Ask three experienced casino professionals how to measure a player, structure reinvestment or build a tier program, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get three different answers.
That doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is wrong. It may mean we’ve been looking for universal answers in an industry where the property, market, player, and objective can completely change the equation.
So instead of trying to settle some of gaming’s longest-running metrics arguments, maybe there’s more value in looking at why smart people approach them differently. Here are six debates worth having at your property.
Argument #1: Free Play — Powerful Tool or Expensive Crutch?
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Free play works. It’s also remarkably easy to overdo.
Tara Clark, COO of Red Circle, believes one of the dangers is that free play doesn’t always feel like money. Years ago, when casinos handed players actual cash, there was a different level of respect for the offer. Once it became free play, increasing the amount somehow became easier.
Clark points to another metric that deserves attention: time on device. Give a player enough free play to satisfy the amount of time they intended to gamble, and they may never need to reach into their own wallet.
Jake Godin, Head of Analytics for Mole Lake Casino Lodge & Event Center, sees free play as one of the casino’s most powerful tools, but also one of the most dangerous when it becomes the only tool. Leon Brimm, Director of Casino Operations for Rolling Hills Casino and Resort, comes at it from the operations side. Free play may maintain an existing base, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is generating incremental play.
The argument isn’t whether free play works. It’s whether we’ve asked it to do too much.
Argument #2: Theo or Actual — Which Number Do You Trust?
Brimm believes ADT is the better way to evaluate a player over time because shorter periods can create too much volatility. But that doesn’t mean he ignores actual wins.
In fact, when actual results begin moving too far away from theoretical performance, he starts asking questions. That approach helped his team uncover a group of advantage players whose results simply weren’t lining up with what the games should have been producing.
Godin sees value in comparing the two as well. Theoretical can help measure expected performance; actual tells you what really happened. It’s often the variance between them that reveals something worth investigating.
There’s another wrinkle from the operations side: How good is the data you’re starting with? Brimm points out that slots capture tremendous amounts of information with every push of a button, while table game ratings can still depend heavily on supervisors estimating play while simultaneously running a pit. His property has been working toward technology that can more accurately capture individual table game activity.
Before arguing about which metric is better, it may be worth asking how much confidence you have in the information feeding it.
Argument #3: What’s the Right Reinvestment Percentage?
Here’s the answer everyone loves: It depends.
Clark has seen a small casino with little competition successfully operate at roughly 7 percent marketing reinvestment. In highly competitive markets, she has seen 35 percent or more.
So, asking what percentage a casino should reinvest without considering the market, competition, and customer base may be the wrong question.
A better one might be: Do we even know what we’re actually reinvesting?
Clark says properties frequently know what they’re spending on points, direct mail or player development individually, but fewer calculate the entire property-wide investment.
Godin has taken that idea further by looking at reinvestment at the individual account level rather than relying solely on broad database averages. It’s more labor intensive, but he has found that approach can produce better results.
The magic percentage may not exist. Knowing exactly where your investment is going — and what it is producing — is far more useful.
Argument #4: Offer Stacking — Marketing Sin or Smart Strategy?
Picture the player who arrives with a birthday offer, senior-day offer, direct-mail offer, bus offer and something else you forgot you mailed three weeks ago.
Clark has seen the result: a $50 player can arrive carrying $150 worth of offers.
That kind of offer creep rarely happens because someone deliberately designed it. One offer gets richer. Another promotion gets added. Someone adds hot seats because Tuesday looks soft. Eventually, nobody has stepped back to look at the entire investment.
But Godin makes an important distinction: Not all stacking is bad.
He has intentionally structured offers across multiple days to reactivate a player, increase frequency, or extend a trip. The offers can’t be redeemed simultaneously; instead, one creates a reason to return the next day or stay another night.
Maybe the rule isn’t “Don’t stack offers.”
It’s don’t stack them by accident.
Argument #5: How Many Player Tiers Do You Really Need?
Four tiers? Five? Six?
How about two?
Clark argues that unless a property has extensive amenities and enough high-end players to create meaningful differences between levels, fewer tiers may accomplish the same goal while being dramatically easier to manage.
Someone has to administer the benefits, track who qualifies, communicate progress, and manage the not-so-pleasant moment when a player gets downgraded. Every additional tier creates more work, and every tier needs a meaningful reason to exist.
Godin takes the argument one step further. He believes tiers should define access and recognition, but they shouldn’t necessarily determine how much the casino reinvests in an individual player. When players are placed into broad buckets, the breakpoints between tiers can create inefficiencies, with two players of similar value receiving very different treatment because one landed on the other side of a threshold.
Maybe the question isn’t how many tiers you should have.
What is each tier actually doing for the player — and for you?
Argument #6: What If the Metric Isn’t the Problem?
ADT. ADW. Theo. Actual win or loss. Segmentation. Reinvestment.
We can argue about which one matters most, but Clark raises a more fundamental issue: Whatever your property decides to use, everyone needs to speak the same language.
If player development measures one way, marketing another, and operations a third, the casino can spend more time arguing about the numbers than acting on them.
Consistency over time matters too. Completely changing reporting every time a new leader arrives can eventually make meaningful year-over-year comparisons difficult.
And this is where Brimm’s operations perspective brings the discussion full circle. Marketing and player development may know what guests are asking for, while operations has the ability to change the mix of machines or games on the floor. That information needs to move between departments if anyone expects to act on it.
Maybe that’s one casino metrics argument we actually can settle.
The smartest property isn’t necessarily the one with the perfect reinvestment percentage, the perfect number of tiers or the industry’s definitive ADT-versus-ADW answer. It’s the property where marketing, analytics, player development and operations understand what they’re measuring, why they’re measuring it and what they’re going to do with the answer.
And yes, sometimes the answer really is: It depends.
