Best options for micro bankroll

Hey All,

Friend and I are going to be in Vegas for 3 nights soon and I'm looking for some advice regarding room comps.

I've been to Vegas a couple times in the past but have no real gambling history to speak of. The first trip was just a couple hours in the City and I maybe put $100 through some machines and didn't use any players cards. The second was a longer stay @ The Palazzo and I have their players club card, but we didn't gamble much there, and it's probably been 3-4 years since that visit.

My gambling bankroll for this trip is micro-sized. Probably around $500-600 so I have no illusions that (under normal circumstances anyway) I'd have enough coin-in at any 1 property (or group of properties) to straight up earn multiple comp nights. I have however seen discussion of people getting teaser offers for 3-5 nights (or the Cosmo curise offers) to return to a property they did some amount of gambling at but did not stay at. I signed up for MLife as I have some MyVegas rewards I'll be using and am staying at an MLife property.

My question is - what would you do to try and have the greatest odds of getting a future comp room offer for a non-mlife property? I'm not expecting anything but if I can mix my play up a little bit and increase my chances I may as well. We plan to casino hop and sight see with gambling mixed in so I don't mind heading around to a bunch of different places.

What I'm thinking currently is playing some Holdem @ the new Linq poker room as well as some VP or slots thereto try and get on the radar at CET. Try and put through $100-200 in VP or Slots @ The Cosmo, and probably a small mount through at Casino Royal to possibly take advantage of their $20 loss rebate. Is playing downtown a small amount worth it or not so much?

If there's anything I should not do, or add, I'm open to suggestions.

 

CET is probably your best bet. Poker tables get very little points. $100-200 is not going to get much either, but it may get some teaser offers.

without getting into a long ADT/THEO discussion, you can so some simple math. Let's say the hotel can get someone to pay $100 a night for a room or give it way to a low level player. If they give away a few nights, and it costs them even $50 a night to give you that room, but you only give them $100 in return.... does it make financial sense to do that?

 

First of all, congrats on the return to Vegas, its always fun coming, but extra fun after a long absence (Absence DOES make the heart grow fonder [for Vegas], afterall). Based on your post, it sounds like you want to go to a lot of properties - LINQ, Cosmo, CR, possibly downtown, and if that is going to be enjoyable for you (my wife and I do the same), do it, by all means. However if your strategy is to lure future comps, it isn't the best approach. I'd suggest really concentrating on one property or group of properties (especially for CET).

I think if you focus on CET you'll be surprised what kind of offers you can get with sustained play even at a low level. Keep in mind that generally comps are not as great for Poker, or VIdeo Poker or tables (especially if you're playing red chips ($5)), as they are for slots, so your games of choice may not be the most lucrative at luring future comp offers. With that in mind, to the extent you go to Cosmo, or an Mlife property, or Casino Royale or downtown, or any property where you aren't looking for comps, whether its to just experience something different or just to check it out, I'd say take a $20 and hope for the best. You can drop $100-200 bucks FAST if you aren't disciplined. Casino Royale does have by far the easiest loss rebate on the strip, however in my (limited) experience there, other than the rebate, they give no comps, so I'd probably not do much there after the rebate.

The reason I suggest CET above is I find they are FAR more generous than any other program, including Mlife, to low rollers. We stay at V/P, but with just a few hours of play each trip at CET properties we earn enough theo to get free rooms anytime we want them, which is all we want to help us extend a 4 or 5 day comp at Palazzo to 7 at Palazzo + CET.

All that said, ultimately I'd say just do whats fun for you. Honestly, its better to go to Vegas and have a good time and experience what you want to experience than to play in places you may not care for just to chase a few extra comps. If you want to spend time at Cosmo, or Wynn, or Aria because they're beautiful properties (even though your play may not earn you comps), you should for your enjoyment. Even though poker or or $5 BJ or craps (my fave) are not great to earn future comps (compared to slots), if that's what you enjoy, go for it. Vegas is supposed to be fun, and sometimes when I worry too much about the comps it makes it feel more like a job than a vacation, and that's defeating the purpose.

Just my .02!

 

The linq poker room is probably a decent way to do it if you can play well enough to sustain with that BR.

