I realised that you and I were doing it completely wrong when I saw a bunch of videos, first
by Brian Christopher.
He's a popular YouTube slot machine gambler and he was on Carnival and he posted videos
with titles like Major Win On The Open Seas, Triple Up: Massive Win On Carnival.
And then I met a really interesting cruiser called Jen's Away Cruisin, and she told me
about the many, many offers she gets for free cruises.
She gets them every single week.
So I thought it's time that I investigated to work out how does this whole gambling on
a cruise ship work?
Welcome aboard.
I'm Gary Bembridge and this is what I found out.
Well, first off, most ocean cruise ships that I've been on have casinos.
There are a few that don't.
So Norwegian's Pride of America, all the Viking Ocean Cruise ships, Disney and Azamara ships,
they don't have casinos on at all, nor do most of the expedition and river cruises that
I've been on either.
But those that do have them, they're always in high traffic areas and involves me walking
through them to get to and from the theatre.
I guess that is to encourage us to stop and play.
So bear that in mind.
Now, the more that I explored, I came across nine key differences to land-based casinos
that I love to go to in places like Las Vegas.
The most important thing I discovered is that the odds in cruise casinos are much worse
than they are on land.
Now, I'm not particularly kind of an aficionado on all of the details, but I found through
various gambling blogs and even cruise blogs like cruzely.com, they had a bunch of articles
with all the details.
And they say that in Las Vegas casinos, slot machines are likely to pay 90% and way, way
higher.
It's rumoured to be much lower, about 80% on cruise ships.
Now in blackjack, which my partner, Mark, plays a lot of when we cruise, he notes that
when playing on land, for example, if he bids $10 and gets blackjack, he'll get back $15.
But on the ship he regularly only gets $12 and roulette also has much worse payouts.
So you don't go on a cruise to really gamble professionally.
But there are other perks and other reasons for gambling, which I'll come to in a short
while.
The table minimums are though much, much lower on ships than on land.
I've played for as little as $3 per bet on blackjack, but I've seen it changed a lot
based on where I'm sailing.
The most amazing big change was we were on a trip which went from Australia up to Asia,
and we were paying with like between 3 and $5 minimums.
We got to Hong Kong, lots of Chinese travellers got on board and it ramped up to $12, and
on some tables up to $20.
So the price minimums do change based on where you're cruising.
So because of all of this, it's much more recreational and sociable than playing on
land casinos.
I find it much, much less intimidating to play the tables on board ships.
The other gamblers are definitely more friendly and they're much more forgiving of people
like me who don't fully know, don't fully follow all the rules in things like blackjack,
when to stick and so on.
In Vegas, very different.
I've found if you don't stick to the rules, don't play properly, they get really, really
difficult with you.
Also, to make it much easier, the cruise lines run classes.
They show and remind me how to play all the various different games.
They also, which I really like put on tournaments, which are great particularly for us less experienced
gamblers because they have a small flat fee, like I was recently on Queen Mary 2 crossing,
I don't really know roulette that well.
I just paid $30.
I got a big pile of chips and I could play roulette, just experiment and learn how it
went.
I've also been earlier the year on Oceanian Marina and I did a slot competition, which
was about for the same amount.
By the way, the winner actually pocketed a couple of hundred dollars, but it wasn't me
unfortunately.
Unlike on land, cruise casinos are not open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Cruise ship casinos can only open when they're cruising in international waters because all
the gambling regulations.
So if you are into gambling, you need to go for cruises with lots of sea days or certainly
ones that leave ports early in the evening because otherwise you're going to have much
less gambling.
Even on sea days though, while the slot machines will be open all day, the tables tend to have
much more restricted times.
Also in cruise casinos, passengers can gamble from the age of 18 versus 21 on land casinos
like in Las Vegas in the United States.
Although for many US departing or very focused itineraries like Alaska and even some Caribbean
cruisers like on MSC, they will stick to the 21 years of age gambling rule.
Importantly though, on many cruise lines, of course you can't drink until you're 21,
so you may not actually be able to drink when you're gambling.
There are of course because of the size, fewer games and fewer tables than in those big land
casinos.
So on cruise ships, I usually find four key ways to gamble.
Bingo, scratch cards, those kind of arcade games like coin pusher things, and of course
casino games, slots and tables.
Now in terms of tables, I have always found blackjack and have found some dealer based
poker games like Ultimate Texas Holdem, Three Card Caribbean Stud, and I've never been on
a cruise with regular poker games where you play versus other guests, like those big tournaments
you get in land casinos.
Though I do believe and have heard that Norwegian and Royal Caribbean do sometimes run those.
But on most cruises it's usually video poker game machines.
I pretty much always find roulette tables on most.
Occasionally on the very big ships I've seen a craps table.
I've never seen baccarat but some people told me that some ships do have them.
Sports gaming, by the way is not a big thing on cruises yet.
I did actually find it on a recent princess cruise on their app, which also has other
games on it where you can actually then gamble pretty much anywhere around the ship.
The seventh key difference is I can use cash as on land, but I can also charge my gambling
to my room via my cruise card.
Some cruise lines have even let me use my onboard credit to gamble with like when I
was on Celebrity, Royal Caribbean, but for example, not on Holland America.
So you need to check if your cruise line will let you use your onboard credit.
To charge to my room, I put my cruise card in the slot machine and I basically charge
it.
The good thing about that is I've not normally been charged a fee, so that's why I avoid
the onboard cash machines.
