Alongside all the other great value at Terrible’s casino at the moment, there’s also been a swipe-and-win promotion which is linked to a $250,000 cash giveaway.
Every time you swipe you earn one entry into the drawing and some other prize that is randomly generated by computer.
To give you the impression that you have some kind of influence over what you win, you have to pick one of three alarm bells with Mr Terrible’s face on it to reveal your prize.
Sometimes it’s a two-for-one coupon for the buffet, which isn’t worth anything if you have points on your card, as comp is worth twice as much at the buffet as anywhere else. Sometimes it’s a twofer for a particular kind of meal (e.g. a steak dinner) at the cafe.
It’s better when you get free players club points. I’ve had awards from 100 points (worth about 25c) up to 5,000 points (worth about $12).
There are also instant prizes, including a musical "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign ornament, Terrible’s t-shirts and (presumably because of surplus stock in the gift shop) a set of tupperware containers. They’re not Terrible’s logo containers, it’s just a totally random giveaway.
And sometimes it’s nothing more than another drawing ticket to stick in the drum.
It’s not worth making a special trip just to swipe here, but as I’m playing at Terrible’s a lot lately I’m taking advantage of the extra value. Especially as you could earn extra swipes every day by playing the machines: 250 points for each extra entry, but limited to a total of three entries per day.
That was until today.
After playing more than enough video poker to claim the daily maximum $25 of free fuel each, Claire and I stood in line to swipe – unaware of the change. It was fairly unusual to have to wait at all for this, and even more so that it was moving extremely slowly.
It didn’t take long to realise that some players were getting more than three goes, and we quickly figured out what was going on.
In fact, only the first three selections give you a chance to win bonus points or free tat. From the 4th one onwards, whichever alarm bell you pressed it is always going to give you a drawing ticket.
One player ahead had 61 goes. The ever-growing mass of people waiting for their free shit started to dissent. Many couldn’t connect the sign on the top of the kiosk that said "earn bonus entries for every 250 points" and the fact that some people had earned bonus entries.
"Why does he get so many?", came a voice from behind. "What makes him so special? Is he the son of the owner or something?".
They really must have special perks for family. "Here boy, take this golden slot card and go swipe so many times that my customers will start spitting on you".
It could happen.
Others, when it was finally their turn, swiped their card, took their one free entry for turning up and looked devastated that they didn’t get to go again. A second swipe of the card proved fruitless, and the message "you need to earn another 250 points for another entry" just produced confused expressions.
Newsflash: casinos give more stuff to those who gamble than those that don’t.
We finally got to the front of the line and Claire steped up to swipe.
You need to earn 1,000 base points for $5 in gas, but this was a 5x points day so we had earned tens of thousands of spendable points. There’s no point in keeping count beyond 25,000. But surely, only the base points would count towards these extra entries right?
Wrong.
Instead of the twenty-something entries I was expecting, the kiosk dropped a bombshell: "Play 1 of 135".
Oh. My. God.
It took nearly 20 minutes to clear them all, because you have to listen to a little cheering noise each time while the ticket prints, and then wait for the machine to reset to the selection screen.
This is how it plays out…
Except it went on much longer than that, without any way to speed it up or stop it.
You can imagine how popular we were. Needless to say, I didn’t bother swiping my own card after all that. I think it could have been the first time in Vegas history that someone gets carted off to a back room and taught a lesson – by other punters.
There is no need for this to be the way it is. What Claire had actually earned was 3 plays on the swipe-and-win and an additional 132 drawing tickets. It might take a couple of minutes to print all those, but there’s no reason to wait for the player to make a selection before printing each one.
Furthermore, there’s no way to cancel the session once it’s started and slot attendants are not interested – it’s not a slot machine. You have to hit the screen the requisite number of times to give someone else a chance to play. We could care less about the drawing tickets as we won’t be around for the draw, but if there’s a chance to get another Terrible’s t-shirt for nothing, I’m going to take it.
I can understand them wanting to reward players with more entries for giving them more action, but doing it this way – especially when there’s only one kiosk in the casino – is quite simply a clusterfuck.
