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Gaming Guru
What bothers you in a casino?2 May 2013
Others have different priorities. Some complaints pop up over and over again, as Steve Bourie found when surveying player comments at his website, americancasinoguide.com. Bourie publishes the annual American Casino Guide, available through his site, with listings of all American casinos, playing tips from experts and coupons for casino discounts. Bourie sent along a top five list of players’ pet peeves, culled from his site. 5. Too smoky. Casinos need better ventilation to help players avoid smelling like an ashtray after they leave. 4. Long lines, whether at the players club or the buffet. 3. Lack of slot attendants. Now that payoffs are made by tickets instead of coins, there are fewer attendants or change girls roaming the aisles. If there's a machine malfunction, the wait for an attendant can be endless. 2. Poor direct-mail offers -- If a casino wants a player to fly in, or drive hours to get to them, do they really think $5 in free play is going to do it? 1. Tight machines. Players know the machines are going to best them in the long run, but they want to at least have some fun for a while, rather than being drained quickly. That’s a good list, one that matches pretty closely the complaints I get from readers via e-mail. Complaints about tight slots are eternal, a gripe I’ve been hearing for 20 years. Overall, slots do have lower payback percentages than they once did, because the bulk of play has shifted into lower denominations. Players who a decade ago would have been betting 75 cents a spin and getting 91 to 94 percent back now are betting similar amounts on penny games and getting 85 to 89 percent returns. There are compensations in entertainment value, but players should understand the price. I’ve come to regard direct-mail offers as bonuses. I save the offers I receive until expiration, and use them if I make a trip. Unless the offer is unusually good, the mail doesn’t drive my play. The lack of slot attendants is alleviated in part by technology. With payoffs by tickets, we don’t have hopper jams or the need for hopper fills. We also don’t have as many hand pays. A royal flush for $1,000 used to bring an attendant, supervisor and sometimes a security guard to oversee a payoff. Now the grand is just added to the credit meter. There’s no need for hand-pays unless the jackpot reaches the IRS reporting threshold of $1,200. Some readers have told me they miss the hand pays, with the little ceremony and celebration time that comes with a big-but-not-too-big jackpot. I’ve come to prefer the modern way. My stomach still does a little flip when I see the “4,000” display for credits won on the hand, but I no longer have to wait 5, 10, 15 minutes for an attendant to come check my machine, then go back to get cash and witnesses before handing me my money and unlocking the machine so I can resume play. Sometimes it’s impossible to avoid long lines at the players' club booth. The buffet is another matter. If I’m planning on going to the buffet, I try to time it so I’m either before or after the crush. I don’t aim for a noon lunch. I aim for 10:30 or 2. At some buffets, there’s an added benefit to going early: You might get a lower price for breakfast, and be there for the changeover when the lunch foods are put out. One place where lines actually have thinned is at the cashier’s cage. That’s because slot players are getting used to going to kiosks to redeem their payoff tickets for cash. It’s a much faster process than the old days of taking buckets of coins either to the cashier or to a change booth, then having the coins run through a counter before payoff. And without slot players in line for card counting, the cage is freed to redeem chips for table players and to handle check-cashing and other transactions. As for smokiness, that’s hit and miss. Revel in Atlantic City has been smoke-free and others have no-smoking floors, but Revel plans to allow smoking as it exits bankruptcy this spring. Illinois, Delaware and Colorado have casinos are smoke free, and Pennsylvania has no-smoking floors in all casinos. But the industry giant, Nevada, is not smoke-free, and neither are more than 30 casinos in Mississippi. Smoke-free is my preference, but hey, if the joint has full-pay Deuces Wild and good blackjack rules, I’ll put up with the chimney. Look for John Grochowski on Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/7lzdt44) and Twitter (@GrochowskiJ). This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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