For the first four of these instances, I will not name the casino where some of these promos took place, mostly because I like playing there and have no personal animosity against them. I will, however, name a specific casino since, at the time, I am not very pleased with their service and operations. In any case, these are the five worst promotions that I’ve personally encountered in my professional life
This wasn’t a terrible promotion in and of itself; in fact, it wasn’t a bad promotion in and of itself. To the contrary, it was perfect for a low-level player such as me since there was very little risk involved. In addition, there was a technique that guaranteed me Free Play every time rather than one of the rewards such as Food Court Credit, a Hotel Room, or a Free Buffet.The concept behind the Promotion was that you would accumulate a certain amount of points ($750 coin-in), and then you would go to this large display and input an eight-digit code in order to win a prize that was comprised of one of the prizes described above. If anybody were to guess the right code (which no one has ever done), they would be eligible to win one million dollars, according to legend.I had no problems with any of it, and my average result (in terms of Free Play) was around $50, but I was also in the position to play a game in which I only had an anticipated loss of $11.63, and that’s assuming there were no slots at an advantage. Taking into consideration that some of the promotion took place on a points multiplier day (although you still needed the same number of Base Points to take a turn at the code), I actually had a very slight advantage right off the bat, regardless of whether or not I participated in the code game itself.
There were three aspects to the problem
(A) THEY HAD ONE CODE MACHINE TO WORK WITH!
After speaking with player services, they informed me that I would not be able to, “Bank,” codes and that I would instead have to break the code every time I got 150 points, rather than doing it many times as previously stated. As a matter of fact, it came out that you could use bank codes, but I didn’t realize this until the very final day of the offer.
It basically results in a lengthy queue of people (sometimes stretching up to 30 people) at the code machine with a card reader that wasn’t very effective at its function, requiring the need to swipe each card three or four times. When it eventually did read the card, it immediately inserted the players into the game, where they had fifteen seconds to input the code, which will be discussed further below:
(B) THEY DID NOT EMPLOY (OR PLAN) PROPERLY.
The game would print out a coupon at the conclusion of each code as a reward. EVERY ONE OF THE CODES You’d assume that something like Free Play would be able to just load onto the card without any further steps. Nope. The game should have printed you a USABLE buffet coupon that you could, say, take to the buffet straight from the game. Nope. Normally, you would expect the Gift Shop certificate to be able to be used in the Gift Shop. Nope. What about the Food Court voucher? Nope.At the end of the day, the redemption of these things was absurdly redundant; you had a voucher that you used to take to the Player’s Club, where they checked your PC number against the number on your voucher, then against your ID, before writing you another voucher for the exact same damn thing that the original voucher was for.
Explain why the employees at the buffet, food court, gift shop, and other locations may cross-check the PC number against the voucher and validate the identification. The answer is, of course, yes. At the very least, they’re expected to. So, in essence, you’re comparing the ID to the Player’s Card and then comparing that to the PC Number on the voucher…twice more times.