What I really didn’t like, though, was how it also drew massive attention to those who had clearly come to the casino with a bit of playing money. This isn’t like them regular casinos – carrying a few hundred dollars makes you a high roller.
Tourists mostly stay away and well-off locals tend to choose the more upmarket off-strip resorts nearer to their more upmarket homes out in the ‘burbs. As one slot attendant once told me, "this place brings out the crazies".
So I can’t tell you how how delighted I was to have to stand there with, effectively, a flashing arrow pointing at my head while dozens of frustrated bottom feeders got a little bit hungrier.
Even though it was still daylight, it was a relief to make a clean getaway.
You would actually lose less money over the long term by forfeiting your bet before seeing any cards than by doubling down on 16 against a 10.
Of course, today the long term was irrelevant. This was the free Summerfest blackjack tournament that was included with my free room at Paris and, as you have hopefully realised, I was pretty desperate.
With five hands to go, the chips were counted down and I had 1,350 – second out of the four remaining players. The leader had 2,700.
Two ladies at the table didn’t appear to realise the objective was to finish with more chips than anybody else and seemed content to just make sure their play money lasted all the way to the final hand. One had just 300 left, and decided that the way to catch up with the leader in five hands or less was by betting 100 at a time.
She’d left herself absolutely no way to win, and that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid.
Hand 11 of 15: The chip leader, not content to sit on his massive lead and find out if I would go broke trying to catch him, bet 300. Although I could have bet the minimum 25 and hoped he would lose significant bets on the next four hands, he would only need to win one more hand (or to suddenly realise that he coast to victory) to put the game out of my reach. I had no choice but to bet the maximum 500.
He doubled down on a 12 with the dealer showing a 10 and I began to wonder whether letting him self-destruct would actually have been the best strategy. He bust, but I also lost the hand with a dealt 18, leaving me with 850 compared to his 2,100 and with four hands still to play.
Hand 12 of 15: He bets 500. Perhaps he really did want to lose. But even so, I didn’t think there was time for him to donk it all off and also made a maximum bet. Ploppy had a 14 and hit a miracle 7 for 21, which couldn’t lose as the dealer showed a 9. Even if the dealer also pulled a 21, he was ending the hand on 2,100 chips – but more than likely it would be 2,600.
If I win, I’m looking at 1,350, a deficit of 1,250 – 2.5 times the maximum bet – with just 3 hands left to play. And if I lose, I have 350 chips left to fight for a meaningless second place.
So, despite having a 16, I doubled down. And, unsurprisingly, I bust out of the tournament.
Give me a pen and paper and a few minutes and I’m fairly confident that I’d be able to work out the optimal play in the end stages of a blackjack tournament. Or, at least, be able to satisfy myself that any particular decision is not a huge error.
However, under tournament conditions, having to track the number of chips left for your opponents in your head, working out all the possible scenarios and having just ten seconds to act, it’s a totally different matter.
There’s actually no reason you should have the pressure of only ten second to make an important decision, but my table had a real bitch for a dealer. She’d already hissed at the lady to my left for not making clear enough hand signals (they were just fine if you ask me) and scolded me for the heinous crime of riffling my chips. Then she decided she’d had enough of this shit so started putting clocks on players indiscriminately.
God help you if it takes a few seconds to be absolutely sure in your head that 3 + 2 + 4 + 3 + A + 3 is indeed 16, and not 17. You’ve already wasted enough of her precious time by hitting 4 times in one hand and not busting yet.
Ten seconds? That wasn’t in the rules… what is this, an online turbo tournament?
She clearly didn’t want to be there, and letting her deal was a horrible advert for blackjack at the Rio, which is surely the point of running these promotional tournaments instead of just having a prize draw.
Anyway, here’s a pop quiz from a situation in the previous day’s tournament for anyone who actually read this far. I finished second, losing by a single chip 2,375 to 2,400. In the final hand, there were just two of us left and I thought my opponent’s stack was 175 less than mine (although it turned out I was actually only 125 ahead). How much do you bet here (minimum 25, maximum 500) to give yourself the best chance of winning, and is it affected by a lack of confidence in the chip counts?