The key to getting cheap/comp nights from CET in the calendar from poker is hours. One long session (4+ hours min) would do you much better than daily one hour stops. Also be aware that those "comps" don't include resort fee and will be mainly weeknights.

 

Your best bet is to play what you want to play at a level with which you are comfortable in an environment you enjoy, and just have fun. Put a card in by all means but just enjoy and don't worry about chasing comps all over. Vegas with paid rooms is often less expensive than Vegas with comped rooms. If you are intent, find one spot, focus your play there, likely on slots.

 

Truer words have perhaps never been spoken.

 

Poker won't get you shit for comp offers.

Whatever you have left after poker, split it 3 ways and play at Aria or MGM Grand, any Caesars property you like, and Cosmo. At each casino, do all your play on only one day (shouldn't be difficult, eh?). Play $1 reel slots with a low pay table.

You should end up getting teaser offers from all 3.

If your MyVegas comp isn't linked to your Mlife account (I don't play MyVegas so I don't know if that's required), then MLife doesn't know you're there, you can play just the minimal one day. If that's not the case, then just substitute any other property, like Tropicana or TI or even Wynn.

So you could theoretically get 3 trips worth of teaser comp or discounts. Once you take a property/chain up on an offer though, you gotta earn your keep on that trip or that'll be the end of it.

 

Thanks for all the responses guys. I have no intentions of making this trip all about chasing comps, just trying to get some info on where my best bet might be at getting a teaser offer or two if I'm going to be wandering around the strip anyway. The comp night from myvegas is on my mlife account and I am linking the other 2 nights to that reservation so I'm pretty sure they'll know i'm there the whole time, between that and hearing they are less generous with offers I lean towards spending the majority of my gambling money elsewhere.

I'm not really planning on playing a ton of poker, the $1/$1 NL Holdem game at Linq seems interesting so I'll probably throw a hundo or two down there, then take the rest to slots and/or some VP and I don't think I'd spend more than the $20 at CR to see about that loss rebate, see if I can hit something on a $1 machine or something.

It sounds like my best bet is probably splitting whatever I have left after poker between Cosmo and a Caesar property and hope for the best, if I do really well maybe also hit Wynn or Trop. At the end of the day if I could get 2, 3 or 4 comp nights, even weekdays I'd be a happy camper. Not expecting just hoping

 

On my second or third trip to Vegas I signed up at Planet Hollywood, I think it was 2013. Played one slot machine for maybe 30 minutes, I don't know what my coin in was, but I lost like $100 bucks. Later I got several comp room offers from lower tier properties, and I continue to get some comp and room discount offers from CET to this day even though I haven't used my card again in any CET casino since that first trip.

So play what you want at CET and you'll probably get something.

 

A good teaser offer is pretty rare and there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to who does and doesn't get them. I would think that teaser offers are tied in to the person's personal info like where they live, what neighborhood they live in, tax info, credit score, etc - and that it is all compiled by the casino to determine who would be a good future customer if the casino can just reel them in... and those are the ones that get the teaser offers.

Also, a lot of people underestimate the amount of coin in they can put through a slot machine, even with a little bit of money. Somebody might say they went to that casino and though they were there for a bit they only lost $100 and yet a month later they wound up getting a pretty juicy offer in the mail... the catch being: how much play did they get with that $100? With a run of bad luck that hundred dollars might only end up representing $150-200 worth of coin in, but with some good luck and a lot of grinding they could possibly have stretched that out to thousands of dollars worth of play - even though the end result is the same, losing just $100, what kinds of offers one might get in the future from that play can vary greatly.

You need to put in time and money.

Casino hopping is about the worst thing you can do. Your gambling budget is somewhere where if you concentrate almost all your play at one property you can probably get some offers in the future, but if you casino hop it'll just end up spreading it out so thin that you'll be under the radar everywhere.

Other than Golden Nugget the room rates at Downtown hotels are pretty cheap already. Give somebody down there a little bit of play and you should be able to get rooms for $20-25 per night pretty easily... the catch is: the downtown hotels aren't as glamorous as those on The Strip and they don't have that resort-like feeling that the big mega resorts have - for some people thats no big deal, for others it can be a huge issue.



