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Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column with Jeffrey Compton, "Player's Edge", featuring information on promotions at various Las Vegas casinos. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Neon section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.

For more details and a schedule of Bob's free classes, visit www.bobdancer.com.

Nov. 18, 2008

Knowing the Rules

The Gold Coast in Las Vegas ran several days of "Double Cash Back" in September and October of this year. Although simple in concept, there were several not-so-obvious features associated with it.

First of all, this was not "double points." This was double "whatever your normal multiplier is." Your normal multiplier is either single points (0.10%), double points (0.20%), or triple points (0.30%), depending on your tier level. The highest tier, Emerald, requires a rather modest 125,000 points over 90 days. This requires $125,000 if you play "regular games" or $250,000 if you play "over-100% games." This may not sound so modest to you, but it includes play at several properties. There are four "Club Coast" casinos (Suncoast, Gold Coast, Orleans, Sam's Town) plus lots of "B-connected" casinos in Vegas and across the country. While the Club Coast and B-connected systems aren't totally merged today, they're working on it. For me, then, this was equal to 6x points.

A second feature was that you needed to cash out your Double Cash Back promptly or it would revert to whatever your default multiplier gives you. In September you had until the last day of the promotion to collect your money. In October you needed to collect it the same day.

Another feature of the promotion was that it was in effect between midnight and midnight. This gets tricky because the official "casino day" at that property is 3 a.m. to 3 a.m. Sometimes casinos will tell you when their official casino day is and sometimes they try to keep it a trade secret. It's frequently not too hard to figure this out, but that's a discussion for another day.

If you never play between midnight and 3 a.m. (which is true for most players) the distinction between the promotion day and the casino day is irrelevant. For 21 hours a day (between 3 a.m. and midnight) the two days coincide. If you played between midnight and 3 a.m. on one of the Double Cash Back days, however, you had to fight to get your full entitlement of points.

I played on one of these days from about 1 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. Although the booth is officially open all night long, during the graveyard shift there is one attendant who takes a couple of half-hour lunch breaks during his shift. On this particular day, the attendant wasn't there. I could "wait him out" or come back later. Shirley and I were coming back later in the day for dinner so I decided to pick up the cash later rather than wait until the attendant returned.

When I returned to collect my money, the attendant told me I had no play during the day in question. Her computer showed the casino day starting at 3 a.m. I asked her to look under "yesterday's" score, and sure enough she found the play. But she told me that she could only redeem "today's" points, not yesterday's. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

The distinction between promotion day and casino day was confusing to the supervisor as well, although when she referred it to the "higher-up" supervisor, the matter was quickly resolved and I was paid appropriately. Had I not persisted I would not have received the correct amount of money.

The next week I also played a little during a similar timer period. By now the front-line employee understood what the problem was but still needed to get a supervisor's override to pay me. Which was given in short order. About a month later, I did this again and by now the booth attendant was authorized to pay the correct amount. It was clear to me that the casino now recognized the problem (at least partly because of intervention by me and probably other players) and had made procedural changes to correct it.

Even with the procedural change, you still had to be alert. If you didn't mention that some of your play occurred before 3 a.m., it's possible that the attendant would only look at "today's" play and not notice that you also had qualifying play "yesterday." I'm sure that some attendants would check this anyway, but it's not guaranteed that all attendants will do this all the time.

The purpose of this column isn't to trash the Gold Coast or their slot club. Obviously when they discovered they had a problem, they acted appropriately and honorably to fix it. You can't expect more than this.

My purpose in bringing this up is to strongly suggest that YOU need to be responsible for knowing the rules. Learning about the slot club is as important as learning where the good machines are and how to play the hands. It takes awhile to learn the ins and outs of the club, but it's important to do so.

The competence of booth employees varies widely among casinos, and even among employees at the same casino. It's easy to say that these people "should" know everything about their clubs, but you're naïve if you think this is always the case. At some casinos, booth employees were hired last week. At most casinos, knowing all the rules to every promotion is very complicated --- and some employees are better than others at learning, remembering, and communicating the various intricacies.

If you wish to be a winning player, you should make it your business to be well informed of the rules that could ever affect you. Obviously you don't HAVE to do this, but what you don't know CAN end up hurting you.

(I originally wrote this several weeks ago. A friend of mine had a similar problem there in November. Even though the casino day starts at 3 a.m., he played between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. and a booth attendant wouldn't give him his double points until he insisted on speaking with a supervisor --- who fixed the problem quickly enough. So there's still a chance that some of the booth employees don't understand how this promotion works yet.)