Five nights in Paris Las Vegas: the first truly unnecessary hotel rental of this trip.
I only took this one because I’d never stayed there before. It was the first – and just about the only time – I’ve seen dates available as fully comped under my account, and given that it’s a miracle I’m still getting room offers from Harrah’s at all surely the last chance to check it out. I was just a bit curious as to what the place was like.
In the pecking order of Harrah’s casinos, based on typical room rates Paris seems to sit in second place – below Caesars Palace and above Rio. So I expected something quite fancy – especially when we were given an upgrade to a newly remodelled "Red Room".
It may well be as "chic" as they claim, but I have to admit that I don’t really get it.
Aside from the red blankets, there was also a bit of red padding behind the beds…
…and a red wall in the bathroom.
There’s a big-ass television…
… and a well stocked mini-bar. That’s traditionally something you don’t get in a Las Vegas hotel, but more properties are starting to like the idea of charging $4 for half a tube of Pringles these days.
The finer design features were clearly lost on me, and it just seemed like a fairly typical hotel room, although it actually felt a little on a small side compared to other places I’ve stayed. Which is a bit odd, because although these rooms have been renovated, the resort is not quite ten years old. Not exactly a relic.
It hardly seems worth the hype of giving a special name to this type of room, and not quite what I was expecting from a Red Room…
Sometimes it just makes sense to buy two copies of the same newspaper.
Friday’s Las Vegas Review Journal contained an insert magazine called Coast Connection from Coast Casinos, which contained a boat load of offers for Sam’s Town, The Orleans, Gold Coast and Suncoast.
We played at Suncoast on a busy 5x points Sunday afternoon last weekend and it was filled with the largest number of miserable gamblers I have ever seen. It got to the point where I was walking around actually looking for anyone with a smile, or who seemed to be even vaguely enjoying their time at the casino. I didn’t find anyone.
And this was before they had something to be really unhappy about, as just a couple of days later Suncoast pulled out all of its good video poker. There’s absolutely no reason to ever go back now.
However the other three Coast Casinos are great and have been pretty good to us. Gold Coast in particular is somewhere we’ve been playing a lot – helped in part by it’s proximity to the Palms (where there’s something free to collect most days; this year’s haul so far includes a t-shirt, an apple pie and a tyre pressure gauge) and, where we’re living right now, it can be virtually on the way to most places.
We’d already marked in the diary a 5x point weekend at Gold Coast this Saturday and Sunday. That promotion turns a 99.7% payback machine into a 100.5% winner and as these are multi-line games with the Super Times Pay feature, they allow you to push money through at 3-6 times faster than the usual single line games.
Positive expectation times fast play equals lots of monies, right? Well, it’s great if you’re winning but those games costing $4.50 or $7.50 a spin can be pretty painful when things don’t go your way.
Fortunately, Claire hit her second Royal Flush of the trip for a thousand dollars more playing money 🙂
The magazine gives you another two 5x points day of your choice at both Gold Coast and Sam’s Town (one before August 15th and one after) and one 5x points day at The Orleans. Sam’s Town has Full Pay Deuces Wild (100.7% before points, a whopping 101.6% with 5x) and The Orleans has several games that can be manipulated into positive plays with the coupon.
As Claire and I will play together on one slot club account on any given day, two copies of the newspaper has therefore bought us ten days of advantage play on video poker!
But that’s not all. The supplement also contains a $10 and a $20 blackjack matchplay coupon. As you get paid double when you win, and you win about 48% of all hands, the value of the coupons is a little under half of the amount of the bets that they match.
Cost of newspaper: $1. Value of matchplay coupons alone: $14 ish.
Unfortunately, you can’t just rip the coupon out of the newspaper and plonk it on the table with your money. In order to use the matchplay you have to take the coupon to the players club to get a different coupon, and that way they make sure everyone only gets to do it once.
I was delighted today to see that a Las Vegas landmark has returned to its former glory.
Luxor is, once again, just a big black pyramid. It looks magnificent.
