Help! Non gambler that wants to get to Prime level.

[Ampurp85]

2 hours ago, B&S said:

Since when can a 12 year old be to prime status?  You have to be at least 18 years old.

 

Lol where did you get 12 y/o from in that quote/post???

[Ampurp85]

3 hours ago, monctonguy said:

I have never been offered anything from Royal's Casinos...and while I don't spend a lot there, I am sure over the past dozen cruises I have spent thousands and thousands.

 

I have only sailed Celebrity once...and gambled the same as I would on Royal....and its unbelieve the offers they give me for 10 day free cruises with Veranda rooms.....based on my gambling???!

 

Are Royals and Celebrity's casino programs linked somehow or?

No two different programs, because two different companies.

[Mike n Ky]

If I buy $500 worth of chips at the blackjack table and play for an hour and cash in my remaining chips what credit/points do I get?

[AshleyDillo]

2 hours ago, Mike n Ky said:

If I buy $500 worth of chips at the blackjack table and play for an hour and cash in my remaining chips what credit/points do I get?

No one knows.

While the dealer does enter how much you're bringing to the table and how much you're leaving with, points are based on average bet per hand..so they're tracking time at the table, average bet per hand and number of hands during that time period. They don't publish how many points you earn for the different table games and it's very subjective. You will see the pit boss come around with a tablet and they're watching and adjusting based on your play.  

[Tom38]

I’ll be a late on to this conversation. For a lot of people playing just for comps didn’t make sense. I travel with a group that are all master level and get comp everything. I gamble a bit but mostly hang out with them. I’m Diamond level and travel solo. I live in Florida and have a flexible schedule. I have been playing with the idea of jumping up to prime. For me free drinks at night, an inside room for a short cruise offer and a free 7 night once a year would be worth spending a little more in the slots. 

[tonyfsu21]

On 1/7/2023 at 10:12 PM, Mike n Ky said:

If I buy $500 worth of chips at the blackjack table and play for an hour and cash in my remaining chips what credit/points do I get?

The great mystery. It depends on how often the dealer and the pit boss decide to throw you a bone and note your play. I’m not a huge table game fan for this reason because there are too many variables regarding the points calculation and this is NOT Vegas. Slot machines seem to be a better fit for earning points. 

[GJ_123]

On 12/17/2022 at 9:50 PM, ElmoHongZito said:

Family of 4 with teen and preteen. Just did our first cruise last month during Thanksgiving on Oasis of the seas. We got 2 side-by-side ocean balcony staterooms because I could not imagine us 4 sharing one stateroom. I just booked a 7 day cruise on Harmony of the Seas for the girls spring break and just the sailing alone (not including gratuities or any add-ons) is costing us $5646. These are central park balcony rooms. Ocean view balcony was significantly more expense. 

Would be nice to be offered a free cruise now and again like I read so many people here have taken advantage of through the Casino Royale Club. Are those cruises usually just for me + 1? In other words would I still have to pay full cruise fair for my 2 daughters if I ever get a free cruise offer? 

I do not gamble but I’m not against it either. Was thinking of trying to get to Prime status on this upcoming sailing in March so I can hopefully earn 2 free cruises. 

How quickly do you think I can get to 2500 points on the highest per spin slot machine I can find? The idea is whether I am up or down I at least break even on what the free cruises would have cost me had I not earned through the casino. Hopefully come out ahead. I do not want to spend an excessive amount of time in the casino either because I am there to enjoy time with the family. 

Thanks in advance for any answers to my questions. 

Coming late to this too, I agree with what a lot of people are saying, chasing points/tiers etc. can get very expensive. A lot of it comes down to luck and getting enough wins on the machines to keep you going. Prime is 2500 points where the benefits are decent, but in terms of the instant rewards certificate you want to get 6500 minimum in my opinion which is an ocean view balcony or Junior Suite on select sailings. 9000 is even better (have achieved this once). If you can get 6500 points for say $2000 I think it's 100% worth it. The savings we've had so far with rewards certificates I think so far have been beneficial. You can even add kids to your cabin sometimes with no upgrade cost and you only have to pay their taxes & fees.

I agree with what some people are saying that many people find the casino fun and a big part of their cruise. If you are getting benefits from gambling even if you lose, in the way of free cruises etc. at least you are getting something back! 

