I was recently having a conversation with a friend who visits a number of casinos regionally where I am. He mentioned a friend who hit up four different casinos because he “wanted to keep his comps active.”
When there are multiple casinos in an area, from markets like Atlantic City or Vega down to regional offerings that aren’t horribly far from each other, it can be tempting to bounce around and claim all your offers in a day. But what does that do to your comps, and is that better, worse or the same than concentrating play at one casino for a day? Let’s dive in a bit.
I’ve discussed in the past things like visit frequency vs. budget, and how that can impact it. Let’s take a look at this from a different example:
You have $200 a month as a budget for the casino, and you gamble once a month. You can go one of two ways:
- You can rotate which casino you visit, and play at a different casino each month with a budget of $200.
- You can visit two different casinos, with a budget for each of $100, and split your time that day between the two casinos.
In the former example, you’re visiting each of the two casinos every other month, and bringing a $200 budget. in the latter example, you’re visiting each casino monthly with a $100 budget for each. In the former example, you can expect your offers to blossom compared to the latter example.
It’s not just because you are going with double the budget. You’re going less often, and offers can sometimes be structured to try to entice more frequent visits. But when you have a larger budget, you can more often avoid a risk of ruin by running out of money, or out of time because you want to get over to the other casino to claim your offer.
If you play less than four hours, that can penalize your offers because there’s less certainty about how a session will go. And if you run out of money quickly, you can be penalized for not doing enough coin-in.
So now back to that original scenario at the top of the article. Hitting a bunch of casinos to keep offers active isn’t necessary if you visit each casino at least once a year – most casinos will keep sending you offers as long as you visit at least that often, and some will keep sending them longer than that too.
If you want to maximize comps, avoiding a hit and run to four different casinos is recommended, because your comps will take a hit if you suddenly go from visiting one casino at a time to quickly going in, grabbing comps, playing for just a bit and then leaving. That will lower your averages and hit your comps.
Last year, I played a lot more in Atlantic City for a couple of months. I would hit between 3 and 5 casinos a day, claim my offers, give them maybe $100 of play and leave. I was on a lighter casino budget at the time and was effectively farming my offers. Lo and behold, my offers in Atlantic City took a dive.
Similarly, for years I only gave one of my local casinos good play, and my offers reflected that accordingly; the other casinos in my area gave me small offers reflecting the small budgets I would visit with. But once I gave one of the other casinos more consistent play, my offers ballooned.
Now, does that mean you shouldn’t cycle through the casinos and claim offers if you want to? You can certainly do it – upfront offers tend to be based on your previous history – but just understand it can impact your future ones.
