1) Sunset Station would honor an LVA 2/1 and let you pay for the remainder with Station Bucks. We did this at the buffet and at Guadalajara. Great deal. Boulder Station and Palace Station would not allow that. It would be nice if all the Stations treated coupons the same.
2) Until 1/7/07, cashback at Casino Royale is taken as free play. They are changing systems and cashback is not available at the booth until 1/7. So if you are playing to a certain level, say $10 cashback to keep the mailers coming, I'd suggest taking your freeplay amount as soon as you can so that the freeplay is helping you earn points. This also works if you are just short of the next dollar amount. Say you have $22.79 in freeplay. Take $22 and play that to earn the next $0.21 then download the last dollar. That way your freeplay is earning you more freeplay.
Also, on the last trip I earned $27 in cashback ( 2 sets of coupons) and earned about $48 in comps for about 1:75 to 1 comps to cashback ( freeplay). 95% of my play was during triple points.
3) At Circus Circus, there is a $5 MP for the field bet in craps. However, the matchplay coupon does not earn 2:1 for rolling a 2 nor 3:1 for rolling a 12. This further decreases the value of the coupon to about $2.22.
4) Once again, on this trip, coupons were profitable and video poker wasn't. Match plays are a great buffer against bad video poker runs.
Even my wife, who hates matchplays, has vowed to start using them in 2007.
5) True cost of a mistake: I played the $50 Walmart gift card promo at Binion's on Sunday. I planned on playing the FPDW but they were full. Instead I played FPJW. Now, I haven't played jokers for a while and it's not my best game anyway but I figured I knew it well enough to keep the base game at least .3% positive and the gift card promo was worth 2.5% so I went ahead and played. I ended up playing next a rather large, sloppy man who surely didn't use his gift card for soap or shampoo. He didn't smell like a garbage truck, he smelled like what you burp up after eating out of a garbage truck. And I have a very bad sense of smell. My wife could pick him out 50 feet away.
Anyway, as I was playing I came across AcJc. Now, this is the 4000 coin royal version so I thought you only hold the ace. I did so and the first 3 cards that popped up were Kc Qc Tc. I was a little bothered but kept playing. I then started to think if I actually made the right play or not. After my money ( and olfactory defenses) ran out I moved to another joker machine. I asked the person playing next to me what the proper hold is for that hand and he said if you have a flush penalty, just the ace; otherwise AJs. Now, I don't know if I had a flush penalty card or not. My eyes were watering pretty badly at that point. I should have asked the person next to me but I could bear to get any closer to him.
I looked it up on winpoker and worst case difference is $0.01 at quarters ( if there are no penalty cards). You can argue that this is a one cent mistake or a $1000 mistake. The real mistake was not having a jokers strategy card with me when there was a chance that jokers would be the only game open. These machines were old coin machines that spit after 1000 credits so I believe if I held AJs I would have hit the royal.
I'm back in 10 days so if I play at Binion's again, I will bring a jokers strategy card and one of those car air fresheners. Then I will be ready for anything.
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