Jean Scott has embraced teaching throughout her life.
In her first career, she was an English instructor and tutor in Indianapolis. After retiring from the classroom, she taught herself enough about gambling to earn the title of “Queen of Comps” and write the Frugal Gambler series of advice books, enlightening hundreds of thousands of fans about the benefits of slot clubs and casino play.
Now, as she prepares to leave Las Vegas for her second retirement, she directs a lesson to casino operators: Many are squeezing players so much that gambling “just isn’t fun anymore.”
“The people who are running the casinos don’t seem to understand the gambler,” she tells CDC Gaming Reports. She cites rule changes that increase the house advantage on games plus widespread tightening of comps, reduced free play, and restrictions on what hosts can offer players.
“It’s so cold,” she says. “It’s hitting everybody.”
Scott has lived in Las Vegas since 1992, buying a condo there after years of visiting, sometimes for months at a time. She often stayed free with comps that she and husband Brad racked up from video poker play. She surprised many of her followers with the announcement in August that she and Brad will basically give up gambling and move to Georgia. She expects the move to be completed by early next year.
Their decision wasn’t all about gambling. She’ll turn 81 late this month and he’ll turn 88 in January, so health and getting around are concerns. The move also allows them to spend more time with their adult children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
However, casinos’ tight-fisted treatment of players was a big factor.
“In the last two years, it’s become just a catastrophe,” Scott says. “It seems like every other day there’s a new cutback.”
A voic
e for low rollers
Scott gained national fame for her appeal to low roller gamblers, especially video poker players betting $1.25 per hand. In 1993, she wrote a Las Vegas Advisor newsletter report headlined “50 nights, 49 free” detailing how she and Brad reaped thousands of dollars’ worth of free rooms and meals from their play. In 1995, a nationally televised “48 Hours” report showed her at “work” in casinos, culminating with her winning a Mercury Mystique in a raffle and journalist Dan Rather dubbing her “Queen of Comps.” Her first book, The Frugal Gambler, became the No. 2 seller on Amazon, trailing only a Harry Potter novel.
Scott’s gambling career has paid off for casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere, says Anthony Curtis, publisher of Las Vegas Advisor, home to Scott’s Frugal Vegas blog, and of Huntington Press, which publishes Scott’s books.
“Without question,” he says, “the things she’s done have absolutely been great for casinos. Everybody reads (her books) and goes, ‘If this little old lady from Indiana can do this, I can do it, too.’”
Scott fondly recalls “the awe, the glorious feeling” of Las Vegas during what she calls the glory years, from the early 1990s until shortly before the Great Recession. “It was like an amusement park for adults. It’s a different life now.”
Scott and Brad each got an early start on game-playing. A minister’s daughter, she tells of playing the Uncle Wiggily board game “for blood” before she could read. Brad, who is dyslexic, was playing the card game Tonk for pennies when he was 5 years old.
Their first trip to Las Vegas was in March 1984. Scott concentrated on blackjack because table game players supposedly were smarter than machine players, although she hadn’t yet learned basic strategy. Brad played dollar slots. They spent their entire $3,000 vacation kitty, losing some of it gambling at the now-demolished Westward Ho casino, where they played because of coupons Scott had picked up. Less than a week after returning home, they received a Westward Ho offer for three free nights.
That kicked a longtime love affair with the casino life. They learned to count cards at blackjack and raised their betting level. They graduated to cruises and junkets, including a private-plane trip to the “real Monte Carlo” and a scary middle-of-the-night taxi ride to a Dominican Republic casino, where they saw armed soldiers patrolling a beach.
“Without a doubt, they have one of the strongest partnerships in gambling,” says Huntington Press editor Deke Castleman, who became the couple’s close friend in addition to editing all her books.
“They’ve had a very strong partnership in terms of playing together, going through the swings together. Neither of them could have done it alone.”
The first royal flush
For example, consider a key evening on Scott’s road to fame.
Both were still playing blackjack, but Brad often would leave the table during unfavorable counts and wander around the casino. On New Year’s Eve 1991, he ambled from Westward Ho to a video poker machine at the nearby Stardust.
Scott’s first response upon finding out was: “What are you doing that for? You can’t make any money on machines.”
When he said video poker was more fun than blackjack, she insisted on learning the proper strategy. So they walked more than 2 miles to the Gamblers Book Club to buy a book by video poker expert Lenny Frome, then returned to Westward Ho to play. Scott would check the strategy charts and advise Brad which cards to hold and discard.
She soon tired out and went to their room, while he continued playing. Shortly after midnight, he came in and spread $1,000 on the bed. He had hit a royal flush.
For a year or two, the couple played blackjack, sometimes at $100 a hand, and video poker at $1.25 per hand. Scott noticed that the machine play generated more casino offers than table play did.
