The Rio is chintzy with their comps

Most Las Vegas poker rooms give their frequent players $1 in credits toward food purchases at the property's restaurants for every hour of play. A couple of places (Binion's, Treasure Island) double that. A few (Sam's Town, Golden Nugget) don't keep track at all, and whether they will write you a ticket for a few bucks off the buffet is completely up the discretion of the shift supervisor that happens to be working that day.

At the Hilton, the dollars earned were cumulative, in that there was no limit to how many you used in a day, as long as you had them in your "bank." I don't eat out a lot, so in the poker rooms where I play a lot, I tend to build up comp credits faster than I can use them. My favorite way of using them is at a time when I'm not playing, but have a date, or family or friends coming from out of town that I can treat for free.

I had blithely assumed that most or all places worked roughly like the Hilton did. I was surprised to learn tonight that that is not necessarily so.

My sister is coming to town this week with her husband for a convention related to their family business, so I want to take them out somewhere nice to eat. I was thinking that the Rio had some good choices, between their popular buffet, the high-end Voodoo Steak and Lounge, and the brand-new Rub barbecue place.

So when I finished playing poker, I asked the shift supervisor about how the comps work, what I need to do to redeem them, etc. Frankly, I don't have enough built up yet to put much of a dent in a three-person restaurant tab, but I thought I might as well use what I have. I was disappointed to hear that they limit payouts to $8/day--no matter how many credits one has accumulated.

How cheap can you get??? From the poker room's point of view, what possible difference can it make if I take out $8 a day for ten straight days or $80 all at once, so that I can treat friends or family, instead of just stuffing my own face? This just reeks of somebody in upper management making a tightwad decision that favors saving a few bucks over doing something that would please customers.

It's bad enough that poker players are already universally regarded as second-class citizens as far as casino comps are concerned. I understand the reason for that--we don't give them as much profit as the brain-dead zombies that pour their paychecks into slot machines, and some poker rooms are even loss leaders for the casinos. But once you've decided to throw us a bone, how about making it one with a tiny scrap of meat left on it, rather than doing the bare minimum you grudgingly have to do just to keep up with the competition across the street? Why not at least try to give the illusion that you care about the riff-raff that sit their butts for unnaturally long stretches at your poker tables? What's next--I need a note from my mother and/or my doctor in order to cash out a few comp bucks?

To his credit, the guy on duty, when I explained the situation, said that he could do $8 a day, with a ten-day expiration on each ticket, and I could then use them all at once. So that's something--but still, what a horrible image it conveys that the employees and I have to pull such nonsense in order to wriggle around a stupid limitation that shouldn't be there in the first place.

I'm seriously still considering making the Rio my main base of operations. I've played there four sessions now--all short ones, totaling only 6.6 hours--and it has been highly profitable, three winning sessions and one loss, for a net uptick of $1026, which works out to about $156/hour. I don't expect that will be sustained over the long run, but it's an enticing start to what could be a beautiful relationship. I hate that this tightfisted, sour note was injected into it so early.

(Despite their stupid comp policy, the Rio does have an awfully nice assortment of souvenir chips, another handful of which I picked up tonight, as shown above.)