Getting comps

3 April 2018

By Frank Scoblete

In the next few issues, I will give you excerpts from my book “Casino Conquest.” These will give you the full ins and outs of the casino comping system. Here goes:

By now, everyone going to casinos will know something about comps. Table game players dutifully hand in their cards to the floorperson, who either swipes them in the computer or records the names on a piece of paper, and when these players are finished with their play they either ask that floorperson or pit boss for a comp or wait until their trip is over to see what the casino can do for them.

In slot machines, it is even easier. Just put your card in the machine, and when you want a comp, you go to the players’ club and see what they will give you – or, as the casino says, “What you have earned.” Naturally “what you have earned” is based on how the casinos see your potential losses. Ah, yes, in casinos, you get by giving!

Casinos have elaborate comping formulas, and while all casinos are a little or a lot different in their formulas, everyone gets what he or she deserves based on each casino’s particular analysis of the customer’s playing worth.

Getting what you deserve
Before you are deserving of entering the world of the undeserving, you must first understand what kind of general formula the casinos use to rate your play. By way of cliché, you must first learn to walk before you can run. So let me walk you through the composite of what comping formulas most casinos will use to judge your play at this or that game.

Here’s the general formula: average bet times the number of decisions per hour times number of hours you play times house edge equals your theoretical loss times whatever percent of your theoretical loss the casinos will give back which (finally, thank God!) equals how much the casino will give you in comps.

Simple?

I’ll plug in some numbers to see how this works . . .

Let’s say your game is blackjack. You play $25 per hand, because you’ve decided that the heart operation you need can be delayed. Most casinos figure you to play between 60-80 hands per hour at blackjack, so let’s say 70 hands (or decisions) per hour for you. So you play $25 a hand for 70 hands; that’s $1750 per hour that you wager. Now, let us say you play for four hours, the usual time casinos like for players to get a full range of comps (that translates into half a work day), so that brings your day’s wagers to $7,000.

Most casinos will rate blackjack players as playing against a house edge of between one and two percent. So let’s split the difference and say that the casino you’re playing in figures you to lose at a rate of 1.5% of all your action.

So your theoretical loss is established by taking the $7,000 you wagered and multiplying it by 0.015 (which is 1.5%) which equals a theoretical loss of $105 per four hours. A theoretical loss is not an actual loss; you could win a session, lose a session; win a lot or lose a lot more.

Over time, your theoretical loss will be close to your actual loss, but for the casino this is neither here nor there. With the millions of decisions the casinos have each day they have usually banked the theoretical loss for all the players, as if all the players were one monstrous entity – a player gestalt, if you will.

Visit Frank’s website at www.frankscoblete.com. Frank Scoblete’s latest books are I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps, Confessions of a Wayward Catholic and I Am a Card Counter: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Blackjack. Available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.