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I just had this offer in an email from Party Poker.
Wow, a $975 bonus. It’s a random amount, but it’s huge. How can I resist?
5,850 Party Points sounds like a fair chunk, but to be honest it’s so long since I played there I couldn’t even remember how you earn them.
Playing tournaments, you earn 2 Party Points for every $1 paid in fees. You pay $2,925 and get back $975, so it’s equivalent to getting precisely one-third of your fees back.
Not a bad deal. But do you remember the last time you paid three grand in tournament fees in a month? Me neither.
Admittedly, I rarely play much higher than the $20s, so I’d be looking at around 70 sit-and-gos a day for 21 days to unlock this bonus. That’s a full time job – assuming you can play a dozen at a time, and I can’t.
It’s more achievable for high stakes SNG players. The $100s have a $9 fee and Party have capped it $10 per tournament for higher buy-ins, right up to the $5,000 tournaments. It would take 325 $100 tournaments or 293 at any higher level to get there.
That’s roughly 15 per day, which is still high for a casual player, but it’s more realistic. However I can’t help thinking that if you can play that many of high stakes tournaments, you’re serious enough about poker to already have a rakeback at least as good as this elsewhere and that you wouldn’t want to jeopardise your VIP status by taking a few weeks out for this bonus, when you’d get almost no perks from Party after the bonus is over.
So… if it’s going to happen, it’ll have to be cash games. A few years ago when Party Poker bonuses were just great, I used to clear them playing $1/$2 limit, which meant relatively soft games with fairly low variance, and the numbers meant that Party was actually giving away more in bonuses than you paid in rake. It was awesome.
Now, things have tightened up. At this level, it takes 57 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points, so for this promotion, you’d need to play 33,345 raked hands!
From my past experience, it takes about 5 hours four-tabling $1/$2 to play 1,000 raked hands, for which you’d pay about $55 in rake. It’s possible, but it’s a lot of work. In fact, it’s a full time job again, about 7 hours of solid play – that’s one-third of the 21 days you have to complete the play requirement.
For what it’s worth, the rake you’d pay is about $1800 so the $975 bonus is equivalent to a little over 50% rakeback. Not bad at all.
The number of hands that are raked increases slightly as you move up limits, but that’s not as significant as the amount of rake you pay. That’s why at $3/$6 you only need 14 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points. That brings down the total number of raked hands required to 8,190 – or about 40 hours of play four-tabling.
It’s a pretty attractive bonus, but it’s also pretty inaccessible to the majority of players and I guess that’s the point. They’re trying to deter the small-timers and serial bonus whores and get players who are prepared to commit a big chunk of time to Party Poker, then hope they stick around afterwards.
I’d love to be able to find a way to do exactly what they don’t want, but as I only have a week left before I head off to Vegas, I just can’t see it happening…
As well as recording myself playing the fake drums, I decided another good way to put my new camera through its paces was to see how it coped with some fast action shots.
A roller coaster that accelerates from 0-80 mph in less than 2 seconds seemed to meet the brief. That would be Stealth at Thorpe Park, and as I couldn’t be bothered to queue for 90 minutes to get on the ride, trying to take pictures of people’s scared faces was the next best thing.
This is one of my favourites:
The picture looks a bit crappy this close, but it was taken hand-held from the ground to the very top of a 200ft high ride against nothing but bright sky. I don’t think I can grumble given those conditions. Certainly not going to cry about it, like this fella.
The pictures where I didn’t have to zoom so much or point at the sun gave better results. Watch the guy in the red shirt, looking all excited as it starts to launch…
… and screaming like a little girl on the way down.
This could become one of my new favourite pastimes.
What I want to know, though, is where did his glasses go? I didn’t actually believe this could happen until now…
I’ve been saying for months that I had more free hotels rooms than I could use during my trip to Las Vegas this summer. Between us, Claire and I have already booked 24 unnecessary nights.
You know – just in case we want to use their pool, or we run out of soap.
Then today (T-12!) another batch of post arrived with even more of them.
First up, it’s an old favourite: Casino Royale.
It’s not the greatest hotel on the Strip, but what their rooms lack in electric curtains and decorative pillows is made up for by the guarantee of a coffee machine and a fridge. For me, that goes quite a long way.
Claire and I both got this offer, and although we won’t use it this time, it’s always useful to know that we still have either 4-6 free nights every month in the bag for when we need it. Casino Royale lets two players combine their comps into a single stay too, which is great.
