Table of Contents:

Foreword
Author’s Note to the Second Edition
Introduction—From Uncle Wiggley to Deuces Wild

Raining on the Casino’s Parade
Great Expectations—A Reality Check
Slot Machines—Handle With Care
Video Poker—The Meat and Potatoes
Slot Clubs—Join Or Else
Comps—Your Just Desserts
Promotions—Casino Gravy
The Bump—Airline Comps
Long Term in Las Vegas—or Having a Life
Pyramid Power
Ethics and Gambling—Odd Bedfellows
Breaking Even is a Terrific Thing

Resources

Index

Excerpt:

     Playing games has always been in my blood. One of my earliest memories is sitting cross-legged on the floor playing Uncle Wiggley. I was three or four years old, still an only child. I’d pester my mother, “Please play a game with me.” She was often at the ironing board or sewing machine and too busy to participate, but she’d say, “OK, honey, I’ll play. You set it up.”
     I’d pull out the Uncle Wiggley board and twirl the spinner and take my turn—hop hop hop—moving the number of spaces the spinner indicated. Then I’d say, “It’s your turn, Mother,” and she’d say, “You spin for me.” So I’d spin for her and move her game piece. Even though I was doing all the work, it didn’t matter; I was playing a game and I was happy.
     To this day I remember the intense feeling of competitiveness I had as a child. Even at age four and five, sitting at a Chutes and Ladders board, I played to win. It was a very important, even passionate, part of my life.
     It may seem like a long way from a kiddy board game on a threadbare rug in a simple Pennsylvania home to dollar Deuces Wild and the luxurious hotel rooms, free meals, and first-class entertainment given to us by palace-like casinos all over the world. Yet the spirit is exactly the same—intense, competitive, playing to win.

Growing Up as a “PK”
     Where I am today is even more remarkable considering where I was back then. My father is an evangelical fundamentalist minister, so I was a “PK,” a preacher’s kid. We had no cards or dice in our home. If a game that we wanted to play came with dice, we’d have to throw them away and use a spinner from one of our other kiddie games instead. Cards and dice were symbols of gambling, which was very much against our religion. But our family always played games. From the simple don’t-have-to-read-the-rules games, I graduated to Chinese checkers, chess, and finally Monopoly, the ultimate of all board games, I thought.
     Many first-born children are resentful of their younger siblings, but not I! I was exceedingly grateful when my parents provided me with two sisters with whom to play games. My parents were grateful too, because now I didn’t pester them to play with me all the time. My family played games almost every night except Wednesdays (which was prayer-meeting night); on Sundays we played religious games. My mother would cook up a big bowl of popcorn and we’d pull out a board game. When we three girls were old enough to play Scrabble, the family’s competitiveness really blossomed. My father is 90, and until a couple of years ago when his health failed one of his greatest pleasures in life was to get together with his three girls, play Scrabble, and beat all three of us. Even though he oversaw a very strict and religious household, the gaming spirit was strong.
     Because we were not allowed to have playing cards in the house, I didn’t learn the four suits until I was in my early thirties. We weren’t even allowed to play games like Old Maid, because that would have had the appearance of sinful behavior. Someone might have seen us playing and thought we were engaged in a poker game! When I got married, I finally started to play cards, but not “real” card games. We went through a period of Old Maid, Rook, and Pit, just enough to broaden my life a little bit.

