Slot Hosts in Casinos

The Care and Feeding of Slot Hosts

Slot hosts are wonderful inventions. A smart player can use them to get lots of goodies not otherwise available. Sometimes you get to put on your acting hat and pretend to be someone else entirely. Oooooh, what fun!
Every slot host must abide by casino guidelines. But the guidelines imposed on the slot host are quite a bit more flexible than those that must be followed by the employees in the slot club booth.
It’s important to be aware of certain preferences of the casino. Casinos prefer losers over winners. They prefer slot players to video poker players (the profit margin is higher). They prefer big players ($5 and up) over small players (25 and down). Does this mean that you have to be a big loser at $5 slots to get anything? Of course not. But it does mean that if you appear to fit (at least part of) the favored profile, you’ll do better than if you don’t. For example, I never plays slots. I play a lot of video poker, but only when I have an advantage over the house. I usually play at the $5 and higher level and hosts fall all over themselves to offer me comps.

Casino Playing Strategy

Most of my strategies for hostmanship were developed when I was a $1 player. Playing only games at which I have an edge is not the way to generate a lot of comps and money , but I’ve been known to tell slot hosts that “I was playing five-dollar Double Diamonds over at the Mirage. I hit two doublers along with a red seven they call it ‘double-oh seven.’ Thirty-two hundred smackers. Wow!”
In truth, I’ve never played such a game in my life. But I’ve fed the host just enough misinformation to pay dividends.
First, the casino now thinks I sometimes play $5 slots. They love that. Whether or not I won this time is irrelevant. They figure that if I keep playing, I’ll lose. They also know I sometimes play at other casinos. They want to keep a sucker like me for themselves and they figure they can do that by treating me better than the other casinos do. I’m now getting comps based on sometimes being a $5 slot player and trust me, the comps for those players are much higher than they are for $1 video poker players.

Gambling Budget

Pretending to be someone you’re not is part of the fun. These days, Shirley and I are well known, so we play it rather straight. But earlier in my career, it was fun to try different personas. I can’t pass myself off as Michael Jordan, Napoleon, or Demi Moore, but I can pass myself as someone with a lot of traits the casino values (because it helps its bottom line). Such characteristics australia casinos are different than what is valued in normal society If they think I’m a conservative family man who comes to town one weekend a year with a gambling budget of $250, you can be sure they’ll make me pay retail for everything I get. But if they think that gambling has cost me two wives along the way and I’ve been known to go on binges, you can bet the red carpet will be out.
Now imagine that I tell a host, “We won yesterday and my wife wants to go home because we never end up winners. But I want to stay because you guys are treating us so well.” What do you think will happen? My bet is that we’ll continue to be treated very well indeed.