Sam's Town no longer feels like home

From my earliest days in Vegas, Sam's Town has been one of the casinos I have played at regularly. It offered good video poker, progressives in particular, and strong promotions. Recently, a lot has changed.

Like most Vegas casinos, Sam's Town has been graduatlly removing or downgrading its best video poker games for a long time, but very gradually. Until quite recently, it still offered 9/6 jacks or better for $2 and $5, games rarely found at locals casinos. Two bars offered a $1 9/6 jacks or better progressive, which occuasionally turned positive, especially with point multipliers.

In the past couple of years the big attraction for me at Sam's Town has been senior days. Each Wednesday there is a mystery point multiplier and drawing for those 50 and older. The point multipliers, limited to 10,000 base points a day, range up to 30 times for video poker (50 times for slots). (Boyd Gaming's other Coast and downtown Las Vegas Casinos have similar programs.)

Getting 30 times points was rare -- I think it happened only once at Sam's Town -- but for quite a while I was reglarly getting 10 times point and occasionally 15 times points. Ten times brings the return on 9/6 jacks to 100.5 percent without a progressive. That's an expected $50 profit on the $10,000 coin in needed to earn 10,000 base points, the maximum to be multiplied. On $2 jacks, that takes a little over an hour, for a pay rate (not including any winnings in the drawing) of about $40 an hour. Plus a free lunch and dinner buffet.

The first big blow, a few weeks ago, was the removal of all four of the machines that had the $2 and $5 jacks on them. Around this time, the point multipliers took a noticable dip not only at Sam's but at the other Boyd properties. Instead of 10 times or more, they become mostly 5 or 6 times, making jacks or better break-even or a smidge better. Still, the $1 progressive could be an attractive game, depending on the jackpot amount. And there was the drawing.

The final blow, a couple of weeks ago, was the downgrading of the jacks progressive to 8/5, making it unplayable, even with a huge jackpot. There are still a few machines with $1 9/6 jacks and a couple of $1 8/5 bonus poker progressives that occasionally become attractive, but nothing else for the $1 and up video poker player.

At the same time this was happening, Sam's Town closed its Mexican restaurant, Willy & Jose's, and its Billy Bob's steakhouse, one of my favoriites. At the new steakhouse, called the Angry Butcher, the menu is a la carte, where Billy Bob's threw in a salad and potato with your steak.

My read on the video poker situation at Sam's Town is that marketing game away too much in points, and the slot director fought back by taking out the games on which players could easily earn their maximum multiplied points on Wednesdays (and other days Sam's Town offered 7 times points to the public, in most recent months once a week). Of course, the casino is now losing the revenue from the higher-denomination games when there is no point multiplier and the return to all players is negative.

Whatever the reason, the combination of lower point multipliers, lower denomination games and the loss of a good progressive makes Sam's Town a much less attractive place to play. I'm now spening most of Wednesdays at Stations properties, which offer a better $1 game and no limit on the number of points you can earn with a multiplier.