Bonnie recently received an email from a local casino that read: “One Day Only, Tuesday, Guaranteed Free Slot Play $20.00” We’ve received variations on this numerous times over the years from this casino. So, we marked it on the calendar and made plans to pick it up. I didn’t get such an offer but I was already scheduled to receive free play that day. Perhaps that was the reason.
At least one player, however, received the same email with one “minor” difference. Instead of guaranteeing $5, $20, or $50, the email guaranteed $512,623. Now what? It said “Guaranteed.” Does guaranteed really mean guaranteed?
The player contacted me about this, wanting to know what he should do. My advice was, first of all, don’t expect to receive half a million dollars. It’s simply not going to happen. Reasonable people will probably agree that this is an obvious mistake.
The mistake probably happened in the computer program that sends out these emails. I have no idea if this casino uses their own employees and computer programs to send these emails or if they contract out the job to someone else.
My second bit of advice, however, was to contact senior management about this. If the casino simply says, “Whoops! Our mistake. We meant to give you $10. Here it is,” then you should scream bloody murder. You made a special trip in for the big money and now you’re insulted for “only” $10. There are times to make a scene and this may well be one of them. I suggest you make it an Oscar-winning performance.
On the other hand, what if they say, “Whoops! Our mistake. Our computer programmer was having a bad day and on some of the emails put the player’s card number in place of the dollar amount. Since your card number is 512623, that’s the amount that actually showed up. With your amount of play, we intended to have given you $10 of free play. What we’re going to do instead is, because of our mix up, give you $500 in free play and comp you a stay here for two nights. Please accept this as our way of apologizing for the mistake.” If they say this, I suggest you take them up on their offer. You might negotiate for $1,000 instead, but generally speaking, take the offer.
There are players that will hire an attorney about this and see if they can make the casino honor the half-a-million-dollar guarantee. I don’t suggest this, but you can do what you want. I strongly doubt that you’ll get either the Gaming Control Board or any court to agree with your position.
There are times to hold the casino’s feet to the fire on their promises, and there are times to let them off easy if there’s an obvious mistake. Players can easily differ in their opinion as to what makes an “obvious mistake” and what you should do about it. Part of the decision-making process involves, “If I do try to make them honor their guarantee, will I succeed?” Since I don’t believe you’d be successful here in trying to legally force them to pay $512,623, then that affects my decision to let them off easy.
But letting them off easy doesn’t mean letting them off completely. They made a mistake. You were inconvenienced. They should be told that, repeatedly if necessary, and let them make you an offer. Do not go to the slot club booth to complain. They have no authority to make things better. Demand to see the vice president of marketing. Or perhaps the general manager. They DO have the power to make things right.
And when they are making things right, part of their decision-making process is to evaluate how upset you are and how many people you are going to complain to if you don’t get a nice offer. So, this is definitely a time to “go Hollywood” and appear to be irate even if you’re not.
Another part of the decision-making process by the casino managers is:Â How many times did this error occur? If it only happened to three players, they can afford to be generous with their mea culpa. If it happened to 10,000 players or more, they aren’t going to be so generous to each person, although the total amount of their restitution may be larger.
Still another factor is whether you’re a winning player and the casino has a history of removing winning players. In that case, go easy on them. Why make this the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets you busted? If you’re a losing player, however, go for it! You don’t get these opportunities very often.
A casino’s offer made in an email of a half million dollars of free play just for showing up is, as Bob wrote, an obvious mistake. That being the case, the recipient of the email cannot claim with a straight face that he made a special trip to the casino to collect his $500,000 reward, as Bob suggests he should do.
Claiming injury in wasted time and travel and a let-down of expectations (“you should scream bloody murder. You made a special trip in for the big money”) when the recipient learned that the casino was not going to give him a half million dollars in free play is an obviously fraudulent ploy and one that should earn him nothing other than close future observation for attempts to cheat the casino.
