Caesars Palace Plays Red Light, Green Light for Comped Drinks at Sports Book Bar

Casino austerity continues.....one of the last bastions for any casino goer to get a comped drink(s) while gambling at low cost was the video poker machines. There was never any bet qualifier to get a cheap beer or watered down mixed drink....all you had to do is sit down and play.

But as the economy declines, especially for the majority of income earners on the low and middle income scales in Western countries, impacting casino revenues......the targets to make up for that revenue will be those potential customers on the bottom. And I am sure more casinos will do this in the future.

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On the heels of Mirage rolling out a voucher system to regulate how comped drinks are earned by video poker players, Caesars Palace has implemented a new system of its own.

It’s a little like Red Light, Green Light, but it’s no game, and it could signal another unfortunate penny-pinching trend by Las Vegas casinos.

The Red Light, Green Light comp drink system is currently at one bar, the Race and Sports Book Bar at Caesars Palace.

The casino has installed three small lights on the back of each video poker machine at the bar.

One light is green, another is red, and a third is blue.

Most customers would probably never even notice the lights, but they’re used by bartenders to determine if players are worthy of comped cocktails while sitting at the bar.

Here’s how it works.

First, the blue light turns on of the customer at the car has inserted $20 into the machine. It serves as a baseline to differentiate between customers drinking and enjoying sports on the nearby screens and those playing video poker.

Typically, a bartender can comp a first drink if a player puts money into a machine, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with the Red Light, Green Light system.

Only after a player has qualified with their play do they get the green light for a comped cocktail.

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While I understand the casinos wanting to do this to cut out the free drink hounds.......the last thing any player needs, is to wonder/worry whether they are playing enough to get a drink or not....this could backfire methinks especially since consumers are pretty savvy nowadays and they'll just adapt and gamble at the casinos that have a more liberal drink policy.

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Originally Posted by Shizzmoney

But as the economy declines, especially for the majority of income earners on the low and middle income scales in Western countries, impacting casino revenues......

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Wow, how quickly folks have forgotten Gary Loveman. All the financial engineering, overbuilding and Ferris wheels occurred long before this economic decline in Western nations.

Hope you were cutting & pasting from some other boob.

Heard about the big new project near the Stratosphere and gotta look at adding that company to my casino short list. They will not learn until they are in reorganization.

Article is still interesting cause I believe the future IS smaller boutique casinos and controlled costs. All that shit is a bygone era like the Ratpack & finned Cadillacs

Imagine exclusive gambling clubs with ex-Patriot offensive linemen guarding the doors. You almost have to submit to a means test to get in. Fico score rofl.

This is all especially the end game as aging slot players die off.

The Walmart crowd will have a another casino big box with flashing blue lights, crab legs at the buffet & the occasional free drink.

Segregation is a lost virtue.

Downtown already has a system to prevent people from getting free drinks while pretending to play video poker (or slowplaying it).

The player needs $20 in the machine, and the bartender has to witness them actively playing.

Otherwise the bartender is told not to give drinks to the player, with the threat of being fired.

The bartenders hate it. It also cuts into their tips. (Fewer drinks = fewer tips.)

The most ludicrous of the new rules involves giving a drink to a friend. You can't do it. Even if you've "earned" your drink, you are NOT allowed to pass it to a friend sitting next to you. Presumably that's to cut down on drink consumption, to where even if you have "earned" enough drinks to cover both you and the friend, they don't want double the drinks consumed. But it's still bullshit. If you've played enough to qualify for the drink, you should be able to do what you want with it. Reminds me a bit of the Subway tomatoes on the side ban.

And while I understand why Caesars is trying to cut down on drink leeches, I think this is the wrong place to focus. Their cost per drink provided is very low, and the percentage of people leeching more than they've "earned" through play is also quite low.

The only way I can see this being justified is if the purpose is to basically drive out the video poker slowplayers, and replace them with people who actually play. But that would assume a full bar where that's necessary.

Caesars has just been making cuts in strange places lately. Maintenance has been a huge area for cuts, and all it does is aggravate an entire hotel's worth of customers (including the high rollers) in exchange for saving a few working-class salaries per property per year.

Penny wise and pound foolish definitely comes to mind.

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Originally Posted by Sanlmar

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Originally Posted by Shizzmoney

But as the economy declines, especially for the majority of income earners on the low and middle income scales in Western countries, impacting casino revenues......

---

Wow, how quickly folks have forgotten Gary Loveman. All the financial engineering, overbuilding and Ferris wheels occurred long before this economic decline in Western nations.

Hope you were cutting & pasting from some other boob.

Heard about the big new project near the Stratosphere and gotta look at adding that company to my casino short list. They will not learn until they are in reorganization.

Article is still interesting cause I believe the future IS smaller boutique casinos and controlled costs. All that shit is a bygone era like the Ratpack & finned Cadillacs

Imagine exclusive gambling clubs with ex-Patriot offensive linemen guarding the doors. You almost have to submit to a means test to get in. Fico score rofl.

This is all especially the end game as aging slot players die off.

The Walmart crowd will have a another casino big box with flashing blue lights, crab legs at the buffet & the occasional free drink.

Segregation is a lost virtue.

