Why Video Poker Players Should Care About Loyalty Programs

Slot clubs are casinos’ versions of customer loyalty programs. They’re also sometimes just called players’ clubs. These clubs reward gamblers with free stuff, and this free stuff can be in the form of cash rebates, free play, restaurant meals, hotel rooms, or entertainment tickets.

The rewards are determined by a formula which differs by casino. Slot machine players, for example, might earn points faster than video poker players because the casino knows that the house edge for slot machines is higher than the house edge for video poker.

It can be tricky finding anyone at the casino who understands the finer points of the math behind these programs.

But if you want to succeed at video poker, you’ll have to learn how to tell the good loyalty programs from the bad ones. Then, you must understand why it’s important to choose a good players club as a video poker player.

How Cashback Works With a Players Club

Cashback is possibly the most important feature of a players club, at least for video poker gamblers. Here’s an example of how cashback works:

Let’s say you’ve found a slots club that pays 0.5% cashback. For every $4 you put through a video poker game, you get 2 cents back.

That’s simple enough, right?

But casinos don’t usually express it that simply.

They might, for example, tell you that every $20 of your play amounts to a point, and 100 points is worth $10 in cashback.

Another casino might express their cashback and players club policies differently, too. They might say that for every $50 in play, you get 100 points, and you can trade your 100 points in for $50 cashback.

These aren’t necessarily equal either. You’ll need to learn how to do some math to get the actual expected value of the cashback so you can add it to the expected return for the game.

What Cashback Is Worth in Practical Terms

Let’s say you belong to a players club that pays back 1% in cashback. This means that a full pay Jacks or Better game has a 99.54% payback percentage, but you can add 1% to that for an effective 100.54% payback percentage.

This means you have an edge over the casino, but it only works if you play the game perfectly.

What’s that worth in dollars and cents?

Let’s assume you’re a reasonably fast player and get in 500 hands per hour on a quarter machine. This means you’re putting $1.25 into action per hand, or $625 per hour.

Your edge over the casino is 0.54%, so you multiply that by $625 to get your expected average winnings per hour. 0.54% X $625 is the equivalent of $3.38 per hour.

But if you played the same game in a dollar version, you’d get to multiply your hourly action by 4, so you’d be putting $2500 into action per hour instead.

And your average winnings per hour would jump to $13.50 per hour.

The money doesn’t start getting good until you find the $5 per hand machines where you’re earning an average of $67.50 per hour.

Also, playing faster increases your earning rate per hour, but only if you can play faster without making strategy mistakes.

How Do Casino Promotions Play Into All of This?

Most casinos offer promotions where you can earn double or triple points. These promotions often involve playing during specific hours at the casino. If you’re earning double points in the scenario in my last bullet point, you’re increasing your earnings per hour to as much as $135/hour. Triple points means you’re earning $203/hour.

But those aren’t the only promotions available at casinos either. Some casinos might offer double payouts for specific hands. For example, a casino might offer a bigger payout for a four of a kind of a specific ranking. Or you might get a double payout on a royal flush if you hit that royal inside the same 24-hour period as a previous royal flush.

Casinos often enjoy holding drawings. The value of the tickets to a drawing are based on the number of tickets and the amount of money (or the value of the prize) in the drawing.

For example, if the casino is awarding 10,000 tickets for a drawing for $1,000, each ticket is worth $1,000 divided by 10,000 tickets, or 10 cents each.

If you can evaluate what these promotions are worth, you’ll get way ahead of other video poker gamblers.

More Details About Players Clubs for Beginners

Giving out comps is nothing new for casinos. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Comps include free meals, free rooms, and show tickets. Sometimes, these comps just represent discounts on these items, too. About 25 years ago, casinos started getting more granular in terms of how they award these comps.

It’s no longer the judgment of the casino hosts and pit bosses that determine who gets comps and for how much. Now, modern casinos use their slots clubs to determine who gets comps and how much those comps are worth.

When you join the players club at a casino, you get a card to insert into a gambling machine while you play. The magnetic strip on this case records how much action you’re putting through the machine.

As I pointed out previously, the amounts of the rewards you get back vary from casino to casino, but the average seems to be between 0.2% and 0.5%. Getting more than this is possible, and doing so can enable you to gamble with an edge over the casino.

The Best Way to Take Advantage of Players Clubs

I might have already made this clear, but in case I didn’t, the best way to take advantage of players clubs is to play video poker.

But don’t just play any video poker games. Stick with the games with payback percentages that are high enough to make it worth your while. Don’t play slot machines, ever. The payback percentage is never high enough on a slot machine to make such a game profitable even in conjunction with your players club rewards.

For most gamblers, you can offset most of your losses and break even because of the paybacks. Most average gamblers can’t get an edge over the casino, although some professional gamblers do.

Las Vegas Casinos With the Best Players Clubs Programs

I’d love to offer you a list of Las Vegas casinos offering the best players’ club programs, but the casinos change their rewards systems often enough that such a list would become obsolete the minute I hit “publish.”

If you do a search for the best slots clubs in Vegas, you’ll find dozens of outdated results. I don’t want to be included in that list. You’ll find most of these discussions in the form of forum threads that are 10 or 15 years old, too.

And you’ll find posts on various gambling blogs claiming to offer lists of the best slots club, but good luck finding such a list that actually tells you what percentage you’ll earn the comps back at. Such posts are generally so vague that they’re completely useless. They might as well be lists of random casinos.

Different slots clubs also have different ways of rewarding their players. Some clubs give more rebates and cashback, while others are more likely to offer you free rooms or random gifts. You might find a casino where the casino host will offer you a free room on top of your other rewards, while another casino might take a more by-the-book approach to their rewards.

Conclusion

Those are the basics of how a slots club works and why it’s so important to the video poker player in particular. You could spend a lot of time visiting top casino websites to figure out the percentage back that you’re getting from the casino in comps, and that would be time well-spent.

But that doesn’t tell you what the pay tables at the video poker games are like.

And that’s at least as important, so you’ll have to do some scouting if you’re serious about video poker.