Good question. Your 401G is a business checking account and should be treated as such where your expenses are taken out of it.

My opinion and not a criticism:

Like any business you have to look at your expenses. if the four day trip is costing you $2000, and you are a red chip player, then you have to look at this and say to yourself if you can stay at a less expensive place and eat less expensively. Now you might not want to do this and I understand this. This trip might be a vacation or it is just that when you travel you like to stay at eat at fine places. Well if that is the case, then I think i would lower the $2000 expense for my 401G.

What I mean is even a red chip player can get a FREE room downtown. So think of it like this … if this was purely a business trip to make money I would stay downtown and eat less expensively. So maybe a day would only cost you $100 instead of $500, so this four day trip has a REAL expense of $400.

Also, if you are playing other games like slots and poker, you should have a 401G for each of these games separately.

The idea of the 401G is to build it up so that you don’t stay a red chip player. Using compound interest, as your 401 increases so does your bet size. But if your expenses are too big for the volume your are doing, then you either have to cut your expenses, figure out a way to do more business, or close your doors.

This is what I tell my retail clients and this is what I would tell you

Dominator

For myself only, I look at it a bit differently. (I would not presume to tell someone else to do this.)

If Sandtrap and I had not taken this course 10 years ago, and become advantage players, we would be taking many more trips in retirement instead of going to AC 1-2 times a month. We now take one cruise a year (instead of 2 or 3), and go to LV in June and Oct.

Were we taking more "vacation" trips, we would have to spend money on hotels, food, transportation, and incidentals. When we go to AC as frequently as we do, we do not pay for food or rooms. (We do pay for gas, of course.) Therefore, my accounting for my 401G only takes into account what I win or lose at craps or Pai Gow. When I play video poker, it comes out of a different account. Since I frequently win at Pai Gow, I use those winnings to feed my craps habit for those sessions when I am off.

This works for me, but may not for others.

Goddess

Gman, mine is a mix of the above. If I am travelling with Mrs. Griz, it’s not a "business" trip. That’s vacation dollars and usually not pulling from the 401G on non-gambling items. Don’t get me wrong, when I go down to the tables in the morning to roll, I’m all business, but after that, well, it’s another budget I’ll pull from.

When I go to just play craps, it’s now a "business" trip and the expenses are usually cut fairly back in order to maximize my ROI. (return on investment).

It’s time for some more business to get done…!
Hope to see some of you at a table sometime soon!
The "GTC Way" is business… and business is good!
😎