Winning Your Way to Comps Online

Oh brave new world of the Internet, where you can earn real casino comps by playing virtual games online. You may have heard of myVegas, where you can play slots on Facebook and earn real comps at the MLife family of casinos (MGM Grand, Mirage, Excalibur, Luxor and the like).

The Stratosphere has its own online poker site, ace|Play Poker (named for its players' club) where you can win seats in their live poker tournaments, show tickets, merchandise, and all kinds of stuff in general, including buy-ins to other tournaments. I very nearly won a free seat to the Heartland Poker Tour in Black Hawk, Colorado, when I went heads-up in an online freeroll (my set of Queens lost to a set of Queens with a better kicker; still not over it, sigh). Tonight I managed to make it as far as fourth place trying to win one of those live tournament seats (lucky stiff called my all-in with King-Queen on a dry flop against my Ace-Queen then turned a King...sigh), then took a shot at a second tournament where the prize was a pair of tickets to any of the Strat's shows. And what do you know, after taking an early chip lead, which I lost briefly along with two-thirds of my chip stack, I managed to recoup and take down the whole thing. Claire Sinclair, here I come, eh?