Next, I got this one from the Fremont casino.
This is a no-brainer. I don’t care about the room particularly. I probably won’t use it. If they still have Pick’em Poker (99.9% payback before slot club perks) I’ll be giving them some more action to hopefully keep the room offers coming, but it’s worth turning up for the free slot play alone.
Which brings me to Laughlin. Harrah’s Laughlin are still sending me so many great “just for turning up” offers that I am having trouble choosing between them. In addition to the $85 cash and $50 food credit I wrote about last month, I can now take another $85 cash (but no food, sadly) on a choice of dates in August.
 Then there’s a slot tournament August 7th-9th which includes $100 in free slot play as well as the tournament entry, and a 5x Total Reward Credits multiplier for the entire weekend. That improves the value of their slot club from a paltry 0.1% to a very reasonable 0.5%.
That would be enough to make it absolutely (theoretically) free to retain my Diamond card if I could play it all through on 50-line Jacks or Better at 99.5% payback, but apparently those machines – the ones I hit ten grand on last year – have been downgraded to 97.3% payback.
There are 3 machines left in the casino that would be playable on this offer (“not so ugly” deuces wild – paying 99.7% before perks) but they are $1 single-line machines; so not only would I have a dog-fight on my hands if I wanted to sit down among all the pros wanting to grind their 0.2% edge, it would also take virtually all weekend to pump the required $100,000 through this game, even at $5 per spin. I figure it would take 25-30 hours of play – and that’s if I knew how to play that game quickly. I don’t.
 In a similar vein, on selected dates in July I could take part in the Macy’s Gift Card promotion. As well the promise of a $100 gift card to get you through the door, they’re sweetening this one with tickets to a comedy show. In addition, every 250 RCs gets you another $25 gift card.
The value of that is a full 1%, which is enough to turn their 99.1% Double Bonus Poker into a winner – and there are plenty of those games around. Of course, I then have to find something I want to buy from Macy’s to make it worthwhile.
Also at Harrah’s Laughlin, if I stay for 3 nights July 24th-27th I can walk away with a lovely plain white t-shirt with a printed Harrah’s logo on the breast, after I take them for $50 in slot play. This one’s not quite so attractive, but you just can’t grumble at a free $50.
The problem (and, let’s face it, it’s not the worst problem I’ve ever had to deal with) is that I want maximum value without having to spend the majority of my trip in Laughlin. I like the place, don’t get me wrong, but Vegas kicks its ass. I’ll definitely stay there at least once, but for the other offers I have to weigh up the cost of getting there against the value of the freebies.
It’s about 90 miles each way, and it may be two trips per offer if I don’t want to stay three days every time, which pretty much negates all that free money. However, I suspect they’ll screw you if you check out early, as they’re giving you the free room to keep you hanging around their casino for three days. They charge $50 if you don’t cancel a free room more than 72 hours in advance, but whether you can check-in, take the free stuff and check out straight away, I don’t know. Yet…
I didn’t get in half as many hands this month on iPoker, mostly because I spent most of my online poker time playing turbo sit-and-gos on Poker Stars in order to clear a bonus that was about to expire.
I had less than stellar results at both sites, but I guess I can’t complain that despite losses at the tables, they both gave me net wins on the month:
Stars: Lost $189 to release $240 bonus and redeemed 10,000 FPPs for $160. I was about half way towards both the bonus and the redemption award at the start of the month so I’ll count this as earning $200 of bonus and cashback. Net: +$11.
iPoker: Lost $102, released $90 bonus, received $68 rakeback. Net: +$56
I have to say, though, it certainly doesn’t feel like a winning month.
It wouldn’t be the same without a graph, would it?
OK, I lie. I sweat plenty. But it’s been quite a warm day and the so-called air conditioner I’ve put in this room is basically just a little fan in a box. What can you do?
The reason for this video is two-fold.
1. I wanted to try a few different video recording modes on my new digital SLR (Canon EOS 500D) and specifically to see how the 1080p mode (at a reduced 20 frames per second) compared to 720p (at 30fps).
2. I wanted to find out whether it was going to be possible to edit HD video in Vegas on my now-aging laptop, or if it would be a job for my (almost as portable) Mac Mini.
So, in the absense of anything resembling live action going on around me, I thought I’d record a few songs with different settings. But I only went and aced Reptillia, so I thought that I really should share this achievement with the world and modestly declare just how much I totally rock.
