Progress

There are some signs of movement in my experimental "all Harrah's all the time" program, in which I am trying to see if I can get Harrah's to notice that I give them mobneys, and they should give me generous kickbacks.

As previously mentioned, last week when I first looked into the situation and started learning about "reward points" and "tier points," I found that I had 369 of the former and 21,501 of the latter on my account. Today I am showing 1069 and 22,793. Movement! Whee! It takes 4000 tier points to earn platinum status, which seems not only feasible but easy at this rate. Diamond status for 11,000 seems likely out of my reach, unless I really play nowhere else for a long, long time, and I would hate to give up playing at the Venetian, Palms, Planet Hollywood, South Point, Mandalay Bay/Luxor/Excalibur, etc.

This is probably still not as much credit as it should be. They are allegedly giving us 28 tier points per hour of poker play, and I've put in 37.3 hours in Harrah's property chairs since then, which should translate to 1044 additional points, or a current total of 1413, plus whatever I might get for flushing $30 down a Harrah's toilet losing a total of $30 in their stupid slot machines at three different casinos. (I did the $20 at Imperial Palace as previously noted, then, at Cardgrrl's suggestion, dropped another $5 each at Flamingo and Bally's.) Perhaps the reported 28/hour isn't quite right, or maybe there is some lag in getting the hours updated.

The rewards credits aren't going up as fast because I've finally started using some of them to get free meals, which I hadn't done before. Under the old system, one had to go to the poker room management and get comps written out, which was a bother, so my credits mostly went unused. Now that I've discovered that I can just go to one of the restaurants and have the check covered by my rewards card when it comes, I'm a lot more likely to use them.

In any event, it seems that the system is responding to my inputs at least a little bit. Still nothing in my "offers" inbox yet. We'll see if that starts changing soon.

Of course, there remains the problem of what to do when Harrah's finally notices me and starts offering to let me stay in their fine Vegas hotel rooms. I don't like hotel rooms, even when they're free. I like my own bed, in my own apartment. And I don't have any travel planned to other cities with Harrah's properties. So in one sense, this whole project is kind of boneheaded and pointless. But it interests and amuses me nevertheless.