals, Brad and I are getting strong mailings from some Strip properties. And some local casinos are marketing to out-of-towners who have previously played there
All is not lost if a casino doesn’t market where you live. You can still call the slot club or a host and ask about marketing specials or check for online offers. Some out-of-towners who come to Vegas frequently obtain a local mail box and give that address to casinos who mainly market to locals, using their out-of-town address for Strip offers.
You need to give your e-mail address at the players club of every casino where you play. Many casinos are now using the Internet for strong marketing offers. These are usually in addition to mail offers, but sometimes they send last-minute offers when there’d be no time for snail mail. And the Wynn casino in Vegas markets almost entirely to locals by e-mail, including the amount and times of your bounce-back free play. In fact, if you don’t get an e-mail about some promotions, you’re not eligible to participate in them –- a fact that many locals find to their sorrow when they hear that their friends are involved in a very juicy promo.
While you’re stopping at the player’s club to give your e-mail address, it’s a good time to check that they have your accurate snail mail address. Many people who haven’t been getting mail offers have found out that the casino doesn’t have their right address. And some casinos, when they have mail returned once from an address, just put a “No Mail” notation on the account. Be sure your address is complete, with the whole street address (including the words “street,” “drive,” “boulevard,” etc.) and correct zip code.
Be aware that even though a casino regularly sends you mail, the U.S. Postal Service isn’t foolproof. Occasionally, a mailer gets lost. This is one reason that we compare mailings with our friends and can notice any probable missing one. We also like to compare offers with our out-of-town friends. Often, a casino markets differently to locals and non-locals, but if we hear of a good non-local offer, we can contact our host and she/he will often see that we’re included. Also, quite a few casinos now have Web sites that include your personal offers, so you don’t have to depend just on snail mail. These include Harrah’s, the Venetian, and Station that I know of, but I’m sure this will be more common in the future.
A day without casino mail is a day without sunshine!
10/19/2007
Most of the time I write about Vegas, since that’s where Brad and I live and do almost all our gambling. But several times a year we take a trip to another part of the country, usually for non-gambling purposes like visiting our families. Once in a while, when a casino wants to provide us with a free vacation, we take a trip to another gambling area. That’s the reason we were in Biloxi, Mississippi, last summer, although it was a double-duty trip: We were able to have the Frugal Princess and our 2 grandchildren with us.
However, a couple of weeks ago we traveled to Atlantic City with another gambling couple, just for a change of scenery, compliments of Harrah’s. The other couple was using their free annual 7-Star-tier trip, which included a suite, $500 in food credit, limo back and forth to the airport, and free airfare. We’d already used our complimentary 7-Star trip to go to Biloxi, but players who’ve reached the 7-Star tier can always get free rooms, and we could use our Reward Credits on a 1-to-1 basis to refund our plane-ticket expense. We could have used Reward Credits for food, but that wasn’t needed, since our friends’ $500 food credit covered meals for the four of us.
We hadn’t been in Atlantic City for 10 years; we used to drive there occasionally from our home in Indiana. Still, we fondly remembered our strolls on the beach and the funky boardwalk. Back then the good gambling opportunities weren’t plentiful for out-of-towners like they were in Vegas, so we did more sightseeing on the coast than playing in the casinos.
This time we knew in advance that the gambling opportunities had improved, with quite a few good video poker games at the Harrah’s properties where we wanted to play. How did we find out this information even before we got there? As I stress many times, the Internet is a wonderful advance-planning guide. We went to the database at vpFREE, where all the best VP games AND their locations are listed. (You can sign up for free at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vpFree.) This saved us the hours and hours of scouting it would have taken to cover the four huge Harrah’s properties. Of course, I also carried my trusty Frugal Video Poker Scouting Guide for when I came across a game with which I wasn’t familiar. (No, even though I assembled those charts, I don’t carry all that information in my head!)
I also found out a lot of helpful information for our trip by posting some questions on the vpFREE forum, which has many members willing to share their knowledge and experiences. They described the buffets, from the “don’t miss” to the “must avoid.” They gave details about good promotions they knew about and possible side trips.