I’d been thinking about making a Rock Band video when Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” becomes available for it. But although it’s on the list of upcoming songs, there’s no release date set yet – and of course no guarantee I’ll be able to play all four parts well enough, which is what I wanted. Let’s hope this still happens, eh?
Anyway I only picked up the Mac so I could try to learn how to write software for the iPhone (which is going horribly; the language may as well be Martian compared to what I’m used to) but now it’s looking likely it will be coming on holiday with me (I’ll need to pick up a cheap monitor over there for it), and after that I fear it may only be a matter of time before it becomes the main machine on my desk.
What’s that I hear? A gazillion Mac owners saying “I told you so”?
I never doubted you. I just liked having two mouse buttons. And now I realise that I actually still can. And that I don’t actually need a keyboard with that funny squiggle key on it.
Here’s the thing. My PC, which is a dual-core thing with 2Gb RAM and is a little over a year old, struggled even with the lower quality format. The sound wasn’t quite in sync at times and it certainly wasn’t playing at the full frame rate. My laptop (3 years old, mobile Celeron something) didn’t stand a chance – what I saw could barely be called video.
Whereas the Mac – on paper a less powerful machine than my PC – lapped up the full HD format without even blinking. I was even dragging it around the screen manically (even between two monitors) while it was playing – not a hiccup.
So I loaded the clip into iMovie (which I’d never used before), trimmed off the ends (which took literally 20 seconds), hit a button and it went straight up to YouTube.
Well, not quite straight away. It took nearly an hour to render and upload in top quality, but that didn’t matter so much. I could actually do other things at the same time.
Oh. My. God. It could be only a matter of weeks before I’m fully converted.
It’s getting close enough to my next Las Vegas trip (T-20!) that I can start to get excited about stuff I hear about that’s changing over there that will might actually still be same when I arrive.
And, you never know, some of the new stuff might even still be there when I leave – five weeks later 🙂
I’m not even kidding. You just can’t plan that far ahead with Vegas. One of the highest profile examples is at Planet Hollywood, where in April they were getting ready to unveil a new show featuring Mel B off of the Spice Girls. She came and did her turn, but she’ll be a distant memory by the time I arrive in town.
In other news, the impending demise and susbsequent reincarnation of the Excalibur Poker Room is definitely something I can get excited about. Only days after I left last summer, they ripped apart the live poker room, fired most of the dealers and replaced them with Pokertek electronic tables.
Now, just days before I arrive, they’re going to be putting the humans back.
This story was broken last weekend by All Vegas Poker, and I couldn’t be more pleased about it.
The Excalibur was about the closest thing I had to being my local cardroom. I use the term very loosely as I play a nomadic style of poker, often sitting in three or four different games in an evening. However, last summer it was the easiest place to get to from our rented house and a perfect place to begin a poker crawl on the Strip.
Even though the journey straight along Hacienda Ave drops you virtually inside Mandalay Bay, I preferred to swing down one of the back roads to the Excalibur’s garage, which was right by the doors nearest to the poker room. With loud enough music in the car, I could be there, parked and seated in less than ten minutes.
So I’d start at Excalibur, win a bit (of course – it’s impossible not to, isn’t it?) and move on. Going South there’s Luxor and Mandalay Bay – either via the tram or using the indoor moving walkways. Although, as so many people seem to think that the walkways are some kind of free ride (hold tight, this one goes up to 2mph) it’s often quicker to walk on the carpet instead.
Or you can head in the other direction. Sadly, the Tropicana no longer has poker which takes away one possible stop (although not one I made very often) but there’s always plenty of action at the MGM Grand, and if you want to move on from there it’s not too far to Monte Carlo or Planet Hollywood.
Whichever route I decided on, the Excalibur was a crucial hub of the entire operation. Taking it out of the picture makes dotting between games at that end of the Strip a much less attractive proposition. The trek from Luxor to MGM Grand is probably going to take you 20 minutes, even if you get the travelators all to yourself.
I have to confess I never actually played on the Pokertek tables. I walked past several times. I stopped, stared and kept trying to convince myself they were really not that bad. But even though they’d kept the “spin the wheel” promotion, which I love (it almost always pays $20 when you hit quads or better or have aces cracked, but there’s a bit of excitement, and the chance of $30 or more) I just wasn’t buying it.
