I've found that any rankiing of casinos, resaurants, movies,
baseball teams, etc., etc. is always weighted toward the specific
set of criteria that are most important to the person doing the
ranking. For instance, one R-J reataurant reviewer here in town a
few years ago (who is no longer worth the paper) would drastically
downgrade a restaurant if she didn't receive the level of obseqious
and fawning service she felt was appropriate to her station (even if
she chose to go there on a busy Saturday night). Even if the food
was terrific in her opinion, the best overall rating the place would
ever get in this case would be a "C". Now, if you go to a restaurant
primarily for the food, you would find the overall ranking
misleading and would possibly bypass a given restaurant unless you
knew the bias that drove the rankings. (Also, if you frequent
certain kinds of ethnic restaurants, such as Chinese, where
often "service" means they don't actually throw the food at you,
your criteria for "good" service may be a little more relaxed.)
I've found that every casino "ranking" suffers from the same
biasing. It's impossible to rank according to subjective criteria in
an objective way. For a long time I read "Lodestone"'s (aka John
Kelly) rankings on his now-dead website. The rankings were, for the
most part, logical. But there was one gaping flaw in them: they
didn't take into account the NUMBER of good machines available in a
given casino. For example: Fitzgerald's took and held an
undeservedly high rank because of its two .25 17/10 Loose Deuces
machines tucked in a corner of the casino. The other 142 VP machines
in there were crap, but that didn't matter, even when the two
machines were reduced to one, then that one was reduced to .05
denomination (for all I know, it;s still there); the ranking stayed
high.
A ranking also has to take into account the needs or objectives of
the person reading those rankings. The "best" VP place may vary
depending on whether the player is a visitor looking for easy comps,
a local looking for maximum bounceback, someone who wants cashback,
someone who wants future mailed room offers, or someone who's just
looking for the best game mathematically. So the comparison is a bit
apples-and-oranges.
For instance, Paris/Bally's would rank 835th on a list of "good VP"
casinos based on their VP offerings alone. But their tremendous
mailed offers kick them upstairs several notches in MY personal
rankings. Ditto the VP wastelands of Venetian and NYNY (but NOT
Caesar's, who mailed offers for the same amount of action are
comparative crap).
The upshot of it is that you need to collate your OWN data, using
the VPFree database and your own observations as a guideline. Paying
$X for someone ELSE'S opinion/top 40 lists is a waste of money,
since it's unlikely the listmaker's criteria were the same as yours,
and it's also unlikely taht those criteria were 100% objective.