Overall, in reading your post as a whole I think the best thing for you to do is just play what you want to play where you want to play it and if you get any offers in the future thats great, and if you don't you still had a good time in Las Vegas and got to see the things you wanted to see. Since it sounds like only your third trip to Las Vegas you probably still have a lot of sights to see and things to do and likely don't want to limit yourself to just one or two casinos to concentrate your play.


That being said, if you want to try and get a decent future offer what I would probably do is:

You are there for 3 days, but you don't need to just break your budget up like "daily budget = total budget divided by 3"
If your budget is $600 and you are there for 3 days then you might want to break it down like:
Day 1: arrival day, going to do a little bit of gambling after we check in and use my MyVegas rewards. Budget: $100
Day 2: going to play poker and some cheap VP at The Linq today after I've done some sightseeing. Budget $150
Day 3: this is my bigger gambling day. Budget $350 plus any money leftover from days one and two.

Doing it like that will give you a day where you can have more money to gamble with and play a lot more than just if you had $200 by breaking your budget up in to thirds.

Next, sign up for the slot club where you want to play. Also, make sure the information, especially email address, is accurate: on my trip to Las Vegas where I signed up for slot clubs I had to correct my email address at three places. If you have an unusual email address or a bunch of numbers in it then you might want to even have it written down or printed on a card that you can give them when you sign up.

Make sure your email address is one you will have for a while. If you work for ABCXYZ Inc and they give you a company email address of [email protected] you might think of using that, however are you always going to be working there? Or what if the company rebrands itself? Instead think of having something like a Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account that you can give them - most casinos don't send out physical mailers anymore except to the higher rollers so they need a way to get a hold of you by email.

Know what you need to do for the slot club. At Total Rewards (Caesars) casinos you need to put in $5 through on slots to get a point and $10 through on video poker, as an example, and some casino slot clubs do not give you partial credit if you haven't earned the full amount of points, IE: if they need $10 played through to get a point and you put $8 through and then pull your card out if you put your card back in you need to play a full $10 through to get the point, not just the $2 you were short on.

Grind your play. Grind, grind, grind. You want to play for as long as possible and get as much coin in as you can. For this:
- Avoid the newer slot machines. Most have a high variance to them which means a small spot of bad luck can deplete your bankroll fast.
- Instead look for games that are 10+ years old. The machines/cabinets don't have to be that old, just the games. IE: you can find Cleopatra slot machines everywhere still and that game is over 15 years old.
- Play full lines on the machine, but look for ones where the cost per spin is low. If you search around you can still find slots that play for as little as 7 to 10 cents per spin.
- Playing at 10 cents a spin doesn't sound like much but on a low variance older machine your money is going to last for a very long time: if you are playing at 10 cents a spin at 900 spins an hour that works out to $90 coin in per hour... play for 12-14 hours in a day and you are talking about $1080-1260 worth of coin in.

And thats how slot players get so much in comps: thats at only 10 cents a spin and yet you are talking about $1100-ish worth of coin in, which at a 14% house edge the casino expects to make about $150 off the slot player, which if the casino returns 35% to the player in the form of comps is about $50... playing at 30-50 cents a spin and you can see how slot players can get some pretty decent comps, $150-250 a day can go a long way in comps, and yet still be low rollers.

 

picklz,
I'd say pick a plan you think will be most beneficial to your style of play and Bankroll and have fun wherever you end up. As you say it's not about chasing comps. But it is nice to find a place or places that will yield some offers for future trips and work your way up from there; before long you'll have more room comps and FP than you can count!
Wishing you an awesome trip with big wins, and lots of comps in your future.

FYI:
If downtown is on your radar, in July, I played at MSS for 90 minutes using a new players card, $200 in, played dollar slots. Used same card at Fremont, $200, same amount of time, Fremont players club gave me a free buffet for two which I didn't use. Once home, I received offer in mail from MSS for 2 comp nights valid through Nov30,2015. Ditto at Green Valley Ranch - 3 hours of slots, $400, and offers for 2 comp'd nights. (Played any winnings on original coin back in).

