Oops! I Did It Again

This Saturday afternoon, I posted my best score yet at the Riviera free slot tournament, over 20,000 points. When I checked the winning scores Saturday night, I discovered that yet again, I had finished in 10th place for the second time this week. In this case that won me $75 in free slot play. Even though I picked what was evidently not the loosest Deuces Wild machine I'd ever played, I was still able to transform that into $49.75 in cold, hard cash. Which reminds me, I could probably pay for Britney tickets now. I'm telling ya, folks: Free slot tournaments. They're just giving the stuff away. (Saturdays, 1 p.m.-5 p.m., at the Riviera.)

Mo' Money Fo' Nothin'!

As faithful readers will no doubt recall, I got myself all excited last week over winning $25 in a free slot tournament over at Palace Station, so I decided hitting the free slot tournament trail was probably a good idea.

Today I dropped by South Point after work to hit their Senior Slot Tournament. Your score doesn't even get recorded unless you can break 2,000 which I rarely pull off, so I was feeling a little hopeful when I managed to come in just shy of 3,500 points. The staffer who took my score suggested I come back after 6 p.m. to see if I made it into the money. "Usually the low score is around 6,000," she said, "but it's been really slow today."

It seems Dennis Bono, whose free afternoon talk show packs them in on Thursday afternoons, canceled this week's taping due to Mother's Day commitments or some such. Well, Dennis must be a hell of a draw, because when I stopped by South Point again hoping that maybe I'd limped into the money and scored fifty bucks, it turned out I'd made 10th place and pocketed $200 in cold, hard cash.

Just goes to show: Don't pass up these free chances to make real money. You never know when circumstances will conspire to throw the odds in your favor. I'm still a little in shock over what I can only view as a kind of freak accident, but God Bless You, Mr. Bono.

Heck, I'd already been excited about my day after winning a quarter at South Point's video poker and finding 11 cents in change people had dropped next to the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.

Tipapalooza! (Afterbirthday Edition)

Off-Strip: I popped into the BJ's Cocktail Lounge on Decatur (just a bit north of Blue Diamond) after their sign told me they had a 20,000-point sign-up bonus for new members. Turns out that's worth $20.00 of free play on your next visit! (Or when the boss drops by to log your points, whichever comes first.) I played 10-cent video poker and cashed out nearly double that amount! If the bartender in the little referee outfit isn't enough to tempt you into coming  back, they also advertise $20 free play on Tuesdays; lose that much through the machine and they'll put another $20 back onto it.

Freebie Alert! Whip out your CVS Extra Care card (and if you don't have one, go down to your local CVS and sign up for one), take it to a CVS, scan it at their coupon kiosk, and get a coupon for a free roll of Just The Basics paper towels, a 79-cent value. Scanning your card gets you different coupons each week. CVS is pretty good with the deals and freebies, sometimes with their Rewards for cash off on your next purchase, you can get stuff essentially for free, like those jelly beans I picked up for the office the other week.

Free Eats Update! Remember that coupon for the free buffet or $10 off at the cafe at the Silver Sevens? The one that was in last week's edition of Vegas2Go? Well, the new edition is out (the one with the black cover) and the same coupon is in there again, so if you couldn't find any copies of the last issue, go scarf up an armload or several of this one. As you will note from the sign, you can get a half-rack of ribs and a dozen wings for $7.77 at the cafe, 24/7. Did I mention the coupon is good for a $10 food credit at the cafe?


Keep Watching The Ground: As a reminder that we should always keep our eyes peeled, I put in a lot of legwork this weekend finding out which casinos on or near the strip give away something for your birthday. It will save me a lot of time next year, as only a few do. I'm glad I visited them all, though, because outside of one, I found a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. Not a bad way to wrap up a birthday.

Money for Nothin'

If you want to experience the thrill of competitive gambling and you're on a budget...or, let's face it, you're flat broke...you can always take advantage of the free slot and video poker tournaments around town. In fact, if you're 50 or older, you've hit the jackpot! Well, only figuratively, but hey, it could happen. Here are some of the opportunities around town:

Saturdays: From 1-5 p.m. The Riviera has its weekly free slot tournament with free slot play for the top 20 finishers.