Gin Rummy Fun
     When I was thirty-five, things changed: I left the fundamentalist environment and embarked on a new kind of life. That’s when I finally decided it was okay to play games like gin rummy and poker, so I had to learn the suits. Even today, sometimes I still think of a club as a “clover” or a spade as a “digger,” because that’s the way I learned them. At that time I had a close friend who played a lot of cards. He taught me how to play gin rummy. I took to it immediately. We played for a penny a point and for years we kept a running total in a notebook; since he’d been playing all his life, I wound up owing him quite a lot of pennies. Luckily, he became my second husband so I never had to pay off! But this was my first experience playing a game for money, not just for the pleasurable feeling of competition and trying to win. Even though it was only pennies (that would never be paid), suddenly I realized that playing for real money added a whole new spice to the gaming experience that I had never known before.
     Next came Tonk and Euchre, card games that are extremely popular in the Midwest. Both are played for money and my husband and I played them around the kitchen table with our friends, again just for small stakes. Then I started driving 30 miles to where my husband worked so I could play Tonk with him and his co-workers on their lunch hour. They played for dollars, and that’s when my competitive spirit finally roared up from deep inside me like a geyser. I took to the higher stakes very quickly. I became an excellent Tonk player and found myself beating others who’d played a lot longer than I had. It was only then, several decades after Uncle Wiggley, that I realized I was a natural at gambling.
     Eventually, my husband and I joined a Moose Lodge where there was a Tonk game from ten in the morning till midnight almost every day of the week. Whenever I had a spare hour or two from raising my children or teaching high school English, that’s where I would be. The stakes were quite a bit higher; therefore, the challenge and pleasure were greater.

          
Neon Lights and Black Chips
     I took my first trip to Las Vegas in 1984. Although I’d been playing cards for only a few years, my husband Brad had been gambling since he was five (he had two older brothers as teachers). But neither of us knew a thing about casino gambling, so we played the no-brainer slot machines and a little seat-of-the-pants low-stakes blackjack. We lost our entire gambling bankroll, but we enjoyed that trip so much that we knew we would return to Vegas as often as we could.
     Hoping to improve our results, we attended a blackjack seminar in our hometown and learned basic strategy. Then we went to the library and put ourselves through a crash course on card counting. We practiced and practiced and practiced—and got good enough to raise the stakes considerably.
     It’s funny to think of it now, but we began our casino careers as high rollers. We bet green ($25) and black ($100) chips, and went on junkets to Las Vegas, Reno-Tahoe, and Atlantic City, sometimes on private casino airplanes. We ate in all the gourmet restaurants, saw the best shows, and had the most luxurious rooms. We were living the good life. Then we broadened our horizons and went on junkets to San Juan, Santo Domingo, even Monaco. That was the ultimate junket. Our airfare was paid, we stopped in Paris for four days, and then it was on to Monte Carlo, where everything was comped, even at the exorbitant European prices.
     Looking back on that era, I feel we did fairly well for ourselves. We lost more money than we won, because we weren’t the greatest card counters, but we made more than enough in comps to cover our losses. It was pretty heady living in the rarefied air of the high-roller.
     Then in 1989, Brad retired and we decided that we wanted to spend more of our time in casino locations. That’s when we started to consider a different lifestyle. We began to think that the way we were doing it—taking $3,000-$4,000 and flying to Tahoe for three or four days—was too hectic. Those few days just weren’t long enough: we gambled too long, we didn’t get enough sleep, and we didn’t have enough time to enjoy all the “real-life” things that beckoned to us from outside the casino. Also, on occasion we’d lose a good portion of our gambling bankroll, and it all seemed too fleeting, too transitory, for the price we were paying.
     So we decided to take the $3,000 or $4,000 and try to make it last longer—a lot longer—three or four weeks instead of three or four days. We knew that the best place to do it was Las Vegas, with its proliferation of competing casinos. We decided to trade the first-class short-term treatment for less luxurious amenities over a longer period of time and, in the process, reduce our gambling risk. Besides, about that time the casinos were starting to cut down considerably on what they were giving back in comps to table players; you had to bet more and more to get the good stuff. So we reduced our bets to red chips ($5) and spent a couple of years doing quite well working the lower end of the scale.
     We now went to Las Vegas for a week, two weeks, three weeks at a time. We weren’t staying at the higher-class hotels like Caesars Palace, but at older casinos like the Riviera, Holiday Inn (now Harrah’s), and the Westward Ho. We learned how to work the comp system and discovered that we didn’t miss the gourmet meals (even when it’s free, fancy food isn’t good for the waistline or the cholesterol count). Playing $5 and $10 blackjack, we could still get comps for all the food we could eat—at good buffets and coffee shops. We could also get our rooms at the discounted “casino rate” (typically 40%-50% off the rack rate). Occasionally, our combined blackjack action would earn us a free night or two.

