One of the things we routinely advise here on Flip The Switch is to play with a players card. We also say you should never chase a tier or comps, but should get credit for the play you would do if you’re going to play, so you get the comps you deserve out of it.
Well, on occasion, like many gamblers do, we break our own advice – but not without setting limits.
I recently found myself in Las Vegas to support my friend’s poker tournament success. I had an extra day in town after that, during the middle of one of Caesars’ seemingly frequent nowadays tier credit multipliers. It was a good one too – 10x, which tends to be at the upper end of the range they’ll normally offer throughout the year.
For the year, I was sitting just above Platinum, which is 5,000 tier credits. Their next tier up is Diamond, 15,000 credits. Diamond gains a few key perks, such as an annual celebration dinner worth $100, and waived resort fees when staying at their properties (something which I did frequently enough in 2025, with visits to Laughlin and Lake Tahoe among my travels).
So there is concrete value to the tier in my case. But I didn’t want to go nuts, so I went through the math. To get the 10,000 or so tier credits I would need to reach Diamond, I would need to earn 1,000 tier credits, which is $5,000 wagered on slots, win or lose.
Earning that 1,000 tier credits would give me 9,000 tier credits as a bonus for the 10x promotion, and I’d also get 1,000 tier credits from their daily tier credit bonus program. So I’d come out a bit ahead of the Diamond mark (having some breathing room avoids any stress that I missed it by a few, which I see people discuss on forums a lot near the end of each year).
There’s an expected loss of somewhere between $500 and $750 for that, but of course things can go really good or really bad too, so there’s no guarantee.
I’ve attempted this a few times over the years. In 2017, a lucky poker run saw me up $1,000 and earning 2,500 tier credits for the day. Another trip, also on video poker, I racked up the remaining 1,000 tier credits I needed with a profit. But on a different visit in 2023, even with a point multiplier in place to help me, I couldn’t get any momentum and gave up after spending a few hundred dollars with minimal tier credit accumulation.
So there’s no guarantee. And at some point you have to cut your losses. As it happened I was ahead for the trip, so I decided to give myself $500 to attempt the achievement (which, between two celebration dinners and resort fee waivers, is pretty close to the amount of value I’d probably derive from the status being achieved).
For fun, I also set a rule that I’d see how far I could make $100 last at each casino I visited that Caesars owned in Las Vegas. This rule proved to be an interesting element by the end.
I started out at Harrah’s, figuring I’d work my way down the Las Vegas strip as I hit my target. The only thing was I started having success at Harrah’s right out of the gate.
I got up a bit on the first couple of machines, so I switched to one of my old faithful machines that tends to be reliable for coin-in, Quick Spin, and did $2.50 bets. I racked up almost half the points I needed on that machine alone, and at the time I walked away from it I was up $200 (although I was up at much as $350 on it at one point).
It started to look like this was possible. As the amount of coin-in I had left dropped, and the money continued to find ways to hold out, my optimism grew. But I eventually hit a bit of a bad run at Harrah’s and the $100 ran out with 700 of the 1,000 points achieved. That was great for $100, but there was still $1500 in wagers to do.
I moved on to the Linq. The first couple of machines were very quick to take my money. As I was preparing to move on, I found a machine I hadn’t seen before (a new version of the Quick Spin series I had previously seen at G2E, Electric Pots, which has three wheel upgrades) and decided to play it. So I allowed another $100 at the Linq.
That machine took $50, and so I moved to a really old Colossal Reels machine, betting higher than my norm on it ($2 a spin), and caught a line hit like nothing I’d ever seen on this game before, especially on a base game spin. Suddenly I was back into my first $100. I played a few more machines, got back to being down $100 at Linq, and moved on to Flamingo with about 125 points to go.
I continued to be selective with games, picking ones that tended to give me a good ride. Caesars has a habit of capping progressives on games like Quick Hit, where the point of the progressives is to encourage a max bet. Well, you don’t have to max bet when the payouts are proportional across all bets, so I hunkered down on one last machine to try to finish things up.
A strong 150x bonus hit put me back into my first $100 for the entire exercise, and I ended up finishing the tier credit goal spending just $100 – and the $100 celebration dinner alone will pay for that.
I already had planned to play in Vegas, and made the decision to target my play to a specific promotion, hoping it would work out. It did. But even if I pulled the plug because it was getting too costly, it was play I was going to do regardless.
In those times, you still should stick to your budget, and play only because you were going to play. But taking advantage of promotions, like the use of the players card itself, can be a good way of mixing the spend you had planned with maximizing your opportunities.
Being able to save money in a variety of ways with the status is going to outvalue the $100 invested to finish up the tier, so I look forward to reaping the rewards from it.