Tuesdays: Fiesta Station has a free $1,000 slot tournament for members 50 and older. Silverton has a free $10,000 slot tournament and with your Rewards card the first entry is free; as with most of these, you can earn additional entries by getting points on your player's card.

Wednesdays: Station Casinos have a free $3,000 slot tournament for players 50 and older.

Thursdays: South Point has a free $1,500 slot tournament for players 50 and older.

Keep your eyes peeled for other free tournaments too. Silver Sevens winds up its $35,000 Lucky Leprechaun slot tournament on March 22; gold and platinum A-Play cardholders get one free entry. The Stratosphere can often be counted on to have three-day free slot tournaments during holidays and special events, too. And you coupon clippers: THE SUNDAY has had coupons for free entries into the Gold Coast and Sam's Town free video poker tournaments in every one of its weekly issues so far.

Off-Strip: Sam's Town

Sam's Town, one of the joints so beloved of the locals along Boulder Highway, has as its lush centerpiece the Mystic Falls Park, a peaceful sylvan glade of a place underneath a huge atrium, which starting at 2 p.m. becomes host to a laser light and water spectacular at regular intervals. Like several other casinos in the B-Connected players club, it includes a movieplex and  bowling alley. Table minimums are low, there's 20x odds at the $3 craps table, and the poker room has at least  three tournaments a day with entry fees as low as $23. If you're 50 or over, on Wednesdays this month you get to swipe at the kiosk to get your points multiplied as much as 50 times; 10 points earn you a $4 movie voucher or a 2-for-1 buffet, or 50 points gets you a free buffet. For the rest of us, 600 points gets you a free movie ticket, Buffalo slots have 20x points on Mondays, and all slots have 4x points on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. Hankering for some old-fashioned entertainment? On April 5, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra swings in for an evening of dining and dancing.

Winning At Video Poker Made Easy

The Sunday is carrying a nice raft of coupons in its back pages, including match plays and other goodies to help you come out ahead at casinos around town. Of these, the most lucrative with the least risk are the coupons from the Gold Coast and The Orleans offering you $10 in slot play if you put $10 through one of their machines. While not quite the sure thing that free slot play is, it's nearly as good a deal. When I play Deuces Wild on one of their nickel video poker machines at 25 cents a hand, I might not make all of my money back when I play $10...but I'm almost certainly going to keep more than $10 if I play $20 through. How it works: You take your coupon up to the B-Connected desk, give them your ID and your player's card, and they make the Play $10 Get $10 active on your card. As soon as you've played $10 through your machine (I get out a pen and paper and keep track of exactly how many hands I've played at, say, 25-cents per, which means after 40 hands I'm done), remove your card, re-insert it, press the "Slot Play" button and you'll be able to download the $10 in free play to your machine. How well you do depends greatly on how much you manage to keep of your first $10. On one trip I only kept $6.25 of my ten bucks, so I only came out about $3 ahead at the Orleans...but I moved on the Gold Coast, used the same coupon, and came out $8 ahead, so I better than doubled my money for the trip. This week, at The Orleans, I actually managed to come out ahead on my $10 thanks to a straight flush with deuces, and so came out $9 ahead for the one session.

The Gold Coast and Orleans are also putting free entries into their video poker tournaments into The Sunday, and you'd be a fool to pass these up: While not nearly as sure a thing, they're a free chance at winning some money!

The Gambler's Mecca

The Gamblers Book Club has moved to several locations in its long, storied and peripatetic career. When I finally made my first pilgrimage, it was residing in a small storefront on Eastern south of Tropicana, and I found myself in book collector heaven. Shelves and shelves of books, which despite repeated visits I've never managed to note down every title so I can add them to my to-be-read list. They'd frequently be visited by authors like Nicolas Pileggi and David Schwartz, some of whom were dropping by to be interviewed for their regular podcast. And aside from classic titles like Ovid Demaris's Green Felt Jungle and Doyle Brunson's How I Made A Million Dollars Playing Poker (the original title of his Super System), and all the latest titles on everything from Backgammon to the Mob, they had collectibles! Remnants of vanished casinos, like an El Rancho ashtray or, my personal favorite, bars of soap from the Stardust!