Played 2-3 hours on same trip at Harrahs using existing players card, dollar slots less than $200, and rec'd calendar offers with comp rooms at several CET properties. (Have not played or stayed at CET in quite a few years).

FWIW, my comps come from Mlife, V/P, and Wynn where I spend way, way, way lots of time and money when I visit. As a slot payer who runs a lot of greenbacks through those machines, I do like the comp'd rooms/suites, meals, shows, and RC's that slot play brings while doing something I really enjoy.
Retired, non-smoker, non-drinker who dragged my hubby along to the dark side - hooked on Vegas...go figure!

 

You have $500 bucks. That's awesome!!!!

You're staying at an Mlife property. Don't play there with $500 in 3 days. You won't get anything.

Gamble at 1 property (non Mlife), for 1 day. Now you are a $500 player, a day. That's what the hotel is looking for.....a bigger player.
They don't know where you are staying.
Yes..you will get decent teaser offers from hotels that you have NEVER signed up at.

Spend the other 2 days enjoying the rest of Las Vegas.

Good Luck!!!

 

The only thing I've found that works for a small bankroll is signing up at a new place and playing that level of bankroll in one day.

You won't get earned comps, just random marketing comps. Even then, you have to keep your sights on lower end places. Off-strip Boyd properties were my best bets. I had a couple years where I had plenty of comped rooms at Gold Coast with a bankroll like that.

The longer you're established, the harder it is to get cheap comps.

 

Even though you say you aren't about chasing comps, that's the premise of your initial question.

You can earn free nights at Downtown Grand with that kind of bankroll. Other than that, I'd gamble intensely for short time and hope to fool the system into thinking you're a player or could become one. If you play long and slow, you'll get pegged as a grinder and casinos don't need grinders with their fanny packs and coupons

 

It doesn't take much to get teaser offers, or at least, it didn't used to.

Granted it was in 2008, and the economic landscape has changed since then, but on one of my first trips to LV, I played slots at Wynn enough to get 99 points. 100 points would have gotten me a free spin at some wheel or something, but I didn't know it at the time. In any case, that 99 points represented something like $150 or $250 coin in. I haven't played a dime there since, but I'm still getting the same teaser offers.

Same trip, $20 into a slot at Flamingo, gone in 10 minutes. Had comped nights showing up in my TR account before I got home.

 

Yep, pretty sure my "free" rooms this year cost me $1,000 a night.

 

I have said this so many times! My free rooms cost me so much money.

 

After seeing this quote, it got me to go back and look at the history of our Vegas trips (I keep a money log after we get home - what we went with, what we came back with).

Removing the random trips where we break even or come back up (yes it has happened from time to time). I found:

Trips before we started earning comped rooms, we lost on average $200/day

Trips after we started using comped rooms, we have lost on average more than 4-5x that much. (with a great deal of deviation, larger stake = larger swings)

Now, there are other factors here, better jobs, less debt, more stable financial situation, etc., but when you figure we're generally getting the same room at VP for "Free" we used to pay casino rate for (we rarely get an upgrade to a better suite, happens maybe once a year), not sure we're really getting that great a deal.

That being said, it is the "free" room that keeps us coming to Vegas, its so hard to shell out several grand for a room on the beach or a trip to Europe when you can go to Vegas completely "free". (since we also get free flights through points)

 

My bankroll is larger than yours but I spread my play VERY VERY thin. CET, MLife, Wynn, Trop, Station, Boyd and others. But just by using the cards I get some pretty great rates on rooms from most of them. And a few weeks ago I got a 3 night comp from Green Valley Ranch despite having played there once in my life in May (20 minutes of craps). A nice teaser that I'm going to use.

 

I'm in the same boat as you. I don't actually spend any cash on my flights and rooms in Vegas due to points and comps. I usually end up adding what I would have paid to my bank roll.

For OP, if you're on the strip then CET owned casinos probably give you the best bang for your buck. I only hit up CET casinos in LV for the $5 3Card Poker tables or $10 craps if the Cosmo is $25 and higher that night. I can get pretty cheap rooms for the lower end of CET like Linq, Flamingo and Rio. If I add my GF players number to the reservation many of those have free nights. She's a 3 card poker player if she's at CET.