Player card advice boilerplate

Quote:

I'd sign up wherever you play and use your card.

As a generalization this is good advice, but don't take it to an extreme. Here is why you should not just sign up at every place you pass or play a few dollars.
Sign up only where your play is concentrated. Some freeplay offers will come sometimes just because you are a newbie, so save some of the places to gamble on a later Vegas visit, and appear as a newbie to them at that later time.
How many free nights can you use for your next trip?
$100 a day pushed hard at only one place with get you offers. Pick a place or two and concentrate your play there. Don't then go there another day and just play a few dollars. That will decrease your daily average. You want to look to the casino like you would play and lose $100 each day. Even one day at some places will get you offers.
One technique is to take two days bankroll and gamble it in one day. Skip the first day, go to Red Rock or do shows or take a long sight seeing walk. Then the second day push your $200. Now you look like a higher roller. When you get your card ask what is a "day" in their records. Some casinos have days that start after midnight, others have days that start after 2 am. This is important. If a new day starts after midnight, cash out before that time so that your daily amount put at risk is the amount you gambled the first day, say $1000, not what you gambled for two days, say $1000 and $60 divided by 2 and so $530. For that extra half hour into the second day, in this example the gambler looks like half as hard a player.

If you really want to get offers, get off the strip and play at some of the smaller places: Try Orleans, Gold Coast. They are more likely to come back with some offers for free rooms. The gambling is generally better too.
Even if they don't, just holding a card and signing in to the Boyd website will get you some under $30 a night prices for weekday rooms most of the time, and it may well get you a couple free nights offered right on that website.

Or try downtown. Places like El Cortez, 4 Queens will come back at you with some 2 night offers for your next trip. Even Main Street Station might.
Again, pick one or two and save the rest for next time.
In your whole life you will only be a newbie once at each place or each system. Play at the Gold Coast for example and you are in a card system that includes the Orleans and Main street Stations and Sam's Town. That is not a bad thing, but know which casinos are attached to which card systems.
If you get a card everywhere and play a little everywhere, then you might get so many two night newbie freebies that you can't use them all, or more likely you will not look like much of a gambler and not get anything much. You will have lost your newbieness for no gain at all.

Seed a couple casinos where you might like to stay with concentrated play.

the other thing is that as they give you free nights over a few stays and you keep gambling just a little or your $100 one time goes down the drain too quickly for you to run much money through the machine, then the same casino that gave you as a newbie a freebie two night stay will stop sending them.
So, let's say you got a free night offer at the Orleans after your first visit. Then you went and used that but did not gamble much money there. But on the second visit you seeded yourself as a newbie with the El Cortez and there your daily bankroll held up a long, long time. Now the Orleans cuts you off, but the El Cortez has an interest in this newbie gambler, so they send you two nights or some promo deal.

Consider too how much you might go to Vegas. I made the huge mistake of signing up everywhere about ten years before retirement. I did not have the job flexibility to go when the free offers came. Then I retired and had the flexibility, but I could not present myself as a newbie. Having been too promiscuous on my first trip, my gambling virginities had been sold for nothing.

Finally, there are periodically sign up offers for newbies. Sometimes they are absolutely amazing. One of the best is that the casino offers to let you gamble $100 and lose it, and will then give it back to you in freeplay. However, most of these are just for newbies. So if you waste your newbie status for no sign-up bonus, then on some future trip, when you could sell it for $100, well......... you are used goods