Excalibur is actually the only place I’ve ever limped in with pocket aces in a super-loose $2/$4 limit game, and it’s because of the wheel factor. However, after 6 other players called and then one raised I had no reason to keep slowplaying. I didn’t get to spin the wheel, but I took down a pretty nice pot!
The best thing about playing at Excalibur, though, is the Krispy Kreme upstairs, serving donuts 24 hours a day. Because what I really need to help me wind down after an intense night of poker… is an extreme sugar rush.
This summer we’re staying in the same house as last year and the Excalibur’s triumpant return to live poker is extremely welcome.
I’m always delighted when a reader crawls out of the woodwork and says “hi”, even if it is to set me some maths homework. Kevin Stevens, author of the blog Flipyouforit (check out his brilliant Online Rounders parody) swelled my known audience last week to as many as five, and wrote:
I was wondering if I had a partner playing the HUP 4 man games on stars and we split the profit, would playing as a team give us any additional mathematical advantage?
Now I also know that at least two of my readers are maths teachers (that’s, what, 60% of them?) so I may be getting graded on this but here goes…
I’m assuming that you already feel you have an edge over the field, and therefore the question is whether a double entry will improve your edge, although it will also be interesting to see if this strategy affects a losing player or a break-even player.
Let’s say your probability of winning any given heads-up game is p (and therefore the probability of losing is 1-p). For simplicity, I’m assuming that both members of the team are equally skilled – or that one person is playing under two different accounts on two PCs.
The 4-man tournaments in question are two round, heads up shootouts with just one prize to be won. I’m going to assume a 10% entry fee on all buy-ins. So let’s say the buy-in amount is b, making the amount you pay to enter 1.1b and the prize pool 4b.
If you enter the tournament alone, your expected return is 4bp2 – the prize pool multiplied by the probability of winning both rounds.
We can use this value to find out what it takes to be a winning player. Your ER must be greater than the amount it costs to play, so with the 10% rake structure this is:
4bp2 > 1.1b
=> p2 > 1.1/4
=> p > 0.524
So to be a winner in this format, you have to win – on average – more than 52.4% of your games.
However, to be able to compare to the other strategy, which has several scenarios to consider, a more useful number to remember is the EV per dollar played, which is 4bp2/1.1b = 3.636p2
Let’s ignore the obvious ethical issues and say Bill and Ted are on the same team and Evil Bill and Evil Ted are your opponents on any given sit-and-go.
Statistically, the first round draw will throw up Bill vs Ted one-third of the time. When you’re playing against your partner, all that happens is you pay double to guarantee a seat in the final.
If you have an edge over the field, you’re losing out by not being able to play a meaningful game in this round. As one of the two players will always progress to the final, exactly 50% of your team will win. Therefore if you normally expect to win, say, 60% of heads-up encounters, this draw has reduced your variance but it’s also reduced your overall edge.
As you don’t need to play poker, you could spend the time studying the other two players which might give you some useful information to use in round two (or, if you think they are watching you, you could throw off some wonderful false information).
However, in terms of probabilities, your ER from the tournament when you draw your partner in round 1 is simply 4bp (prize pool multiplied by probablity of winning one round).
The other two-thirds of the time it wil be good vs evil in round 1, and this is where it gets interesting. One of three things can happen:
1. Good triumphs. Bill and Ted both win round 1 and you’re guaranteed to take all the money in the final.
Just like when you play each other in round 1, you’d rather be playing the final with an edge than splitting the money 50/50. However, when you’re both winning players you are each more likely to get to be in this situation than the evil robot dudes.
This part of your ER is 4bp2 (prize pool multiplied by probability both players of winning round one).
2. We only have one bodacious hero in the final. This part of your ER is 8bp2 – 8bp3.
Cubed probabilities, wtf? OK, let’s check it with Bully…
The probability of Bill winning and Ted losing in round 1 is p(1-p). We end up in the same situation if Ted wins and Bill loses so overall we’re looking at a probability of 2p(1-p) that we have just one hero in the final. When we get there the probability is p that we will win prize money of 4b.
Multiply it all together
2p(1-p) x p x 4b
=> 8bp2(1-p)
=> 8bp2 – 8bp3
I think.
3. Evil Bill and Ted both prevail and you’re boned.
This happens the rest of the time, and we win nothing so we don’t care.
Right so time to stick it all together.
Overall, your ER is
1/3(4bp) + 2/3(8bp2 – 8bp3)
Yuck. And don’t forget that this strategy costs 2.2b to play, so we need to divide by that to get the EV per dollar.