They often have a fee if you want to withdraw cash.
But if you charge when you're playing at a table, there also seems to be a fee for that
on many cruise lines.
Now, unlike in Vegas when I finish playing where they print out that little slip which
has your balance on, and you go to machine and get the cash out, on most cruise lines,
the balance goes onto my cruise card and I then have to take my cruise card to the cashier
to cash it out.
Now the balance on that cruise card does not offset my onboard account bill.
It's a separate thing.
So I physically have to cash out and I need to make sure that I always remember that at
least on the last night I cash out or I will lose my money.
So make sure that you do not miss out on that.
The next difference I noticed was no free drinks.
In Vegas, waitresses come around offering free drinks, but I've found on most cruises,
if I'm playing the slots, I start to earn some free drinks points and eventually then
I earn some free drinks.
If playing on the tables, occasionally the pit boss might offer a round of drinks, but
generally speaking it's not free drinks in a cruise casino.
One thing I did discover, by the way from the Point’s Guy Blog, that if I actually
had status on the big land-based casinos, you could actually get perks on the cruise,
but not the other way around.
So if for example, you've got status with MGM rewards or the Caesar program, you'll
find many cruise lines will give you equivalent benefits or even up to based on your status,
free cruises.
So if you do have status, check with your cruise line and find out if you can get that.
So are there any similarities to land-based casinos?
You're probably asking me by now with all those differences.
Smoking, unfortunately.
Many, many casinos on cruise ships also allow smoking.
It's the one place on many ships that you can smoke indoors.
It is changing though.
There was no smoking on my recent Celebrity, Cunard, Oceania, Regent Seven Seas Cruises
and Seaborn trips.
So it is changing.
Another similarity unfortunately is if you're from the US, you have to pay tax even though
you are kind of out at sea.
Now, normally what happens is the cruise line, if you've got a big win, over $1,200 in a
payout, I believe, they will normally give you the IRS forms.
The rest of it you're supposed to of course declare.
If you come from the UK or many other places, you don't have to pay taxes on wins in the
casino because they don't tax gambling wins.
Another key similarity and one that has proven to be a game changer for many is cruise line
casino loyalty programs.
Those programs are different to the normal cruise loyalty programs you get for sailing.
And many cruisers like Jen's Away Cruising that I mentioned earlier, uses those to get
perks, freebies and cruises.
Now, I had always assumed that you had to gamble and lose a lot of money, but Jen has
showed me this is not the case if you gamble smarter.
And talking to a casino host on board a cruise recently, they confirmed what Jen had said.
Now all the lines appear to have these casino programs.
The most popular ones seem to include Royal Caribbean's Club Royal Rewards Program, Celebrity's
Celebrity Blue Chip, Carnival's Players Club, and the Norwegian group across all of their
lines, casinos at sea.
Now, no matter how big or small a gambler you are, Jen and the casino host recommended
that I do the following few things.
First of all, go to the casino on the first night because most cruise lines, by the way,
give free slot play to use on the first day or two.
And secondly, while there, seek out the casino host and speak to them, ask them what is the
program?
Do I need to sign up?
How do I get the perks?
Most of them, by the way, just simply work by putting a cruise card in the slot machine.
Now, while the line can track exactly spend when I'm playing the slots, it's more judgements
used by the casino host observing play on the tables.
So being on their radar early on is really important because the crews that casino host
manages and decides and allocates perks during the cruise.
But how much though do I need to gamble to get free cruises?
That was the big challenge I had of Jen.
Now, I did look at Royal Caribbean as a good example, and according to that, to get a free
interior cabin, an inside cabin, I needed to get to the prime level.
That was 2,500 points.
Now you earn 1 point per $5 gambled.
So in theory, I'd have had to place bets of $12,500 across a year.
However, Jen doesn't gamble that much and she still gets all those free and discounted
cruise offers across many lines.
Carnival, Royal, Caribbean, Holland America, she gets those every single week.
Now what she does is she says she gambles between $1,000 and $2,500 on a cruise.
That is quite a lot of money, but she's been on 50 cruises and she tracks the cost if she'd
paid the going rate versus her actual total out of pocket, which includes her gambling,
her drinks, any onboard spend.
And she's calculated she's paid less all in than a third in total of what the value of
the cruises she'd been on even including some gambling losses.
Now it's important that she doesn't lose that amount of money, it's just the amount of money
that you put through the system.
Now I've put together a blog post of how she does this in great detail, including your
tips by line that you can see on my blog, tipsfortravelers.com/casino because it's too
complicated to cover here.
Now she stresses getting on the casino host radar and into whatever lines program at the
start is really important if you want to go down this route.
She recommends on your first cruise, you probably need to gamble, put through at least the cost
of the cruise.
You don't need to lose it, but you just need to get on the radar.
Once you're on the radar, in the system, you keep getting offers.
They're constant.
Of course, whenever gambling, never gamble more than you can afford to lose.
What Mark and I do when we go on board a cruise is we go with a little gambling fund.
We have a little envelope with the amount of money that we are prepared to lose.
We cash out every night and we kind of know where we are.
Once that envelope's gone, we stop.
I put links here and in the description for the gambling responsibly sites in the US and
the UK if you do need help or it does become an issue.
Now, if you find all of this interesting and want to know other cruising hacks and tips,
watch this video where I talk about the seven things that smart cruises do to make their
cruise amazing.
See you over there.