Review of The Las Vegas Advisor Guide to Slot Clubs

Title:

The Las Vegas Advisor Guide to Slot Clubs

Author:

Jeffrey Compton

Publisher:

Huntington Press

Date:

1995

ISBN:

0-929712-75-7

Pages:

118

Price:

$9.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

February 25, 1998

Casinos have always been willing to give out "complimentaries", or comps, like free meals, free or reduced rate rooms, show tickets, perhaps even free airfare, to those gamblers that provide a lot of action for the casino. In the last couple of years, the casinos have become more sophisticated in the way they track the play of their customers and give these rewards. For the players of video poker and slot machines, most casinos track this play using their slot clubs. In this book, Jeffrey Compton tells us how this works and how to take advantage of it.

Slot club members at most casinos are given a card with a magnetic strip on it (like a credit card) that they insert into the machines they're playing. It records via one of several possible formulae how much the casino figures to have made off of a customer during any playing duration. The casino is willing to give back some percentage, typically about 40%, of this expected win in comps. If one plays smart, one can get back more than this. In fact, a really savvy person can turn this into a positive expectation situation. This book explains how this works.

The book starts off by explaining what slot clubs are, what are the various ways casinos might track play, and how they work. The reader is then told how one goes about signing up and how one accumulates "points" toward comps. These chapters are fairly simple and clearly written. Nothing here will come as any surprise to a casino veteran, but for the uninitiated, this is valuable information.

The author then talks about game selection. While the author indicates that playing video poker on high payback machines is the best bet, I think this could have been stated even more strongly. I believe it's still possible that someone not carefully reading this book could believe that by playing slots under a slot club one might be able to get a positive expectation situation, but this is not the case. One can only expect to make money by playing the very best video poker machines nearly perfectly, even with a generous slot club. The best anyone else can hope for is to offset their losses, but using a slot club to do this is much better than not.

Next, the author talks about the benefits of these clubs and discusses the question, "Which is the best slot club?" He then goes on to rate the slot clubs in Las Vegas on several criteria and finishes with some brief notes on slot clubs in other parts of southern Nevada. The biggest problem with this is that the casinos can tend to change the details of their slot clubs fairly frequently, so this information becomes less accurate as time passes from the publication of the book. Nonetheless, casinos tend to continue to cater to the same demographics, so while the details of the slot club may change, the type of customer and, therefore, the focus of the slot club is less likely to, which means that this information is like to retain much of its value.

The information in this book is aimed at an introductory level. There won't be any major shockers for folks familiar with the slot clubs. Nonetheless, if one doesn't understand them at all or spends a lot of time in front of the machines, this book is probably worth its modest price. The book also (wisely) doesn't try to incorporate information on how to play video poker games for maximum expectation, but instead refers to other good books on the subject.

Capsule:

This book introduces the reader to the concept of slot clubs, explains how best to take advantage of them, and what various slot clubs were like at the time of the book's publication. Folks who understand slot clubs fairly well and don't spend a lot of their time in casino country, or those folks who don't play the machines probably won't get a lot out of this book. However, for those who play the machines and to whom slot clubs are a mystery, this book could be of considerable benefit.