Las Vegas is a competitive market, and it can be easy to get excited and want to gamble all over the place. While I have previously offered reasons why you shouldn’t, I also don’t advise to play simply for comps, and some have fun bouncing around from casino to casino while in Vegas.
If you’re going to do this, and especially if you’re going to do so while in Las Vegas by going off the strip to downtown or beyond, it helps to know when solid promotions are going on that could benefit you. Casinos run various promotions to draw players in.
My favorite is the point multipliers – when they’re structured properly, they can give you a bunch of extra free play, and with that the ability to play longer with less money. This can be great if you’re trying to get on their radar to generate future offers as well.
Here’s a few examples of ones I saw while researching my own upcoming Las Vegas trip:
Oyo 10x Multiplier Wednesdays
The Oyo is formerly Hooters Casino Hotel, and with the name change I lost one of my favorite jokes to make about a casino in Vegas, but what hasn’t been lost is a pretty good multiplier promotion.
On Wednesdays, they let you earn 10x points on reel and video slots. The earnings rate is already pretty solid: $1.50 in coin-in on slots gets you a point, and 100 points is $1 in free play or comps. So normally $150 in coin-in gets you $1, but with 10x that drops to $15. So every $150 in coin-in gets you $10 in comps or free play. That’s quite generous!
For comparison, $500 in coin-in on slots gets you $1 in Reward Credits at Caesars Rewards properties, while $300 in coin-in on non-speciality slots at Mlife gets you 100 base points, which is $1 in points and used to be $1 in Express Comps, now we don’t know because of their need to make things harder to understand.
So Oyo already was offering a pretty good offer by comparison, probably to offset the fact that they have one small property next to the 9 of each between Mlife and MGM that they’re competing against. But once you get x10 going, it can be quite nice. I’ve added an Oyo stay to my trip to check out the rooms a bit and because they gave me nice offers from limited play last year, so we’ll see what comes from this visit! I also have coupons in the Las Vegas Advisor and American Casino Guide to use.
El Cortez: Sundays and Mondays 10x on Video Reel Slots
El Cortez runs a more nuanced promotional offering on Sundays and Mondays that multiplies everything, depending on the game type:
- 2x multiplier on video poker
- 5x multiplier on reel slots and keno
- 10x multiplier on video reel slots
El Cortez’ base structure is like Caesars – $500 in coin-in gives you $1 in cash back or comps (but you earn it one point per dollar; it’s 500 points to $1 conversion rate). This is a separate earnings calculator from comp dollars, but comp dollars is based on play and not multiplied.
But with the 10x multiplier, you can now earn $1 in cash back or comps off of $50 in play, since you earn the points 10 times faster. El Cortez markets themselves as having slots that are 40% looser than the strip, so combined with the ability to earn comp dollars faster and their having old school coin slots, it could be something to check out, especially if you’re downtown on those days.
Stations Casinos: 10x Slots Mondays, Wednesdays, and Some Tuesdays
Stations Casinos, as I write this, is offering 2-3 days a week of point multipliers, depending on the property. They all appear to offer Monday and Wednesday, and some of them Tuesdays also. Like El Cortez they offer a multiplier for multiple game types:
- 6x multiplier on video poker
- 10x multiplier on slots
Stations gives you a point per dollar normally, but it takes 1000 points to get $1 in value. As such, you can get $1 per $100 in coin-in on slots during point multiplier promotions, which is better than the strip, but not as good as either El Cortez or Oyo. But you have more properties to earn them and use them, which may make them more valuable, as Stations owns a number of properties around the Las Vegas area.
The other gotcha is certain slots and video poker earn 1 point per $12 in coin-in, which means you’d have to do 12x the coin-in, or $1,200, to earn $1 in value, even with the point multiplier. That could make it tough for some, especially if it’s on the games you want to play.
There may be more out there, and they do change periodically, so it’s important to keep up to speed on what the current promotions happen to be at the time.