As we now have some expressions that are verging on the horrible (and, certainly, they’re horrible to type) it’s at this point I give up on the algebra and hand over to Mr Graph.
Excel hasn’t rendered the graph very smoothly, but you should get the idea. Unless you’re a particularly awful player, entering the tournament as a team reduces your overall edge. Not only that, but the better you are, the more dramatic the impact is.
For really large values of p, this stands to reason. If you could win every single game without fail, why would you ever play with a partner when you could scoop the prize money by paying just one buy-in instead of two.
However, what’s significant is that even if are an “average” player and win precisely half your games (p=0.5) you are better off going it alone than playing as a team.
It’s not that clear on the graph, but for low values of p, you’re slightly better off playing with a partner. It doesn’t turn you into a winner, but dollar-for-dollar you lose money a little less quickly. (You’ll spew more slowly with two entries in $5 tournament than you do with one entry in a $10).
You can just about see this if you zoom in really close.
The magic number – the likelihood of winning which is good enough that you’re better off not playing with a partner – is 0.25. If you win 25% of encounters, it makes no difference whether or not you play yourself in round one and win a quarter of the finals, or if you just roll the metaphorical dice and win a quarter of all your games.
Let’s be honest though – if you can’t win one heads up game in four on average, you’d be better off playing roulette than trying to cheat at poker.
EDIT: Already found one error with my graphs. The “magic number” should be 0.5 not 0.25, although this does not affect the conclusion that this is a bad strategy.
A trip to San Diego isn’t out of the question this summer. It might just happen!
Mmmmm. Mexican bread.
I wasn’t aware of this until I just noticed this blog post announcing today is the last day for pre-orders of a new poker book by Ed Miller called “Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em”.
Immediately all the right ingredients seem to be there for this to be a great title. There’s no doubt that Miller is an excellent writer and seeing his name on a book makes me pay attention.
In particular, “Small Stakes Hold’em” is the definitive text on loose fixed-limit poker games and his contribution to “No Limit Hold’em Theory and Practice”, co-authored with David Sklansky, is no doubt the reason that this is the only Sklansky book that I’ve read that didn’t feel like a chore.
So with all this potential, I clicked through to learn more.
It turns out this title is a self-published e-book.
I’m familiar with the format. Usually it’s used to distribute manuals that tell you how to make a fortune buying televisions on eBay for a couple of quid, or how to earn thousands of dollars every week for filling in surveys. The same way the author does, who generously chooses to share his secret with anyone who has a credit card.
Personally I love the irony of the ones that tell you how to make a career out of selling ebooks.
Miller explains this unusual decision by saying: “E-books are the new wave in poker training”.
I was not aware of this. However a quick Google search did throw up such gems as an online poker “algorithm tracker” that can have a decent guess at what’s going to be dealt next, or an unashamed “cheating system” which claims to show you other players’ hole cards. Both these notions, of course, are preposterous.
So if this product is genuine – and I highly doubt that self-proclaimed Noted Poker Authority Ed Miller would put his name to a scam – what’s so good about making it an e-book?
Does having to read it on-screen on your computer, rather than at your convenience on a train, in bed or on the toilet make the material somehow superior?
I guess you could read it while playing online poker without having to move your head to look between the screen and a book. That’s marginally +eCalories, but those small edges do all add up.
Here’s the kicker though. The book’s tag line is “The affordable poker book”.
Because all those $20-$30 books out there are just a pipedream for anyone who doesn’t already play for nosebleed stakes.
So how much is this one? It’s $39.95.
If you pre-order today.
If you wait until tomorrow, the price will be $99.95.
As I’ve been told that my potty mouth often causes this blog to get blocked when people are reading it at work, I won’t repeat my first reaction – but you can take a pretty good guess.
It really does say $99.95. As if $39.95 wasn’t already taking the wee wee for a book that you have to print yourself if you want to read it on the tube.
Miller’s prevous books, published by Two Plus Two with all the overheads that come with producing and distributing products made out of dead trees, are priced between $24.95 and $29.95. Even the cash cow Harrington on Cash Games only weighs in at $69.90 for both halves of the book.
The Internet has been responsible for helping to drive down the cost of all kinds of stuff. If you can sell it online, it’s cheaper than having a shop. If you can distribute it electronically, it’s cheaper than sticking it in the mail. As a result, those savings are usually passed on to consumers. There are very few exceptions.