“I realized the promotions were as important as the game.” Scott says.
A lifetime of discounts
Her frugal father had raised her to take advantage of special offers, whether it be cents-off coupons at the grocery store or other ways to save money. Family history holds that when Scott was born, her father asked for – and received – a “minister’s discount” on the doctor bill.
While he might not have approved of her adult hobby, she took his money-saving lessons to heart and meticulously organized gambling trips around the best promotions.
“During what I call the Glory Years, there was good video poker all over the place,” she recalls. “I had it all mapped out. I’d pick up all the coupons and figure out what we were supposed to be doing.”
That continued even after they moved to Las Vegas.
“Discipline – you have to have lots of discipline,” she says. “The golden years that looked so easy, it was hard. I worked harder than I ever worked when I was teaching. It was as hard as digging ditches.”
She says that for every hour of video poker play, she spent another hour researching – sometimes longer since the offers aren’t as good as they once were.
“That’s why I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says. “I don’t want to do that as my whole life. It used to be it was fun, and then we’d go and meet all these friends. It’s not fun anymore.”
But for many years, it was.
They began to concentrate on quarter-per-credit video poker. According to Scott’s handwritten records, her first experience at dollar-per-credit video poker was in 1995 at the Four Queens in downtown Las Vegas, which was offering an extra promotion for play at that level. Experts can play several hundred hands of video poker per hour, and she was leery of the potential cost of raising her betting level. But the promotion made it worthwhile.
Before long, she hit a royal, getting $4,000 for a $5 bet.
“When you’re just a quarter player and you’re real cautious, you’d thought you’d died and gone to heaven,” she says of the jackpot.
They celebrated with a meal, then returned to the dollar machines. And she hit another royal – just 49 minutes of playing time after her first one, her journal shows.
“If we had lost several thousand dollars that night,” she says, “I don’t know what the rest of our lives would have been like.”
Maybe she wouldn’t have been featured on many national TV shows. Or written/co-written seven books. Or become an icon to gamblers across the country who enjoy her personal stories and lessons, then flock to casinos in hopes of emulating her and Brad.
Playing for the long run
Her well-publicized success begs the question of how she has been able to continue playing even though casino executives know how good she is. Scott says that unlike many other Advantage Players, she’s had few problems with being “backed off” – at least not for her video poker play.
Toward the end of her blackjack days, she says, some casinos told her she was welcome to play their other games, but not blackjack. “I think my lips moved when I counted cards,” she confesses.
But she hasn’t been told she can’t play video poker.
She remembers playing a Deuces Wild game at the Fiesta Rancho in North Las Vegas while being filmed for a TV report. She happened to hit quad deuces, and the reporter asked then-owner George Maloof why he allowed Scott to play there.
“I’ll never forget (his response),” Scott says. “George just smiled and said, ‘Jean Scott is good for my casino.’”
Not all Advantage Players were so lucky in that regard. At several casinos, including big ones on the Strip and off-Strip sites catering to local residents, security guards tossed out high-limit players after forcing them to do a “perp walk” through the gaming area, Scott says. They hadn’t committed a crime, but some were considered too good at video poker or suspected of abusing the system by selling comps or other transgression. That enforcement method has stopped.
“The casinos got smart,” Scott says. “If you really want to hurt an Advantage Player, just take away their slot card or put them on the no-mail list.” She says she’s been put on a couple of no-mail lists but has not had to surrender her players club card.
Players who “push the envelope” should avoid being obvious about it, she advises. “If you play only on multiple point days or only during a promotion, that’s a warning sign.”
Playing by the rules
Curtis says Scott’s friendly approach helps extend her playing time.
“She knows how to have a really good presence, so she doesn’t invoke their anger for different things,” Curtis said. “She’s knows how to play by the rules the right way. A lot of Advantage Players will do things that dis-ingratiate themselves right off the bat. She doesn’t do that. She’s very chatty and very fun to talk to. She gets to know the staff.”
Both Curtis and Castleman marvel at Scott’s ability to organize her gambling life. While her books emphasize the importance of researching games and promotions, most players would be overwhelmed by the effort that goes into her detailed calendars and notes.
“She knows what’s going on, when and where,” Curtis said. “She knows how to go to the place where EV (expected value) is the best.” That includes factoring in variables such as time and distance. For example, one casino might offer a promotion worth an extra dollar-per-hour on its face but is far enough away that the net value is actually less than what’s offered at a closer casino.
Scott succeeds because of the “game-playing mentality” nourished throughout her life, Curtis said.
“That’s what this is. It’s a big game, and she plays that game very well,” he said.
Castleman, who wrote Whale Hunt in the Desert: Secrets of a Vegas Superhost, says that in the 1980s, comps were more common for table-game players than slot players.
