Hi folks -- thanks for all the feedback on my trip report! Aggregating a few responses...
nightoftheiguana2000 wrote:
They've had a "losers only" policy in place for some time now. If you
win or breakeven, they don't want your business. Used to be they just
backed off card counters, now they back off anybody who wins or breaks
even, even on progressive and bonus reel slots and keno.
You might have something there: this was our first overall winning visit to Peppermill. Our other two visits were (modest) losers, and our bills were fully comped on each of those occasions (except for tips, as expected). But of course three trips isn't many data points.
"George" wrote...
Don't you get the "Preview" booklet with a coupon for 2 FREE nights in
the regular tower? You could have combined that with a 2 comped
nights offer from another mailing. Unless you had an overpowering
desire to stay in the Tuscany tower, you would have saved many comp
dollars since the Tuscany rooms are twice as expensive. I'm
estimating your hotel "comp bill" would have been 1/4 of what you paid.
I readily admit and agree that (in hindsight) we could've done better. We did enjoy our very nice Tuscany Tower room, but the truth is that when we're at a casino resort, the room is basically for sleeping and showering, so as long as it's clean and the bed is decent, we're OK. Our "mistake" (?) here was that, being pretty new to Peppermill, we didn't really know how comp'ed rooms worked, so when our (prior) host booked us for the Tuscany Tower, we just accepted it. 'salright, it was nice. In the future we'll probably be happy to request a Peppermill Tower room at a significantly lower assessed rate (so we instead have comp $$ to enjoy those nice gourmet meals ;).
"Michael Aclin" wrote...
Also, the newly remodeled
rooms in the regular tower are super nice! Nice beds with pillow top
mattresses, big flat screen TV, extra wide shower curtains. I can stay
there and not have ANY of my comp dollars going to the room expense.
Do you (or anyone) know if these remodeled "old" rooms include an in-room safe? That's one benefit we definitely appreciated in the Tuscany Tower room, that wasn't previously available in the Peppermill Tower.
"2-WILD" wrote...
Based on your game choices and play time, I estimate your total coin
to be @$70K, which fits nicely with your experience based on the
above parameters.
Actually, I estimate our coin-in much higher than that. 66 man-hours of play (per the casino's report, but it seemed right); estimate $8/deal (most of our play on 10-coin dime SpinPoker @ $9/deal or 15-play dimes @ $7.50/deal) and a modest 300 deals/hour (those super-multilines are relatively slow). The multiplication says $158,400; I'll call it $150K. That's $37,500/night, which IMHO is a respectable amount of play -- that's why I was surprised that we were "overcomped". Following through on the math, the casino's reported "theo" is pretty close to the true theo of what we were playing -- but in many casinos you're rated quite a bit better than that.
"fordscks" wrote...
This is a case of facts versus fallacy, i.e. "Reno was easy with
comps".
Yes, apparently. 
This does seem a bit surprising to me, since frankly, Reno as a visitor town isn't very spiffy, and there's a lot of competition. We do enjoy the Peppermill experience, though, and are glad to keep patronizing them if we can get (at least) an overall-neutral situation. (For us, the wildcard is GETTING THERE: it's annoyingly tricky to actually get to Reno from our home in the Washington DC area, without paying tons of money or getting lousy flight schedules.)
Thanks, everyone! I continue to welcome any comments/suggestions.
--Joe