For several years now, the front side of this iconic building has been violated by some kind of advertisement as part of the growing trend in Vegas to ruin the exteriors of the hotels by turning them into gigantic billboards.
Most recently, and until today, Luxor has carried an advertisement for the latest Transformers movie. This wouldn’t be quite so ghastly if there was some connection to the resort. I thought, perhaps, the movie was being shown on the Luxor’s IMAX screen – and then remembered that the IMAX was dismantled last year to make way for a positively non-Egyptian exhibition of stuff from the Titanic and some human corpses.
In the past, they have used building wraps to advertise their own shows: Criss Angel "Believe" and Hairspray. It still makes it look nasty, but I don’t mind this half as much as just random commercials being plastered over the walls.
The Luxor is not that dominating along the Las Vegas skyline during the day. There are many newer buildings that are much taller. However, even the small ones in Las Vegas are huge, and there are still times when it is the only thing you can see.
Giant black pyramid, twelve o’clock.
How much better is the view above than it was earlier in the week, when it was also spoilt by a crosshair pattern (this had been added to three sides of the pyramid) as a way to entice potential advertisers?
This is why, sadly, I have little confidence that all black will remain a permanent look for the Luxor.
All four sides have been cleared, so chances are something new and tacky is going up all the way around.
It’s at night when Luxor really shines. Literally. You can see the Batsignal from miles away (as well as from space, apparently) but it’s most impressive close up, when you can see the animated lights along the edges of the pyramid shifting towards the peak, and then that impossibly bright beam poking out of the top and reaching upwards for miles.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The music clip above is the actual jackpot tune from the royal flush Claire hit today at Terrible’s for $2,000.
There is no sweeter sound you can hear in a casino.
WOOHOO! Two grand baby!
The music is about a two-minute loop, and we got to hear it several times as it took a while to get paid, but in the end everything went smoothly.
As Claire has never hit anything large enough to trigger tax paperwork before we weren’t sure what would happen. As I understand it, any machine win of $1,200 or more has to be reported to the IRS.
US citizens are expected to declare gambling winnings on their tax return (or be able to prove a net loss from gambling for the year).
Foreigners, by default, are deducted 30% unless they come from a country that has a tax treaty with the USA. Fortunately, the UK does but I still thought it probably wouldn’t be so straightforward.
I already have an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) which I had to give when I hit a jackpot last year so I asked if we could put the payout in my name, but they insisted it had to be whoever was playing the machine at the time.
Not only was Claire’s players card in the machine, but I’m led to believe that casinos also have one or two cameras around the place, and that they take a special interest in players who win money, so it wasn’t worth messing about.
I’ve seen in poker tournaments (where the threshold for reporting wins is a ridiculously low $600) that overseas players have completed the ITIN application on the spot and received the full amount straight immediately.
I’ve also heard of players getting stiffed because the casino didn’t know what to do with the paperwork (or couldn’t be bothered to work it out) so they just kept the 30% and left it for the individual to work out how to get it back. If they didn’t pursue a claim, whether or not that 30% went to the government or to the casino’s stockholders is anybody’s guess.
To be honest, I don’t know how Terrible’s processed this one, it was all done off in a back room somewhere while we waited by the machine, bopping to the funky jackpot tune.
After about 20 minutes, a team of three slot attendants turned up with a wad of cash and handed Claire a "Foreign Person’s Income Subject to Withholding" form along with two grand in crispy notes.
It’s not immediately obvious why a watch store would be billed as a must-see attraction, but it is the (self proclaimed) World’s Largest and to be frank there’s not a great deal else to do in Laughlin when you want a break from gambling and it’s too hot to mess about on the river.
The Watch Man is inside the Riverside Resort and boasts 20,000 watches for sale all under $20.
Yes, of course they’re all cheap imitations or just plain tat, but what can you expect for the price.
20,000 watches for sale is a bold claim, and one that I couldn’t be bothered to verify, but there is a pretty impressive selection.
It’s like shopping in a giant motorway service station car park.