One other tip... if you have kids ALWAYS do your open booking with Next Cruise as a US booking. Kids Sail Free is virtually always on offer with US bookings and this can be applied when you make your booking through the casino. Sometimes if you are not from US they will make the booking in the country you are from. But I always make it a US booking. I've heard some passengers complain about having to pay to phone the US line, but you can just use Skype! I've phoned them multiple times using Skype and works perfectly.

I can see the original post is from December. @ElmoHongZito did you ever try to get a rewards certificate/Prime?

[GJ_123]

On 1/8/2023 at 3:12 AM, Mike n Ky said:

If I buy $500 worth of chips at the blackjack table and play for an hour and cash in my remaining chips what credit/points do I get?

Virtually nothing I'm afraid, probably in the region of 100 points. The only way to accumulate meaningful points is through the slot machines. Unless you are spending 10's of thousands at the tables you will get barely anything. If you want Prime/Instant Rewards Certificate tables aren't the way to go. 

[tonyfsu21]

30 minutes ago, GJ_123 said:

Coming late to this too, I agree with what a lot of people are saying, chasing points/tiers etc. can get very expensive. A lot of it comes down to luck and getting enough wins on the machines to keep you going. Prime is 2500 points where the benefits are decent, but in terms of the instant rewards certificate you want to get 6500 minimum in my opinion which is an ocean view balcony or Junior Suite on select sailings. 9000 is even better (have achieved this once). If you can get 6500 points for say $2000 I think it's 100% worth it. The savings we've had so far with rewards certificates I think so far have been beneficial. You can even add kids to your cabin sometimes with no upgrade cost and you only have to pay their taxes & fees.

I agree with what some people are saying that many people find the casino fun and a big part of their cruise. If you are getting benefits from gambling even if you lose, in the way of free cruises etc. at least you are getting something back! 

One other tip... if you have kids ALWAYS do your open booking with Next Cruise as a US booking. Kids Sail Free is virtually always on offer with US bookings and this can be applied when you make your booking through the casino. Sometimes if you are not from US they will make the booking in the country you are from. But I always make it a US booking. I've heard some passengers complain about having to pay to phone the US line, but you can just use Skype! I've phoned them multiple times using Skype and works perfectly.

I can see the original post is from December. @ElmoHongZito did you ever try to get a rewards certificate/Prime?

Please let me know how to get 6500 points with $2000 because that seems like a pipe dream. The math just doesn’t work out. 

[cruisellama]

On 12/17/2022 at 5:15 PM, bakingbad3 said:

I actually just posted something about this in a different thread!  Here are my thoughts:

Bottom line up front: You can get there in as little as an hour, but you need to have an appropriately sized bankroll.  If you can walk into the casino with $12,500 cash, you will get to Prime.  You will likely pay somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for your trouble.  

So how do you do it? Find one of the all-digital slot machines.  You are looking for buttons on the bottom part that say "x lines" with "x" being numbers like 1, 15, 25, 50, whatever.  The higher the better.  You should be able to find one that says 200 or 300 as one of the highest values.  You are also looking for a denomination button, or a 2 by 2 grid of a cluster of buttons.  They should say "1 c", "5 c", and so on.  This is the bet amount.  You are looking for at least 25 cents.  You should be able to find a machine that has somewhere around 200 lines to play and lets you bet 25 cents a line.  Find it?  Good, that's your machine.  Start feeding it $100 bills.  Pick the highest line amount and the highest denomination amount.  Hit the "spin" button. You should be betting about $50 a spin.  You can just smack the button over and over to skip the animations, though you might end up on a machine with mini-games that force you to interact.  There is zero skill involved in these.  Just go as quickly as you can.  If you can bet once every 5 seconds, you'll hit Prime in 21 minutes after pushing the spin button exactly 250 times.  Though chances are you'll play slower, and who knows, you might even get a hand pay (which is when you win an amount on a single spin that exceeds a certain threshold (I believe it is $1200 or something like that) where the attendant has to pay you in person and get your tax info and stuff).  So conservatively, let's call it 2 hours.  But definitely should be doable in a single sitting.  You might burn through a lot of your $100's in a row, but the game should ebb and flow and my guess is that you'll end up down a couple thousand, give or take, when you're through.  Though you could be down ten thousand or more.  But as long as you start with $12,500, you'll get to Prime guaranteed.  

And that's it!  Congrats on getting to Prime!

If you're interested in my logic and math, or how to reduce the risk of this costing a lot more than a couple grand, read on.  