Gamblers Book Club has finally relocated to its old downtown stomping grounds, moving in with the Gamblers General Store at 800 block S. Main. (A clerk at the General Store told me the Book Club had bought them out.) Now more than ever, this is the one place anyone who's serious about studying their game, or anyone who's serious about collecting gaming paraphernalia, has to visit. The General Store was always a cool place, a veritable museum of ephemera like old slot machines and gaming tables, except that if you raked in enough chips at the casinos, you could actually buy them. Want an old Hooters blackjack table with a "Big Pair" bonus? Check. Your friends want to humiliate you into buying a deck of Hannah Montana playing cards? Check. Got twenty grand to blow on an old fruit machine? Check. 

My advice? Go early and often. Show up on the weekend for a 10% discount. Don't forget, the American Casino Guide has a discount coupon as well!

No Plans for Valentine's Day?

Well, like Tom Petty says, "Even the losers get lucky sometimes." The Stratosphere is holding a free Cupid's Cash Slot Tournament this weekend, Friday the 14th through Sunday the 16th. All player's card members get one free entry per day, and you can get up to two additional entries per day for each 150 base slot points you earn that day. The top ten get cash and a free stay at the Strat, with 1st place taking down $700 and three nights. If that's not enough action for you, you can still get in on the Riviera's free slot tournament, every Saturday between 1 and 5 p.m., where the top 20 can win between $50 and $1,000 in free slot play. With prizes like that you can afford to drown your sorrows at your favorite watering hole, or if you're a guy alone on Valentine's Day, perhaps at an entertainment venue populated by women of limited sartorial means.

Best Bets at Blackjack (Surprisingly)

One of our favorite blackjack games is at the good old Riviera...a $5 shoe game with decent rules and 3:2 on blackjack. The trick as for all these places is to start your day there, early enough in the morning that you can get a seat while all the tables aren't packed, especially if, like us, you believe that the fewer the players at the table, the better. Oh, they also have $1 blackjack, if you can ever find a seat, and don't mind being dealt out of a continuous-shuffle machine, you basic-strategy-player, you. (Right across the street, Circus Circus has some decent tables too, and just like at the Riv, every six months you can buy $40 worth of promo chips for $30, reducing the casino's edge that much further. Just get there before it gets even more crowded than across the street.)

"Las Vegas has the biggest Hooters I've ever seen," my poker buddy Brian is fond of saying. True, the cocktail servers here look as if they all have the same surgeon's number in their rolodex, but if you can ignore the distractions, we found to our surprise that they have one of the best single-deck games in town, and if you get there early enough in the day, for as low as $5 minium. They also use a notched shoe for their multideck games, guaranteeing you the same good penetration every time.

The Longhorn is a little dive on Boulder, pretty much right across from Sam's Town, that we've grown to love for several reasons, not the least of which is the most generous set of blackjack rules in town: surrender, double down on your 2nd or 3rd card, doubling on splits, etc. (Eat your heart out, Las Vegas Club.) They have $2 and $5 minimum tables, but playing $5 minimum gets you a $5 bonus if you get a blackjack in diamonds. You earn comped meals in their restaurant pretty fast, and generously tipping your dealer may well get you additional comps as well; I'm just sayin'. Brian, who likes playing the side bets, especially likes this place because he hit the Queens of hearts on the Lucky Ladies for $125. One night they let all the pit players spin the wheel for a prize and Brian won a jacket, the lucky stiff. I had to settle for free slot play. Oh, and when you sign up as a new member, they give you a cookie. Throw in cookin' lounge acts on a tiny stage and what's not to like?

Elsewhere around town: The venerable El Cortez brags that they have 3:2 blackjacks on all their tables, and that goes for single-deck as well. The Rio is not exactly known for their low minimums or decent table game odds, yet surprisingly, they have $5 minimum single-deck when you can find it. Ellis Island and Tuscany, near each other off Flamingo east of the Strip, both offer surrender, a boon to my buddy Brian or, as we all call him, "the 15 magnet." Silverton, south of the south end of the Strip, has so much to recommend it, their $5 minimum blackjack is just gravy. Rampart, attached to the J.W. Marriott Resort off of West Charleston, is a good place to eat considering that playing at their $5 minimum tables can quickly earn you comps to their buffet. Finally, the Stratosphere also uses a notched shoe for their multideck games, and it guarantees every deal has the deepest penetration you'll see in town, even if you have to play at least $10 minimum to get better than 6:5 on your blackjacks.