Regular casino players value the offers the casinos provide them. The frequent combination of room, free play, gifts and food/beverage offers that casinos float are designed as an enticement to get players to come back to the casino, and potentially visit more often.
It’s also easy though to get thrown off the pattern that led to your receiving those offers to begin with. So in today’s post I share some tips on how to maintain those offers.
Keep in mind this is not an encouragement to play solely for offers; offers and comps are an added bonus, and are earned because of your expected losses, so you should never play for them. That said, if you are going to gamble, being smart about when and how you gamble can maximize the offers so you get the most for your entertainment dollar.
Play With a Consistent Budget
Offers tend to be based on a calculation of your expected losses, with a percentage of those losses earmarked as marketing dollars through those offers. Each property or company has a different formula for what they’ll offer for comps, and usually ranges between 20 and 40 percent of your expected losses.
Most casinos will calculate this based on expected loss, versus actual loss, because a player could go on a lucky streak one trip, and on a quickly losing one another. In turn, casinos will also base it on an average over time – the more you visit, the more information they’ll have to calculate against what they expect your budget and gambling to look like.
New casino visits give them new information that can impact your budget. If your offers are calculated based on you losing on average $200 per visit, and you bring $100 to the casino on a trip, unless you get lucky and get more mileage on your play than normal. If your play is less than normal, your next offer may be cut to reflect the change in your average. If it’s a small difference, the cut may be minimal, but if it’s a larger one (say, $100 budget vs. a normal $500 budget) the cut could be larger.
Of course, if you bring more than normal, your next offer may go up, reflecting your increased average.
Don’t Hit and Run
Most casinos will warn in some form that accepting an offer without play may risk future offers. Casinos use offers to draw players in, so if you visit and accept an offer but don’t play, they certainly won’t look kindly on it.
But even more broadly, if you use your players card at a casino to do anything – accept free parking, swipe for a sweepstakes, etc., – they will likely flag that as a gaming day, and if there’s no gambling
Some casinos will treat no-play days more strictly than others; at the most extreme, they will lock you out of your offers and not allow you to redeem any others until they see some play back on the board; others may ignore an occasional no or low play day, dropping one out before taking action.
But in most cases, you should expect a no play day to be like a $0 day on your average – it will pull the entire average down, at least for awhile, and so you shouldn’t do it unless you have good reason, like hitting a jackpot and wanting to run with the money (in which, cash always trumps comps!).
Your Visit Frequency Matters
Some casinos calculate offers on a cycle based on how often they think you’ll visit. If you take the same budget and visit twice as often with half the money, your offers will likely dip because of that first point about your gambling average.
But if you visit less often, and suddenly consistently visit more often, you might see your offers calculated in a different way. Some casinos will give daily offers as a baseline, but if a player is redeeming them too often, shift them to a weekly cadence, for instance.
Consistency can be your friend, so if you tend to visit monthly, and visit an extra time here or there, the casino probably won’t change a thing, but if your visit frequency suddenly spikes, or you accept more days than they’re expecting, you might see a change in your offer schedule, or how much you can claim per cycle.
Some casinos watch for players who are overcomped, or those who got a lot more than they should for their average play. They might see their mailers/offers temporarily suspended, or reduced, until such time until their comps are over time back in line with their play.
How do you make the most of your offers? Share in the comments below!
