In my last post, I talked about the trip non-casino activities; I emphasized from the beginning that this vacation with my friend Susan was purely recreational. However, that didn’t mean that we would avoid casinos. I was looking forward to introducing Susan to this exciting entertainment environment. In past years, she’d made a few brief casino visits during business trips to Vegas, but she’d seen them only as a quick way to lose too much money.
I explained in past blogs that I wouldn’t be visiting the Atlantic City Tropicana this trip as an advantage player, since I’d already reached my Harrah’s tier goals for this year. It was my chance to have a relaxing vacation and a break from taking care of Brad. However, although I was leaving advantage play, I would not – actually could not – be leaving frugal play. I found myself, almost unconsciously, using many of the same frugal techniques I’d learned and used for the last 38 years of casino play.
One of the first things I did when I reached the casino was to check the players club kiosk, something I routinely do, especially if I haven’t visited the casino for a while. I didn’t expect to find any new information; I’d been closely following my online CZR account and already knew my point balances and company-wide promotions, along with offers from specific properties where I’d recently played. But since I hadn’t been to Atlantic City for many years, I really didn’t expect to find any extra goodies for this visit.
So was I surprised to see a $315 “gift” on the kiosk screen! It was from a free-play promotion that I didn’t know about. I hadn’t seen any publicity about it – no signage indicating if it was available to all CZR players or if it was specific just to the Tropicana. Maybe it was an extra perk connected to the CZR Reward Air package I was on, but I’d received no notice of that. I’m not sure I would have known that this was available to collect on any slot machine if I hadn’t stopped at the kiosk.
This wasn’t the first time that checking a kiosk reaped big benefits. Often when a casino is running a drawing promo that you hadn’t known about, you can check your account at a kiosk and find you can register there to be eligible to participate.
Susan and I had already each contributed $200 to a joint gambling bankroll that now had a $315 boost! We were ready to see how long we could make it last. We agreed that we weren’t looking for big wins; we just wanted to stretch out our entertainment time. To that end, we did a lot of “sampling” as we hit the table-game area. Moving around a lot reduces your time at the games where the casino edge will want to feast on your bankroll.
A good way to stretch your money is to bet the smallest amount you can and the casino will just nibble slowly on your bankroll. Therefore, we looked for the minimum-bet tables. However, I knew we wouldn’t be playing table games very long; even though it was a weekday, there were no $5 tables that would provide us longer fun time; $15 was the lowest.
We hit the crap table first. As many people are, Susan was intimidated by all the busy complex action, so she chose to watch me. I know the best crap bets, but with a $15 minimum pass line bet, I knew our small bankroll wouldn’t survive long with taking the 5x odds offered behind the line. So to show Susan a few more fun options, I instead took the 6 and 8. That got us lucky for a few minutes, but when my short roll quickly sevened out, we decided that a $100 loss in a few minutes didn’t provide enough bang for our buck.
Next, we headed for the Three-Card Poker table. I’d never played this game before and needed the help the kindly dealer gave me. (Don’t put a chip on Play first; you have to put it on Ante. You look at your hand to see if you want to play it and if you do, then put a chip on the Play space.)
I’d checked my latest book, The Frugal Gambler Casino Guide, when preparing for this trip (another good frugal tip) and found the best simplified strategy was to play only when you had queens or better. We were lucky and got good hands and when we’d won $100, we left, cashed in our chips, and decided that it was fun to get even!
Next we played a little roulette on the stadium option. Rows and rows of machines face a screen where you can play video blackjack, craps, baccarat, and roulette. Susan’s son had asked his mom to put $50 for him on black. It took a few hands to figure out how to play our machine, but she finally won $35 to take back to him.
These stadium games might be a good choice for players who are intimidated by the live tables and they might provide lower-minimum choices. However, they also provide the opportunity for faster play that might take away any advantage the low-minimum might afford. And, of course, you don’t have the social contact that makes live games more fun for many players.
We saved my favorite table game for last – blackjack – with which Susan had some experience thanks to just-for-fun BJ sessions at Legacy. We chose a crowded table since on any negative game the fewer hands you play, or the fewer bets you make, the longer your bankroll will last. We played almost an hour, with the expected up-and-down results. After one large down, we hit a good stretch and quit when our loss was only $100. We really enjoyed the session, but didn’t want to risk another big downhill slide.
We discussed how we enjoyed our play at the table games and would have stayed much longer if the minimum bets had been lower. But after about two hours, we moved away from the pit, looking for something that didn’t shrink our bankroll so fast.
“Did you play any video poker?” you might ask.
My research in planning this trip revealed that this would not be a casino where one would probably find an advantage VP play. However, I thought I might find some of the exotic games I usually didn’t play back in Vegas because of their bad paytables. But they could be a fun short-term option to play if I found them in very low denominations. It didn’t take me long to check out the VP inventory there: extremely small proportion of the machines on the floor and very few of the newer titles and variations. In one corner, I did find one very old sticky-buttons Ultimate X, at multi-line nickels. I wasn’t excited about playing it, but I wanted to show Susan a little glimpse into what I’d been doing in a casino for the last 38 years. She didn’t get my fascination with video poker and was certainly unimpressed when I lost $100 in just a few minutes. (It’s hard to explain that short-term losses “don’t matter” along the way to the long-term win.) She was looking bored and truthfully, I was bored too. Short-term play can be a real psychological downer. So we kissed that machine good-bye and labeled it “NO FUN.”
Off we went to a game we’d found earlier, one that unexpectedly gave us more entertainment value than all the others we’d played on this trip. I’ll tell you about it in Part 3. Just a little hint: We nicknamed ourselves the Wonder Women!
Happy Labor Day to all. Brad and I are going to Florida to relax with the family over the holiday weekend. And then I’ll be back to tell you more about the Atlantic City trip, including a report about the great frugal get-together.