Of course, being in a casino, there is a fine selection of gambling-related watches. Wheel of Fortune was one of my favourites…
… although some of the poker watches were impressive too …
In the more vocational selection, I was particularly impressed with the rotating stethoscope second hand on this nurse watch.
The best thing is that there literally is a watch for everyone. Seriously. Where else could you find such niche timepieces as these?
There’s even something for the Lady Bear lover in your life.
My absolute favourite, though, was one I didn’t even notice in the store. It just caught my eye when I was reviewing these pictures and I’m gutted that I didn’t get chance to buy it.
Quite how they decide where to draw the line between "you’ll just sizzle a bit if you go outside" and "you’ll probably die if you go outside" I don’t know. But apparently 112 F is that line in the summer, the point where it suddenly becomes unsafe to spend too long outdoors – even though it’s not much higher than the average 106 F in July.
To be fair, it’s felt quite warm lately. Relative to the usual scorching heat, I mean. This is my 5th summer here and, mostly, I’m used to it and know how to cope.
Wear a hat, drink lots of water, don’t assume those massive casinos are as close together as they look. That kind of stuff.
And then, we went to Laughlin. My dashboard says it was pretty hot there.
I haven’t quite pinpointed my precise tolerance to desert heat, but 122 F is on the wrong side of it. It was absolutely horrible. Even on a short walk from car to casino, or back again, it felt like every drop of moisture in my system was instantly sucked away.
Because sweat was evaporating faster than I could produce it, my body basically turned into one big water pump, which ran dry in a matter of seconds.
Thank God for air conditioning.
The original plan to go jet-skiing on the Colorado River went out the window, and we stuck to indoor activities. Like earning a free lunch.
The River Palms casino usually has a decent free grub offer. This time it was a free burger or chicken sandwich if you earned 100 slot points – equal to $1000 cycled on video poker.
It used to be possible to get fed for free while also playing a positive expectation game, but sadly those machines have now been converted to tournament machines. However, the next best thing was still pretty good: 99.7% Deuces Wild.
This game only exists there as "Spin Poker’ which is a strange beast. You play video poker but the cards are dealt onto slot machine reels so you are paid out based on winning hands along a gazillion different pay lines.
The 0.3% house edge on $1000 gambled is $3, but that same 100 slot points also earned me about two dollars in cashback and another dollar in comp.
Not that I wouldn’t pay $3 for the burger below, it just tastes that little bit sweeter when it’s totally free.
Overheard at the players club desk in Terrible’s casino, where I was waiting patiently to claim yet another free t-shirt (and if anyone actually wants one of these leave a comment with your size, I’m sure I’ll win some more before the trip is done).
One player was just signing up and had some sort of free slot play offer that you claim at the machine by punching in a PIN number.
"You need to follow the instructions on here", she said, producing a card.
"This one is in Spanish, that’s all we have left, but you can just follow the pictures".
Which just made me wonder why, if it was so simple, they’d bothered producing a Spanish version of the instructions in the first place.
EDIT: Managed to get hold of one… and an English version!
Never mind spending a hundred dollars or more on a ticket to see Circque du Soleil or Bette Midler, there are still some great entertainment deals to be had in Vegas
Check this out: fifteen bucks to see The Donnas at the Hard Rock!
Sure, with Ticketbastard fees it’s more like $50 for a pair, but what can you do? Still an absolute bargai, and not to mention one of the greatest bands in the world.
I’d hoped to be able to catch a show at the new Joint at the Hard Rock but there wasn’t much that appealed this time around. At a push there’s No Doubt in a couple of weeks, but with tickets starting at $121 I was just too meh about it. That’s more than the Spice Girls, and there’s no comparison.
The Donnas played in the rock club venue, Wasted Space, which is a much more intimate affair. It’s tiny – supposedly a 400-500 capacity venue but with the stage area separated from the bar last night there can’t have been more than 200 there.
The picture above is poor (my small camera appears to be on its last legs as it started doing some mad shaking instead of focusing properly, it’s about the best I could do) but it shows how close I was, with just a couple of fists in the air in front of me – and I was virtually standing at the back.
Comments