Low-Roller Paradise Found
     As time went by, I began to notice that Brad would be gone from the blackjack tables (while we were playing and being rated) for longer and longer periods. I wondered where he went, afraid the pit bosses would get after him for staying away from the table—just leaving his chips and disappearing. We already knew that you should leave the table as often as possible, because you were being rated by the hour and as long as you left your chips at the game, the comp clock kept ticking. Finally, he confessed that he was running over to the machines and playing video poker.
     I thought, “Oh no, not video poker!” Everyone knows slot machine players are uninformed and can’t win. I figured only a real loser would go from blackjack to video poker. Brad, on the other hand, looked at things differently. “But, Jean, I’m only putting in quarters and I’m not losing that much,” he insisted. “Besides, it’s so relaxing and fun.”
     And he was right. Blackjack gets tiring, particularly when you’re counting cards. We couldn’t play for long periods at a time, so following Brad’s lead, I decided to take a (skeptical) look. When we left the tables and stopped the comp clock, I’d sit at the video poker machines, watching while he tried his luck.
     Then in January 1990 we were playing at the Stardust when I noticed advertisements about a “slot club.” When I investigated, I found that it didn’t cost anything to join and members got comps, prizes, even cashback, for their play. I said to Brad, “As long as you’re gonna be putting money into these machines, we might as well get something back for it.”
     I started reading articles in various gambling magazines which claimed that video poker was a game of skill and that the payback could be very good, almost 100%. We also found that at the end of our trips, the Stardust would give us back $40-$50, based solely on Brad’s video poker play. Better yet, when we went home, we started getting mail from the Stardust—invitations for free nights and meals and parties—which reminded us of when we were high rollers.
     The next time we went to Las Vegas, we took advantage of the free nights at the Stardust and we started joining every slot club we could. Brad and I use different surnames, so we opened up two separate accounts at each casino, and I started playing video poker, too. Also, we studied up on the optimal strategy for 9/6 Jacks or Better video poker, so although we weren’t winning, we weren’t losing much while the comps continued to roll in.
     We started to get lots of our nights comped, and since we were retired and had all the time in the world, we didn’t mind moving around a bit to take advantage of as many offers as we could at the different casinos where we were slot club VIPs. A casino would send me an offer in the mail for three free nights, and Brad would get the same offer on the same day in the same mailbox. By combining our six nights at casino A, then accepting an offer for four nights between us at casino B, as well as another four nights at casino C, we all of a sudden were staying in Las Vegas for 14 nights, without paying for a single one! In addition to this, any time we asked, we got our food comped.

The Joy of Video Poker
     To top it all off, we discovered that video poker was far more enjoyable than blackjack. Playing 21 is hard. Card counting requires constant mental calculations. First you have to calculate the true count, then divide by the number of decks remaining to derive the running count, then figure out how much to bet. All the while you worry that the pit boss is on to you as a counter and—horror of horrors!—you’ll get thrown out of the casino and have to start all over again somewhere else. I’d already been barred from one casino in Tahoe for counting cards, so these fears were genuine. And for me, there was a more pressing problem. I’d always played a good game of blackjack with basic strategy, but when I counted cards, I think my lips moved slightly. I was an English teacher and math never came easily to me, so when I counted, I had to do it almost verbally. It was exhausting!
     But playing video poker, we could sit side by side at the machines and laugh and drink diet soda and not worry about a thing. We knew the Jacks or Better strategy so well that we barely had to think about it, and we were getting more comps than we did playing $5 and $10 blackjack. It was all so much more fun.
     Before long, we started noticing Deuces Wild video poker machines and began talking to people who were playing them. We quickly learned that unlike Jacks or Better, the Deuces Wild variation was a positive game (meaning it paid back more than 100%). We went to Gamblers Book Club, paid $9.95 for a booklet on video poker in Las Vegas (by Lenny Frome), and studied the strategy for Deuces.
     The first time we sat down in front of a Deuces Wild machine was New Year’s Eve 1991. I held the book while Brad played, and every time a hand popped up that we weren’t sure how to play, I looked it up on the chart. After a couple of hours of playing, I had a headache from all the smoke and noise and retired to the room, leaving the strategy book with Brad. About an hour later the phone rang. It was Brad. “Guess what? I just hit the $1,000 royal flush!” I laughed, “Well, I guess that pays for our $9.95 strategy book!”
          