We found one game that we ended up playing a lot, because it had the automatic-hold feature, which we have run across only a couple of times before. We really enjoyed this –- but not because it always held the right cards, which it didn’t. Anytime you find this feature, you must play for a while to determine how smart it is. Usually, the little man inside the machine who does the holding knows only a very generic strategy –- he hasn’t practiced on Frugal Video Poker or other software programs! But he holds the right cards often enough that it does save you time in the long run. You soon learn what rules he doesn’t know and it’s easy enough to change the hold in those cases. If you know the correct strategy and change when it’s necessary, this feature can help you play more accurately by keeping you from making basic oversight errors, like missing a small pair when you have two royal cards. And once you learn when the hold changes are needed, it can speed up your play considerably without losing accuracy.
In summary, I can say we had a wonderful trip. What’s not to like with a free four-night vacation in a beautiful room that overlooks the ocean, with congenial friends, all expenses paid, and you bri
10/25/2007
Last week I told you about our recent trip to Atlantic City and promised I’d talk about our experiences with promotions there.
First, I’ll discuss airfare reimbursement. The couple we traveled with had airfare included in the free annual 7 Star trip benefit they were using. However, we’d bought our own, figuring that we’d probably be playing enough to get it repaid by Bally’s, where we were staying.
Airfare reimbursement is always an iffy thing at any casino. The amount you have to play to get it is almost never set down in black and white. You have to go through a host to request it and the host usually has to go to a higher level of management to get it approved. The amount often isn’t based just on how much coin-in you give them, but can be dependent on how much you win or lose.
Harrah’s policy on this varies, depending on the policy of the specific property where you’re playing. I can’t give even a rough estimate of how much to play before you ask for your airfare back. But I took my own oft-repeated advice to “just ask” and got a positive answer, although this wasn’t an outright comp. We did have to use our Reward credits, but at a one-to-one ratio, which is better than a cash benefit we can get in Vegas by turning points into Visa cards. Mostly Reward Credits are used for food comps, but we have more food comps than we could ever eat up!
Doing promotions at non-Harrah’s properties in Atlantic City involved a discussion among the four of us. I know that Atlantic City casinos often have lucrative sign-up bonuses for new members, so we discussed whether we thought we’d be coming back very often during the next few years. We agreed that this wouldn’t be likely, since it’s a very long and tiring flight from Vegas to A.C. and none of us are as young as we used to be.
So we decided to take advantage of a sign-up bonus at Borgata, a new casino built since we’d last been in Atlantic City. It was a nice bonus for players who had a premium card from another property, and each of the four of us was either Harrah’s Diamond or 7 Star. They gave us each a Black Label players card, their premium-tier level, $100 in free play, and enough in our comp bank for two visits to their great buffet and a one-night stay on a future trip.
We tried to sign up for a similar promotion at the Taj Mahal on October 1 when we saw an advertisement for it in the casino, but found out it ended September 30. I hate when casinos don’t keep their promotion information up to date!
The Tropicana had a wonderful sign-up promotion going: 3x points for new members. But we decided we didn’t have enough time to take advantage of this one. We didn’t want to join and play just a little, then not be able to take advantage of a Trop sign-up promo in the future.
The night before we were to leave, we saw a flashing sign at Trump Plaza advertising a $100 sign-up bonus. The four of us had tramped around several casinos that day and the other couple said they were too tired to go to another casino, no matter how good the bonus was. Brad and I had always wanted to ride in one of those boardwalk rolling chairs, but it seemed we were usually in a frugal let’s-walk-and-get-some-exercise mode. But this foggy night, with tired feet, it seemed like a romantic choice and it was only $10 and a tip each way, a small investment to pick up $200.
I can only blame what happened next on the fact that I was exhausted. First, we had to wait 15 minutes at the slot club, because the supervisor was at dinner and no one else knew about this new promotion or how it could be done on their computers. When the supervisor came back, I should have verified the details of the promotion, but my brain was even more weary than my feet and I just remembered the sign flashing $100 and I assumed it was free play like at Borgata. So Brad gave her his driver’s license and she gave him a player’s card. Then she said that she had put $100 in his comp bank and it would be there for