Jean Scott replies:
This is a question that is connected to the one I answered on 9/5/08, discussing playing on someone else’s players card.
Many players do pick up free play for other people, usually relatives or close friends, and this usually involves just having their players card, knowing their PIN, and playing this free play through once before cashing out.
There are two ways this can work after you download the free play to credits on the machine. In some casinos, depending on their slot club system, you have to leave the card in the machine while you're playing off the free play and the system is recording your play. In others, you can take the card out of the machine after the download and play the free play without the system recording that play.
On the surface, it wouldn’t seem to matter which system the casino has. You play the free play through once and cash out what’s left. But knowledgeable players know that there's much more important information under the surface in casinos. And that hidden information here is called Daily Average.
There are two kinds of casinos:
The "nice" ones don’t care how often you come in or how much you play on any one day. They reward you with bounce-back/comps in a logical manner by looking at your total play for one month or one quarter or even as long as a six-month or yearly period. Maybe you are retired and like to play just a little bit every day in a casino down the street from your home. Maybe your work schedule means you can only play on weekends. Or, if you are an out-of-town visitor, you may be able to play only twice a year, but you like to play heavily during those weeklong vacations.
Then there are those casinos that don’t understand the concept of human differences and they drive me crazy. They want to "control" my life by telling me when to come in and how much to play each time. They worship the god of Daily Average. What if I like to play big a couple of times a month, say $30,000 coin-in each time? So I do that one month and they send me nice bounce-back coupons, six of them on specific days scattered throughout the next month. Hummmm… They really like my playing $60,000 through in one month. I appreciate the rewards for my play and pick up all six, and play on two of those days my usual $30,000 coin-in. The next month I get six coupons again, but for only one-third the amount as the first time. Oops! I got caught in the Daily Average Trap. Although I played the same $60,000 that month, I was "tripped" six times. Now my daily average is $10,000 instead of $30,000 and I don’t deserve as good rewards, even though I'm giving them the same amount of total play.
So, to answer your original question: I work to figure out how the marketing system operates in each casino where Brad and I want to play -- and let me tell you, this is a difficult and time-consuming (and sometimes almost impossible) job. And then we choose casinos where the marketing program best rewards our play and are convenient for our desired schedule. So we don’t need to play every time we pick up free play in a casino where they don’t use Daily Average as their measurement. And –- casinos should take notice here –- we, and many other players, just don’t play as much as we’d like in some casinos, because short casual playing sessions will ruin our average!
(Editor's Note: Read more about the Daily Average trap in More Frugal Gambling, the best resource available for machine players, where Jean spends four pages discussing this important issue in the three-chapter section on comps.]