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Trust me, I am no Loveman fan. I do know creditors have been fighting with Caesar's over their corporate debt bond holdings for years. I think he's a hypocrite for running up exorbitant corporate debts (while being on the board for a group called, "Fix the Debt", a "non-profit" lead by executives of the biggest banks and corporations in America to advocate to cut social security and other government social spending)...all while getting a multi-million dollar severance package on the way out.

Performance wise, he's probably one of the worst CEOs in the modern era for what he did with Caesars, especially buying up properties with cheap debt financial instruments left and right. The only "investment" Harrah's/Caesars made that actually did well, financially and marketing wise, was buying the WSOP brand (and they've even fucked that up, they probably could make more i.e. the WSOP.com fail site).

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All the financial engineering, overbuilding and Ferris wheels occurred long before this economic decline in Western nations.

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I agree with you. I mention the incomes effecting casino comp behavior because that was another one of Loveman's awful bets (as well as other fail casino corporations). In order to have this great real estate expansion that he did, you are essentially betting on Americans' discretionary incomes (and other Western countries where he bought property) to expand. And then you are also betting that consumer base will frequent your casinos at an exponential income growth from not only top, but also the bottom. He's probably a big fan of the neokeyesian drivel that dominates the financial engineering space today; the type of guy whose an "expert" at how to construct and build running the financing a business....but not actually knowing actually fucking run one (and in this case, the "math genius" MIT grad failed at both). He was betting on a streaming amount of traffic of consumers who would be willing to come to all of the casino spaces Caesars has and open their wallets to everything. They attempted to monopolize what they saw as a "growth" as state governments became more and more willing to have casino business law in their legislatures. He also probably thought that these properties they were building and buying from 2004-2008 would go up in value...another bad decision.

In terms of the "income decline" ...yes, it really started 30 years ago, after the ending of Bretton Woods. But within these last 7-10 years, we've seen this incredibly widening gap, which rivals the Gilded Age, between the incomes of the 20% and rest of us thanks to Federal Reserve QE policies which resulted in bubble stock market asset inflation, declining labor participation rates, and rising taxes (i.e. Obamacare), services (i.e. rents), and other fees. Also, savers are getting less and less for their dollar and social security payments....and older people have always been an important base for any casino business.

In contrast, one of the better CEOs in America IMO is MGM's Jim Murren. Initially, the Aria/Cosmo properties were going to be built for a wider base of consumer. Instead, I think he and the MGM saw what was coming and made their casinos more into a luxury spot that focused more on a "Monaco style" quality of space and service rather than all-in-one cheap volume style gaming Caesars has. Last time I was at Aria, the guy next to me at the bar was a Real Estate agent in Fiji, owned his own island, and was neighbors with Marc Andreessen. This is the type of guy who will, instead of looking for the $10 BJ tables, is probably playing $100 a hand and that is the type of consumer MGM bet on. Aria's cheapest BJ table I do believe is $25 and so is the Bellagio. MGM stock is up 858% since 2009.

From a marketing standpoint, it was a big gamble because casinos on the strip really try to shy away from the "Monaco" type of casino as they fear that middle level consumers wouldn't frequent or even traffic a casino they would assume they cannot afford. Shaniac says this best in a blog during this year's WSOP:

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The dispiriting thing is Aria was made that way by design. At one point, I remember the plans for "City Center" were supposed to include things that resembled a normal human city, with features like parks and dog walks. Instead, they opted to build the umpteenth luxury mega-mall, and the result of short-sighted urban planning are felt from the sidewalk on Las Vegas Blvd. to the top floors of Vdara.

So, maybe the bottom line is fine, because maybe it has to be. If you can't lure degenerate gamblers with their favorite drug (because the parephenlia is just so awful), you best hope the demand for Gucci stays strong and the nightclub industry maintains its clamp on large scale entertainment options.

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I also do agree that "smaller boutique casinos and controlled cost" casinos will be the wave of the future of the business. But if you go big, you better do it right.

The fact Loveman couldn't see this really goes to show what happens when you put people in charge who have "no skin in the game".

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Originally Posted by Dan Druff

Downtown already has a system to prevent people from getting free drinks while pretending to play video poker (or slowplaying it).

The player needs $20 in the machine, and the bartender has to witness them actively playing.

Otherwise the bartender is told not to give drinks to the player, with the threat of being fired.

The bartenders hate it. It also cuts into their tips. (Fewer drinks = fewer tips.)

The most ludicrous of the new rules involves giving a drink to a friend. You can't do it. Even if you've "earned" your drink, you are NOT allowed to pass it to a friend sitting next to you. Presumably that's to cut down on drink consumption, to where even if you have "earned" enough drinks to cover both you and the friend, they don't want double the drinks consumed. But it's still bullshit. If you've played enough to qualify for the drink, you should be able to do what you want with it. Reminds me a bit of the Subway tomatoes on the side ban.

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What I did was try and sit right in front of where the bartender is currently standing, toss in $100, check the odds to make sure it isn't absolutely horrific and start to slow play hands til I was acknowledged. Tip, cash out and just walk away. I only did this a few times because while playing a good VP machine near the slot section it was hard to get drinks at times. The table games you could hardly keep up with the waitresses though.