I have issues with the price of music at iTunes compared to the cost of CDs, but at least it’s no more expensive and you’re not committed to buying a full album if you only want a few songs. It’s really only Ticketmaster that has such flagrant disrespect for its customers that it charges you a “convenience fee” when they have a monopoly on an event, and then charges you again for the privilege of printing your own tickets.
(Obligatory Ticketbastard rant: I just bought two $15 tickets for The Donnas in Las Vegas next month – yes, really, they rock and you know they do – and the total was $48.50. That’s more than the cost of an extra ticket in fees!).
And then there’s this book.
Miller also doesn’t mention whether Two Plus Two wanted to publish this book. Surely if they did but he’d made the decision to do it independently, this in itself would be a great testamonial to the quality of the work. When you’ve had 150,000 units shipped through this channel in the past, it’s a big leap of faith to go it alone.
If they didn’t want it, why not? And what – apart from the fact that you’ll only have to sell a few dozen copies to make the same amount of money as you would from the royalties from thousands of printed books – makes it worth nearly a hundred dollars?
Unfortunately, I can’t feel anything other than cynicism towards this book’s launch and, regrettably, I will be looking for a free copy on thepokerbay tomorrow.
If I can find it, I’ll send Ed Miller $20 and a link to this post.
EDIT: Publisher Mason Malmuth comments on the price compared what it would have been through 2+2 here:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=10550513&postcount=18
What better way to start the weekend than with a batch of casino mail to wade through?
I know some of the stuff is a couple of weeks out of date by the time it arrives but having a big parcel of offers forwarded from a mailbox whenever it fills up is surely more exciting than just having odd flyers arrive every few days.
It’s still a little early to be getting offers I can use when it’s 5 weeks until my trip begins, but there’s starting to be some that will be useful.
Claire and I both got letters for a summer-long offer at Harrah’s Laughlin. Hers said:
However mine was considerably better:
Free nights in Laughlin aren’t hard to come by (Claire’s “calendar rates” on the back of the letter show free for almost any weeknight). But cold, hard cash and free food just for turning up is always very nice.
Actually the $50 food credit is not quite what it seems as it’s a one-time use coupon – even though it comes with a three-night stay. So if you just use if for a buffet for two, you blow about $30 of value. Then again, you’re not going to feed two people at the Range Steakhouse for $50 (here’s the menu).
Still, it’s worth the drive just for this, and we’re likely to get other Laughlin offers too. Today’s mail contained June offers for River Palms (2 free nights and $5 free play) and Colorado Belle (2 x 3 free nights and $10 free play).
Back in Las Vegas there’s still some deals. This time Claire had the upper hand at Gold Coast with this:
Compared to my measly offer:
To be honest I can’t complain at this as I haven’t played at Gold Coast on my card at all recently, whereas we still have about $600 of unused comp on Claire’s card after caning the Super Times Pay machines (99.8% payback) on a 6x points day (1% added value).
Chances are we’ll be booking Claire’s offer but not using the room, just to get the $20 free play and at least one free meal at Ping Pang Pong.
The other Boyd properties had a little something to give too. Claire got another good offer from Sam’s Town:
In fact, make that two offers. This mailer had the same coupons twice, once for July and once for August. However, it’s not clear whether the free food is for one person or two. Usually it’s two, but that information is notably absent from these coupons.
Whereas I got a freebie from the Fremont, which isn’t bad when the only action they’ve ever had from us was one session on Pick’em Poker:
As the food credit is listed as “$20 in FREE dining certificates” – plural – I suspect it will be a couple of dollars here and $5 there. If I could be sure there’d be something for Dunkin’ Donuts I’d be all over this one, but I just don’t feel it. So as we don’t need the room, I think we’ll pass on this one and hope it comes again when it’s actually worthwhile staying there.
The final one was a bit of a surprise. Green Valley Ranch apparently wants me to come and stay for free:
I can’t remember the last time we went to GVR. It must have been for a promotion of some kind, maybe a blackjack matchplay or some kind of swipe-and-win. I remember being there, and vaguely recognising some of the places from American Casino, but I know that of all the Station Casinos this one is probably the one we’ve played at least.
Not sure if I’ll use this. As absolutely-not-VIPs at a hotel that thinks it’s something special, there must be a catch. My guess is that they would still want to charge Station’s usual “resort fee” stealth tax on this comped stay. How much? Only $24.99 per night (see the very bottom of this page). Probably not worth it just to use the pool…
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