9/7/2001
Alaska was beautiful and the cruise was a relaxing change from the intensity of Las Vegas. But Brad and I are glad to be home – and we were welcomed with a whole month of super promotions.
Do casinos get together and talk about their planned promotions? Nah – I know they wouldn’t do that. But how do you explain the rash of Grandparents Day promotions this year? I don’t remember ever hearing about even one in the past. Well, I’m not complaining – it’s about time they honored the most loving bunch of people on earth! And I guess you can take your pictures to Silverton before Sunday for their “Cutest Grandkid Contest” – but I want you to know you’re in for some pretty steep competition – I’ve submitted photos of two of the cutest “Army brats” in the world! And they’d love to add a $500 savings bond to their portfolio. Of course, if you don’t want to face so much competition, or you aren’t fortunate enough to have grandchildren (yet), you can celebrate Grandparents Day on Sept. 9 anyway by going to any Coast casino, where anyone with a slot card can earn 2x points all day.
And where will you be on Sept. 12? If you are a serious advantage gambler, always looking for a really good casino play, you’ll probably be at the Suncoast, where they’re celebrating their 1st birthday with TRIPLE POINTS all day! That’s .75% cashback or .9% comps on top of tons of good VP games that are coinless! Now that’s my kind of promotion, even without the free cake and champagne noon to midnight, live entertainment from 1 p.m. on, and fireworks at 8 p.m. Brad and I will be there as soon as I can get rolling – probably at least noon, since I’m not a morning person, even for super promotions. Stop by and say hi; we’re always happy to take a break from video poker to chat with old friends and make new ones.
If you want to stay up to date on good casino plays, make it a habit to frequently check Slot Club Promotions on the home page here, especially early in the month. I spend hours on the phone badgering casino employees for advance information and verifying new promotions and changes so you don’t have to waste your valuable time doing the same. The monthly LVA and the Compton/Dancer weekly Neon newspaper column are hampered by advance deadlines; and this week, as usual, I have put in some updated and additional information that can save you time and perhaps provide you with some good money-making ideas on where to play.
BRIEFS
A hint for getting the cheapest price for Vegas show tickets before you get to town: avoid service charges by calling the casino’s 800#, asking for the box office, and booking directly with them. However, sometimes the fees the Internet and phone-booking services charge, some quite high, are worth the money if you want particular seating locations. Ticket brokers are an option for those very-hard-to-get tickets, but plan to pay a hefty premium. Of course, if you’re a regular player at the casino where the show you want to see is playing, your most frugal option is to ask your host about getting comped tickets.
The informal LVA fan get-together at Main Street Station in downtown Las Vegas last month was so much fun that another one is planned for all of you who are in the Chicago area on Sunday, October 14. It will be at the Winning Streaks Bar and Grill at Harrah’s in Joliet at 2 p.m. If you want more information, you can e-mail Sue Casey at [email protected]. Brad and I are sorry we can’t make this one. However, we’re happy that the sale of our condo in Indianapolis just closed and we’re now officially permanent Las Vegas residents – after 18 years of Vegas being our “home away from home.”
9/14/2001
One of the questions I’m frequently asked is whether it pays to leave cashback points in your slot club account rather than redeem them. There seems to be a persistent belief that a host will give you more comps, or you’ll get better mail offers, if you have a large unredeemed balance. This has been discussed on Internet boards recently in the wake of Arizona Charlie’s retroactively devaluating points (which later, thankfully, they rescinded).
The fact is, I’ve never found this to be the case in the scores of casinos where I’ve played over the years. Comps and offers are overwhelmingly based on EARNED points, not point balances. The only deviation from that rule of thumb I know of is at Fitzgeralds in Las Vegas. Its slot club policy specifically states that as long as you keep a balance of $50 in your account (this is a comp balance only; they don’t give cashback), you receive 4x points on all your play — along with more frequent offers.
However, I advise everyone to redeem cashback regularly. Likewise, it’s not safe to let too many comps points pile up either, since some casinos have unpublished expiration deadlines when points “drop off,” even if you continue to be an active player. And you never know when slot club policies will change or a casino will close or switch owners, sometimes so quickly that it’s difficult to use up or redeem points in the allotted time. The Desert Inn, Frontier, Silverton, Hard Rock, and Arizona Charlie’s come to mind here as examples, just in the last few years, where there have been some unhappy players who lost money in this “use or lose” game.
BRIEFS
When is a promotion not really a bargain? Be careful when you see airline tickets or airline vouchers given as a casino incentive or reward. I’ve found that these are rarely worthwhile. The fine print usually states that you must use designated travel agencies. When you check it out, you find that the discounts can only be used on full fares, making the ticket more expensive than a discounted fare you could get from the airlines or on the Internet. This is also usually true for a “free” companion ticket: You pay more for the first one than you would for two discounted tickets. So check it out before you play just to get this benefit.
Interesting statistics from TomSki: The average number of video poker hands dealt before you’ll see each possible hand at least once is 36,798,430. This is using a 52-card deck with 2,598,960 unique five-card starting hands.
From the Really Weird Department: I like “different” promotions, but the one that the Trop in Atlantic City plans to launch September 14 takes the cake. Called the $10,000 Chicken Challenge, gamblers play tic-tac-toe against a live chicken. Don’t all you advantage players scramble to get a flight there, however. The deck is stacked against you, so to speak. The chickens are secretly trained by a Tennessee farmer by the name of — and I’m not making this up — Bunky Boger. And the chickens always go first, so they win most of the time. Although casino executives say the chickens will be treated like royalty and will work in shifts of only one to two hours, there could be another hitch. The Review-Journal, in its story last week, said that United Poultry Concerns, a group that protects the interests of fowl, would try to stop the promotion, which, they claim exploits the chickens. I guess I should start an organization that protects the interests of gamblers against unfair casino games and crazy promotions!
