Question of the Day - 13 August 2022

We're confident that the casinos account for carded and uncarded action, meaning play that's in (carded) and out of (uncarded) the player tracking system. It gives them information about their marketing efforts and other metrics. But to our knowledge, they don't share that information publicly. At least we've never seen any. Until this question. 

During the quarterly earnings calls for public corporations, casino executives mention that there's more or less uncarded play and our impression is that there's been more since the pandemic, at least in terms of what's reported by the business writers in their earnings stories.

Actually, we doubt that 30%-50% is high. Some gamblers do want to maintain anonymity, but that's probably the smallest group. And sure, others lose or forget their cards and don't want to wait at the booth to get another one. Jean Scott has also often noted that even when people have their cards with them, they decide not to use them, because "they're playing for only a short while." 

Probably the majority of uncarded players either don't know about the players club or don't want to be bothered to learn about it. A lot of these are people who still believe that comps are for high rollers, so they don't qualify. Or they don't know about comps at all. Or they sign up, but quickly find out that benefitting from the players club system takes some work, which they don't want to do. 

First-timers are essentially clueless and from what we read in the business press, there were more and more of those when the pandemic was at its worst and people who might not have considered Las Vegas a viable destination pre-COVID suddenly took notice, especially given that they didn't want to get on a plane or they would, but only for a short distance. 

As an example, in one recent earnings call, Blake Santini, president and CEO of Golden Entertainment (the Strat, Arizona Charlie's, etc.), mentioned that they "were seeing some degradation in the lower end of the database and uncarded play" and that he wasn't surprised, since both of those segments benefited from the government stimulus money. But now that that money is long gone, Golden is having to replace uncarded play with "better players at the higher end of the tiers" -- meaning regular players who know all about and take advantage of the benefits of cards. 

That's why, similarly, the locals casinos bring down the averages. Locals who frequent their neighborhood casinos learn quickly about the system and its benefits. It's the visitors on the Strip who raise the average substantially.