How do I arrive at my conclusions?  A huge part of my math revolves around the "RTP" value, which stands for "return to player".  These are values set by the casino and dictate how much money, over a long period of time, each machine will return to the player.  In Vegas, slots are usually in the mid to high 90s, meaning that if you spun a $10,000 penny slot machine a million times, you'd leave with $9,600 assuming it had a 96% RTP.  I am assuming that Royal has an 85% RTP.  I may be over or under estimating that, but I am confident that this is fairly accurate.  Here's why.  A good video poker machine in Vegas will have an RTP extremely close to 100%, like 99.5% or higher.  Some even have a hair over 100% RTP, believe it or not.  But the general consensus is that on Royal, video poker RTP is terrible.  So I assume that means it is somewhere the 90-95% range.  Call it 92.5%.  Royal gives you 1 point for every $10 you put through a video poker machine.  But they give you 1 point for every $5 you put through a slot machine.  This isn't out of the kindness of their hearts.  Logically this must be because slots have an RTP that is around twice as bad as video poker.  So that's how I get to 85% RTP for slots.  If you brought in 1,250,00 pennies and you played a single penny machine 1,250,00 times, you would walk away with Prime status and be almost statistically guaranteed to have roughly 1,062,500 pennies left over.  But it would take you over 72 days of playing 24/7 to do this.  Obviously we can't play a penny at a time.  So we trade statistical certainty of the outcome for time spent playing.  Playing $50 hands as in my instructions above, this could take less than a half an hour.  But the chances that you end the session down 6, 8, 10 thousand dollars are not insignificant (you could also end the session up several thousand dollars too!).  You have to trade your comfort level with knowing the final result (which if you remember will ALWAYS converge to you losing $1,875) with the amount of time you are willing to sit and play.  There is a lot of math that goes into figuring out the odds, and it depends on the standard deviation of the pay table (which is impossible to know and varies greatly by game).  But for our purposes we can just double the amount of time it takes to get to Prime for every time you cut the bet size in half.  My conservative guess for the $50 bet size was 2 hours, so $25 bets would take you 4 hours, $10 bets would take you 10 hours, and $2 bets would take you 50 hours (though with $2 bets you should never have a hand pay and could always play fast, so this may actually be closer to 10 hours at a consistent 5 seconds a spin).  If you had groups of people doing each different strategy, the group making $50 bets would have some people leaving the casino with Prime status and $1,000 left over, while others would be leaving with Prime status plus $20,000 in their pocket.  The group playing the $2 hands would all leave with Prime and with cash amounts somewhere between $9,000 and $12,000.  But they traded more time at the machine for that tighter window of likely outcomes.

Hope this helped!  The most important thing to remember is this: Royal does not lose money on the casino program.  Statically, they are charging each person who makes it to Prime $1,875 to get there.  Some pay more, some pay less, but the house always wins.

 

Very interesting observations.   Had a sense there was a process that could be followed to "ladder up".  I'm not a gambler, but I have family members who are at that level.  I enjoy watching.

[GJ_123]

49 minutes ago, tonyfsu21 said:

Please let me know how to get 6500 points with $2000 because that seems like a pipe dream. The math just doesn’t work out. 

It's finding a game on the slots that you perhaps won't win on but pays out enough that the points just keep building up. The key is basically the amount of time that your money lasts and not having to put in more. To give you an idea in April my wife had $750 dollars free play and that lasted her the whole of the first night, just kept picking up enough wins. I think at one point she got a pot for $800 and another couple for $400-$500. On the first night she got 2100 points, so straight away that's 1/3 of the way there.

Don't get me wrong it's cost us much more than this before! We got 9000 points once but that was probably more like $5000-$5500 that cruise. We are using the certificate for that next month, it's a Junior Suite on a nice sailing and we still saved a bit of money on what it would have cost us. Maybe we have just been relatively lucky. Maybe next time we won't get anything like 6500!

[Ampurp85]

1500 points will get you a free cruise and the higher your points the better the options are, usually at the 6500 mark they are offering JS and suites. My last cruise in April I wanted to earn a cruise and make prime for the next year. I got 3200 points on about $2300 but I originally wasn't playing for the points, and probably could have gotten it for under $1700 had I been focused. On that list it was cruises up to 12n in interiors, OV and balconies. I never play more than I would pay for the cruise.