“Casinos didn’t have any respect for slot players,” he says. “When video poker came along, and slots got a little bit more popular, slot play started to account for more casino revenue than table games. Slot players are king in casinos now. Jean Scott had a lot to do with that.”
Adjusting to the limelight
Scott’s “everywoman” persona and conversational writing style help thousands of fans bond with her.
Castleman, who frequently dined with Scott and Brad at comped meals, recalls that she often wore a tiara – “She was the Queen of Comps, after all” – and usually sat facing the dining area. When she noticed other patrons looking at her, wondering whether they really were eating within view of the famous Jean Scott, she would smile and wave, inviting them over.
“People would line up to talk with her,” Castleman says. “And (Brad), as a matter of fact, had her books with him, and she’d sign them.”
In some ways, the editor says, her fame brought her out of a shell common to Advantage Players, who generally try to stay under the radar.
“She’s more withdrawn than she appears to be when she’s in public,” Castleman says. “She’s very open, very embracing when people come up to her. That doesn’t come naturally to her. She had to cultivate it.”
Curtis says Scott’s story is a classic example of being in the right place at the right time, then capitalizing on it.
On the night she won the car featured in the “48 Hours” episode, she had a nasty case of the flu and had to force herself to be on the casino floor to be present for the drawing.
“Sure enough, lightning struck,” Curtis says. “It had an unbelievably positive effect on everything she did. The book immediately zoomed up the charts. Here was somebody who wasn’t used to what media could do for you. She got herself in front of the cameras and took advantage of the opportunity. She rode it all the way to town and back.”
Parting observations
As she prepares to ride away from the “house that video poker built,” Scott reflects on what’s happened over the past three decades.
As of mid-November, she and Brad have hit 1,317 royal flushes, including a dealt royal on a 100-play machine that resulted in a $100,000 payout.
They’ve made numerous friends, many in the gambling world, although fellow Advantage Players are harder to find nowadays because of game changes and reduced promotions.
They’ve seen the Las Vegas area population more than double; Clark County had 2.23 million residents in 2018, up from 741,459 in 1990, according to the U.S. Census. The number of visitors doubled, from 20.95 million in 1990 to 42.12 million in 2018, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reports.
Megaresorts replaced many of the couple’s old haunts.
For Scott, the most substantial change is hard to pinpoint with numbers or buildings. It’s that many casinos have eroded the player-casino relationship with a raft of changes designed to pad the company’s bottom line.
More Frugal Gambling, her second book, cites a quote from the late Chester Simms, once co-owner of the Flamingo: “Gambling is the most personalized business there is. You are separating a man from his money without giving him a product or service. You had better at least give him a kiss.”
That philosophy, and the strong personal touch casinos once cultivated with their customers, has evaporated, Scott says.
In the golden years, “you knew the people at the slot club desk, you knew the floor people.”
“The casino atmosphere became kind of our life. That’s where we met friends. It was a warm, friendly lifestyle. There were good games, and there were good promotions.
“The hosts weren’t looking at you as an enemy. They would cheer when you got a jackpot. They knew, on the whole, that you were going to play. And another thing they knew is that you brought in other people.”
By and large, that’s gone, she adds. Hosts no longer have comp-writing authority, what she calls “the power of the pen.” That’s been replaced by hard-and-fast point systems, and she fears that casino kiosks eventually will replace hosts for all but the highest-level bettors.
She doesn’t see the trend reversing.
Occasionally, a casino might revive good games, increase bounce-back free play or offer juicier comps.
“Business will start booming,” she says, but the changes don’t last long after the “bean counters” chime in.
“Right now, the casinos seem to mainly be using generous food specials and casinowide jackpot promotions to draw in players. Maybe that is attractive to the unknowledgeable public, but it is not a big draw to skilled or knowledgeable players.”
#HotClicksandPicks: This Week: #exclusive – Parting words from ‘Frugal Gambler’ Jean Scott: Put the fun back in casinos. –@MGRUETZE, CDC Gaming Reports. https://t.co/0VvKMSSnQj #CDCgaming
— CDC Gaming Reports (@CDCNewswire) December 21, 2019
The last chapter of Scott’s first book is titled “Breaking Even Is a Beautiful Thing,” because savvy players could enjoy enough free rooms and meals to have a free, or almost free, vacation. Maybe they’d even come out ahead.
Scott says that approach doesn’t work anymore. Now the goal, as stated in what probably is her final book, The Frugal Gambler Casino Guide, is to lose less – hardly a goal that gamblers embrace.
“That’s where we are now,” she says. “There are advantage plays, but the advantage is so razor-thin I figure I won’t live long enough (to get it).
“It just isn’t fun anymore for us.”