That’s possibly the worst advice you’ve ever given. It would be, as you say, an obvious mistake, and going charging in there as if you really expected to get half a million dollars would just paint a big X on your forehead. That would be like walking onto the Mercedes dealer’s lot and loudly demanding that $5 new car that they advertised (misprint, duh). Or going to the grocery store and screaming for those 1-cent sirloin steaks you saw in their weekly flyer.
I suppose that you might have some kind of “special” relationship with casinos but for most of us peons, making this kind of trouble would serve no purpose and could easily get us thrown out and/or our player’s cards revoked. Claiming something you’re obviously not entitled to will cause resentment. ALSO, when APs try to shoot angles like this, it discourages casinos from offering promotions at all.
Best advice you have ever given.
Got to go. I must practice for a trip in November.
Thanks Bob
B-)
Maybe what Bob was getting at was, sure, no one in his right mind thinks a casino is going to give you free play like that, but if you make enough of an annoyance of yourself they’ll give you *something* just to get rid of you.
If that’s the case, we then move to the delightful question of how much is getting rid of a pest worth to the casino. Bob probably could write 1000 words on the many-sided ramifications of that issue.
Maybe “Making a Pest of Yourself” should be another arrow to be added to the advantage player’s quiver along with “Seeing the Dealer’s Hole Card” and other peculiar and vaguely disreputable ways to turn the casual entertainment of playing games of chance into a serious full-time vocation.
Here is what I would do.
With that mailer in hand (or in my purse), I would find a machine I want to play, insert a $20, insert my players card and check to see if that $512,623 showed up as available free play, just out of curiosity. If it did indeed show the $512, 623 I would put on my service light. When an attendant shows up I would ask “Is this for real?” That attendant would probably call a supervisor, who would contact the next one in line, and so on. That way I’m not having to ask for “senior management” myself.
I’d expect they would check it out, do whatever they had to do, and re-set things for the appropriate amount of Free Play. If they offered something for my trouble, fine. But I would not make a fool of myself by demanding more, especially THAT much more. What goes around comes around.
I think your suggestion is the best. However if that free play
was on my card I would try to play it off and plead ignorance if
the casino objected later. eg. I thought that was $5.12.
Don’t say anything!! Just play it, cash it, go home.
If the $512,623 free play actually did show up on your machine when you placed your card in the slot, why not play it and cash out every so often? Is there some type of legal ramification to doing that?…just taking the casino at their word of a mailed offer and it showing up in your account? Why get management involved? Let them come to you.
I think you guys have a point. I actually had thought of going first to a machine in high limit, see if that half a million is loaded on my card, and if it would play. If it is “one day only”, it would take a high limit machine to use it up in a day…wouldn’t it? Ha.
If the casino only requires a pin to pickup the freeplay, I say let the system work for you and suck out as much as you can on higher limit video poker (although try to avoid getting a w2g obviously)
The casino and computers are usually so dislocated, that I’d be surprised if you kept quiet, if it EVER got figured out (unless you intentionally had someone look at your account later on down the road)
Something similar happened to me before at a closed casino…I was supposed to get $50 freeplay and when I put in my pin# it came up as $500 freeplay..now that’s not quite $500k but still…I was a well known player and had a host who always looked at my account (backend comps etc)..she never said ANYTHING about the mistake…so I whole heartedly believe it was an error made by IT, and obviously computers are witchcraft to casino employees…so they never put 2&2 together…may it RIP
In response to Steve above:
I had a friend who, when in his twenties, found his checking account suddenly had $50k in it when it should only have had a few hundred. He immediately saw this as his big chance in life. He believed that he could make a killing with a system he had devised prior to the windfall for stock market trading. He immediately withdrew the money with the intention of repaying it after he’d made a lot of money trading stocks. Unfortunately, the bank realized its mistake in days and before my friend replaced the funds. The bank reported him to the police. It turns out, you can’t claim ignorance in an obvious situation like that or the one of the free play email offer.
The irony of the story is that the would-be stock trader was a policeman. I don’t know why, but he wasn’t prosecuted and continued to be employed by the police department. They may have taken his gun away and reassigned him to desk duty or something. I don’t remember. I do remember his telling me that there was something placed in his file that would hamper future advancement. He chose to quit the force a year or so after the incident.
