I travel to Las Vegas quite regularly & a question I’ve been asked on a few occasions is what is the advantage play scene like?
Vegas hustlers for the most part are movers. Unless there is a serious big money play, they don’t tend to camp machines as much & are more likely to hit and run before moving on to another area or casino altogether. Advantage players in other markets tend to camp a hell of lot more & often make themselves obvious that they’re waiting on a machine. An exception to this I’d say is over at Aria, Caesar’s Palace & to a lesser extent the Venetian/Palazzo. Granted, when you’ve been an advantage player for as long as I have you tend to run into the same faces repeatedly. However, it’s over at these places where the same slot hustlers I saw last week were the same ones I saw three months ago as well as six months ago. It appears that these advantage players have made these casinos their home base & they don’t intend on moving to other places which I personally don’t recommend.
Two popular Vegas slot hustler grievances are how much more competition there is now & that no one can make money anymore. Yes, there are more hustlers than ever in Vegas. But this situation isn’t unique to Vegas. There are more hustlers everywhere & let’s face it, these newer advantage play machines are much easier to figure out than in years past. As far as the second grievance is concerned, I easily make more money hustling slots in Vegas in 2021 than at any time in the last 10 years that my trips are almost always paid for & then some.
Why? Despite there being more competition, there are far more machines that can be advantage played. I used to make lists of what advantage play slots casinos carried. Not too long ago the lists would contain the basics i.e Golden Egypt, Ocean Magic, Aladdin’s Fortune, Plants vs Zombies etc. But as time progressed the list would get longer & longer. Combine that with how many casinos are in the Las Vegas region, along with the millions of tourists who are novice gamblers that come to town & there are ample opportunities to make money slot hustling.
As far as how the hustlers interact with each other goes, the ones in Vegas tend to keep to themselves. A casino in an area where it’s the only show in town forces hustlers to coexist & sometimes even share plays. As a result you develop a bit of a relationship with your fellow hustlers whereas almost all Vegas hustlers operate solo. I remember before ever making a trip to Las Vegas that many of the old school hustlers made it seem like Vegas was cutthroat & that the hustlers were constantly fighting with each other for plays. Maybe it was like that back in the day but it’s not even close to that now.
Lastly, a popular misconception is that Las Vegas gets the first look at new advantage play machines. Of course with Vegas being the headquarters of so many slot manufacturers it’d only make sense. You’d be surprised though how often I received texts from friends in other places around the country showing me a new game that can be hustled & it doesn’t drop in Vegas for several months.
Hopefully this was somewhat enlightening and gives you some insight into what it’s like to slot hustle in Las Vegas.