9/21/2001
I received an e-mail this week wondering why last Friday’s column was so business-as-usual, with no mention of the recent terrible events in our country on September 11. Part of the explanation is that I had turned in the column the day before this tragedy. However, I had plenty of time to revise or even completely re-write the column — that’s the beauty of online writing. You aren’t bound by advance deadlines. The other part of the explanation is that I simply wasn’t thinking about the routine parts of my life last week — my mind and heart were too full of shock and horror and sorrow. I was frozen in an iceberg of inaction.
Each person has his own personal burden to bear as a result of the events on that fateful day. Many have major disruptions in plans and great financial loss. Most have smaller inconveniences. Far too many bear the loss of someone who was in the center of their lives. But no one can escape losing the feeling of safety and security we took for granted as Americans.
My personal burden is one of fear, an emotion with which I don’t have much experience; I’ve enjoyed a very secure life for 62 years. Many of you know, through her occasional writing projects, my daughter Angela, the Frugal Princess. I’ve mentioned in the past that she’s married to a career Army soldier, a Ranger and a trained paratrooper. On September 11, Steve was somewhere in a Southern U.S. wilderness, training his platoon for a November assignment, a six-month tour of duty in Kosovo. Earlier I’d wished that he didn’t have to leave Angela and the two kids in upstate New York (at his new posting, Fort Drum) to deal alone with the long cold winter that will be such a change from their last three years in Hawaii.
Right now, Kosovo seems downright safe, compared to places he might be sent. It’s interesting how one’s political beliefs and opinions of government policy change when it might be the tall, strong, handsome young Super Dad of your beloved grandchildren who could be asked to put his life at risk for America’s security. I’m going to have to pray long and hard to get myself to the place where I can accept that.
I know that, in spite of our heavy hearts, we all must try to get life as much back to normal as we possibly can so that the terrorists did not “win” on September 11. Next week I plan to be back with a regular Frugal Friday’s column. I know many of you are interested in how Vegas reacted during this crisis, so I plan to write a column I may title “No city is more red, white, and blue than Las Vegas.”
9/28/2001
Last week I promised you that I would write about red-white-and-blue Las Vegas, a city with patriotic feelings as strong as anywhere else in the U.S.A. As I’ve been traveling all over our spread-out city since September 11, I have proudly seen the proof of that everywhere, from children’s make-shift pictures of flags and eagles in the windows of simple homes in the most impoverished neighborhoods to the big new flags that wave from tall new flagpoles I can see above the cinderblock walls that guard the most exclusive suburban enclaves. When we went looking to buy a flag, no store in town had one of any size, so we cut out the full-page color flag from a our local newspaper and put it in our window.
Sure, we’re a “”company town,”” but the towering casino marquees replaced their flashing advertisements of magic, or dancing girls, or the message of possible riches, with eagles and waving flags and the simple message of “”God Bless America.”” A couple of large casino companies have contributed a million dollars for disaster relief — but small businesses all over town have donation jars at their cash registers in their best effort to help fellow Americans in this time of crisis. Our firemen have been out on the street soliciting contributions for the families of their brothers lost; our entertainers are unselfishly showing up everywhere for benefit activities. And so many people arrived to give blood that the Blood Banks were swamped.
If you just come here on vacation, you might think of Vegas mostly as the Strip, the downtown casino area, and a few casinos scattered around the outskirts. Actually, casinos make up a very small percentage of our city. If you fly into town in the daytime, you’ll see that most of the buildings are not tall casinos, but are red-tile-roofed houses, stretching in neat rows for miles and miles beyond the Strip or any casino. And in each of those houses is a person or groups of people that have lives much like residents in any American city. Many of these people will never enter a casino their whole life, will never play a slot machine or sit down at a blackjack table, will never eat a meal at a casino restaurant or see a casino show. Many may go to work in casinos, but when they come home and take off their black-and-white dealer uniform or scanty cocktail-waitress costume, they’re simply tired mothers who are cooking their families’ dinner or dutiful husbands who are cleaning out the garage when they would rather be watching a ballgame on TV.
Of course, many local residents do visit casinos, but because of time or money constraints, this is a special maybe once-a-month treat. Even most of the retired residents with extra time and money don’t go to casinos every day. Most of the time Vegas residents are busy with the same activities that you and your family are busy with in a non-casino town: going to school, earning a living, playing golf, standing in line at the DMV, reading old magazines in a doctor’s office, shopping at the mall, figuring out how to make enough money to cover all the bills, reading a newspaper, getting married or divorced, finding privacy time to have sex, doing volunteer work, welcoming new babies, and burying the dead.
And when disaster strikes in our beloved country, like it did on September 11, all of our eyes are glued to the TV, just like anywhere else, whether we’re in a casino or at home. For a few days life seemed to stand still, even when we wandered around doing necessary tasks, our pain so great we could barely breathe. The normally raucous casino atmosphere was strangely quiet, with most of the scattered gamblers around only because their planes had been grounded and left them stuck in a place where they really didn’t want to be. Everyone longed to be home, and that was where most Las Vegans were whenever that was possible.
Las Vegas is trying to start getting back to normal — that’s what our President urged us all to do. But there are new problems and heartaches