I think Bob’s premise was that you’d show up and find that you only had $10 or $20 FP credited to your account. What would I do if I showed up, stuck my card in the reader, and it showed $500,000 free play? Well, it would take a while to play it off, and then I’d have a bunch of big tickets to cash (or one immense ticket), so I really doubt i’d be able to escape scrutiny. (With my luck, I’d hit the last thing I wanted–a royal!)
So then the question would be, could they do anything to me other than throw me out? Hell, yeah. This is NEVADA. People don’t understand that there is no rule of law here and that the only actual crime one can commit is messing with the casinos’ cash flow. If they want to charge you with fraud, then they will. They’ve gone after LOLs for picking up nickels off the floor. You try to get half a million out of them, and they’re going to be very unforgiving.
But if I had that offer, mailed to me in my name, especially if delivered by US Mail…any attorneys here? Who can say it wasn’t meant for me? Certainly the casino can “say” it wasn’t, but on what grounds could I be punished other than disinvited to the place forever? I’m ignorant, I thought my ship had come in, there it is on paper from the casino management. I just might see how far it would take me.
Candy: On Earth, sure, you wouldn’t be guilty of anything. On Planet Vegas, you would be viewed as trying to scam a casino out of half a million dollars, which makes you rank worse than Stephen Paddock and Josef Stalin combined in casino eyes. Don’t forget, there are no actual courts in Nevada–only casinos and those who serve them.
But there are some precedents from real jurisdictions. People get mailed huge checks by mistake, see credits on their bank statements, get told to come in and pick up their valuable whatever, etc. and whenever they try to cash in, they get charged with fraud on the premise that they should reasonably have known that they weren’t entitled to the windfall. My take (as an Earth resident) is that when a CASINO tells you you’ve just been given a huge gob of money, you aren’t obligated to automatically disbelieve it the way you are if, say, Wells Fargo tells you the same thing.
Bottom line: trying to fight a casino for money YOU think it owes you is like trying to fight a grizzly bear in its den while armed with only a sharpened stick. Fairness and the “law” don’t enter into it.
As far as Bob’s suggestion, I think there is an art to putting up the right kind of stink that probably gets you what you want but definitely doesn’t get you thrown out. Play victim, not intimidator. As far as deciding to play if the free play happens to already be on your card, I think the recent court decisions in the Phil Ivey, edge-sorting cases should be considered.
Reading through these comments, I’m struck by how ethics or morality never enters into the calculus of the posters’ replies. I’m thinking maybe there is a slippery slope from blackjack card counting (ok) and the sophisticated probability calculations of video poker play (ok) to the actual committing of financial crimes without a trace of guilt (not ok). “If you can get away with it, do it!” seems to be the motto of the forum comments. Maybe that explains how Bernie Madoff and other major robbers became the people they became.
It looks to me as if the advantage player is so zealous about looking for an “edge,” any edge, that, over time, one’s sense of right and wrong becomes a casualty of the pursuit, an occupational hazard.
Since one commenter spoke of Stephen Paddock, I’ll say that it’s a relief at long last the Sheriff has confirmed in part what I’ve known for weeks – since the guy told me about his plan over a year ago, but only as a revenge against the casino fantasy. Still, he was pretty descriptive. You can see what I’m talking about at my Instagram page, Rodney4K, or my comments in Anthony Curtis blog here about him towards the end of the thread.
As far as the subject here, this was basically the premise of one of the episodes of Andrew Dice Clay’s Showtime series which is set in Las Vegas. His fax machine started working in the middle of the night and lo and behold, he got an offer to host the Oscars – which had originally been sent in 1998. Needless to say, he didn’t host the Oscars, but the network that made the offer was basically pressured into giving him a starring role in a special.
As far as this, you’re not going to get very far trying to claim a ludicrous amount of free play or cash or anything else because of this type of mistake in real life. If you’re really lucky, you might get a huge internet conglomerate like Amazon to honor a mistake, but that’s about it. Casinos aren’t going to be pushed around by customers very easily.