Review of The Las Vegas Advisor Guide to Slot Clubs
Casinos have always been willing to give out “complimentaries”, or comps, like free meals, free or reduced rate rooms, show tickets, perhaps even free airfare, to those gamblers that provide a lot of action for the casino. In the last couple of years, the casinos have become more sophisticated in the way they track the play of their customers and give these rewards. For the players of video poker and slot machines, most casinos track this play using their slot clubs. In this book, Jeffrey Compton tells us how this works and how to take advantage of it.
Slot club members at most casinos are given a card with a magnetic strip on it (like a credit card) that they insert into the machines they’re playing. It records via one of several possible formulae how much the casino figures to have made off of a customer during any playing duration. The casino is willing to give back some percentage, typically about 40%, of this expected win in comps. If one plays smart, one can get back more than this. In fact, a really savvy person can turn this into a positive expectation situation. This book explains how this works.
The book starts off by explaining what slot clubs are, what are the various ways casinos might track play, and how they work. The reader is then told how one goes about signing up and how one accumulates “points” toward comps. These chapters are fairly simple and clearly written. Nothing here will come as any surprise to a casino veteran, but for the uninitiated, this is valuable information.
The author then talks about game selection. While the author indicates that playing video poker on high payback machines is the best bet, I think this could have …