To tackle this question, we turned to Max Rubin, author of Comp City -- A Guide to Free Casino Vacations.
If three gamblers played $100 a hand blackjack for one hour at a typical casino and the results were as you described them above, here’s what would happen.
The breakeven player would get a percentage of what the casino should have won. Net result: somewhere between $25 and $40 in comps.
To the player who lost $10,000, the casino would happily fork over a 10% "quick loss" ($1,000) in comps, and send a limo the next time he wanted to play.
Finally, if someone wins a hundred $100 bets in one hour playing blackjack (the player who won $10,000), the casino would call for an investigation, hold the chips, and make the player sue to get them back. Regardless of the results of the suit, management would then bar that player from ever setting foot in their casino again.
Since no one ever wins or loses every blackjack bet (in an hour, anyway), the casinos do have standards (for comps, anyway). They all pretty much work like this:
Losers get more -- between 25%-40% of theoretical losses or 10% of actual losses, whichever is greater.
Everyone else gets comped at the same rate (based on their theoretical losses). Although it seems to make sense to give the winners more comps (to keep the players around longer and get some extra whacks at getting the chips back), that practice went out the window about the same time that accountants started telling casino managers how to run the business (back when gas was less than $1 a gallon).