The Queen of Comps
     Soon it was smooth sailing. The comps kept rolling in, we learned to take advantage of promotions, we perfected the strategies for many of the video poker variations, and we were having a blast. We’d gone from $100 bets to $5 bets at blackjack, then to $1.25 a hand at video poker. We were getting more comps and freebies from the casinos playing $1.25 video poker than we ever did playing $25 blackjack. Our transition from high rollers to low rollers was complete.
     For us, making the most of the low-roller system (initially) culminated in December-January 1993. During those two months we played no blackjack at all (except during special promotions). Instead, we sat at the video poker machines. This was the longest Las Vegas trip we had undertaken. We stayed for 50 days, including Christmas, New Years, and the Super Bowl. We paid for a room on only one night. (We could’ve gotten that night free too, but we didn’t want to bother switching hotel rooms for a single night.) The only meals we paid for were those we ate outside of the hotel-casinos when we just couldn’t face another free buffet or coffee shop (poor us!). And because we managed to hit five royal flush jackpots, at the end of those 50 days we went home with $1,500 more than we left with.
     It was for those feats that the Las Vegas Advisor, the famous consumer’s newsletter for Las Vegas visitors, pegged me the “‘Queen of Ku Pon,’ the ruling monarch of the mythical magical kingdom of Low Roller.” And two years later, when CBS’s news magazine “48 Hours” did an entire show on gambling, two segments were devoted to Brad and me and our money-saving exploits. While introducing our story, Dan Rather gave me the title that has stuck: the “Queen of Comps.”

Description:
     In this completely updated and revised new edition to her gambling classic, Frugal Gambler author Jean Scott brings readers up to speed on changes relative to today's casino scene. The new edition reveals her ongoing accomplishments as a low-rolling player, as well as tips she's gleaned from being a full-time Las Vegas resident. New information includes:

• a completely revamped video poker chapter
• updated coverage on maximizing slot club membership
• examples of exploitable gambling promotions and how to look for them
• an all new Resources section to help you continue your "frugal" education, and much, much more!

     Though Jean Scott was well-known to Las Vegas Advisor subscribers throughout the ‘90s, it wasn’t until she wrote The Frugal Gambler in 1998 that she became a household name to casino players across the country. For the past seven years, arguably no gambling personality, except perhaps Anthony Curtis, has been more featured on television than this “Gambling Grandma.” Her frequent TV appearances, her long-term success in casinos around the world, and the solid low-rolling advantage-play techniques she’s divulged along the way have all helped catapult The Frugal Gambler into the ranks of best-selling gambling books, having sold more than 100,000 copies, at one point reaching the number-two spot on Amazon.com’s sales list of books.

Reviews/Media Mentions:

“A Sure Bet.”  —Star Telegram

“An entertaining and informative read.”  —Casino Player

"Jean Scott is really a 'Volks-Writer,' a writer for the people. With near surgical precision, she cuts away the cancerous and incomprehensible parts of difficult subjects and leaves only the kernels of truth in her wake. She writes at a level that wouldn't bore an informed person or confuse an ignorant. Very tough to do!"  —Frank Kneeland