Taking a run at Caesars Diamond in a Day / Diamond Plus status

Chasing Diamond Plus by demonstrating Diamond in a Day

While I am ultimately on the hunt for Caesars Diamond Plus status (more on why in a moment), the technique I have used to get there is more widely applicable since I have followed a classic “diamond in a day” strategy.

For those unfamiliar, Caesars Diamond status requires 15,000 tier credits. Tier credits are generally earned by gambling, though it is also possible to earn some tier credits through the credit card (based on hitting spend thresholds rather than per dollar spent) and through daily bonuses (for earning a certain number of tier credits in a single day).

To get ahead of myself, I had already earned 10,000 tier credits from the credit card. As it so happens, Diamond Plus status (the next tier above Diamond) requires 25,000 tier credits. Since the gap between where I was (10K tier credits) and where I wanted to be (25K tier credits) was exactly 15K tier credits, I knew that this pursuit could be both beneficial for my goals and more broadly useful for readers, since someone starting at 0 would presumably want to earn 15,000 tier credits in a day for Diamond status. It just worked out well that the gap to get me to Diamond Plus was exactly that number of tier credits.

I’ve previously written about earning tier credits through the credit card. If you want to compare with doing that, read that post. I’m not going to dive into the details on the credit card in this post. Instead, in this post, I’m going to focus on how I earned 15,000 tier credits in a day while minimizing expected losses.

First, it is necessary to understand in a bit more granular detail how tier credits work.

Earning rates for tier credits from gambling vary

The most important thing to understand here is that the earning rate for tier credits from gambling varies based on the type of gambling you’re doing. I’m going to focus on a way to reduce the mathematical house edge and maximize your tier credit earnings. In order to get to that, it helps to understand the different rates at which you earn tier credits, but keep in mind that the numbers will look better after first considering the basics.

Most ordinary slot machines at most Caesars properties earn one tier credit per $5 wagered. You could wager that $5 in one shot, or you could wager $0.10 fifty times. All that matters is that you’ll typically get one tier credit for every $5 that gets wagered in the machine. However, some machines can have much worse tier credit earning rates. I’ve heard of some as bad as $20, $30, or even $50 wagered per tier credit. Slot machines don’t proactively tell you their tier credit earning rate. Rather, you would have to put in your card and pay attention to how quickly you are earning tier credits as compared to how much you’re betting.

Table games are even less predictable. At least in some cases, your tier credits will be based on a pit boss figuring your average wager over a period of time (though, as tech has improved, I think some casinos are keeping track with NFC in their chips). That gets even more complex depending on whether and how they count the many side bets available on lots of table games. As best I can tell, it is almost impossible to predict what you’re going to earn in terms of tier credits from table games. That isn’t a good way of chasing status. If you enjoy playing table games, play them because you enjoy them, and if you earn status from that, it’s a nice bonus.

Personally, I wanted a more predictable and replicable path.

Video poker is a slot-machine-like game with a very low house edge if you play the correct strategy. The correct strategy component is really important because you need to know which cards to hold in a game of draw poker to mathematically give you the best payback over an infinite number of hands. While the cards are randomly dealt and drawn, the “right” decision about which cards to hold is just a math problem, considering the mathematical probability of each winning hand as compared to the payout for those winning hands.

Assuming you find a machine with a good pay table (some machines pay out more than others for various hands) and you play with a perfect strategy, the return to player over the long haul can be as much as ~99.5%. In other words, over an infinite number of hands, on a machine with the best pay table, you would get back more than 99% of the money you put into the machine. In real life, there will be some variance (i.e. over any finite number of hands, your results could be better or worse). However, the volatility of draw poker is likely to be relatively low if you’re playing strategically. That makes video poker a really appealing way to earn tier credits, though video poker earns tier credits at a slower rate of one tier credit per $10 wagered in most cases (though, again, you need to pay attention because some machines are 1 tier credit per $20 wagered).

To put some numbers to this that may sound outrageous at first (but maybe not later), if you were earning 1 tier credit per $10 wagered and you needed to earn 15,000 tier credits, you would need to wager $150,000. Spoiler alert: I didn’t do that. However, it is also worth mentioning that you wouldn’t wager that all at once; rather, it would be a dollar or two or ten here and there over many, many spins. Gamblers call this number the “coin-in” number, despite the fact that casinos no longer use physical coins in most places.

Considering the $150,000 coin-in necessary to earn Caesars Diamond under ordinary video poker circumstances (or $75,000 on more volatile ordinary slot machines), you can see why cruise lines think that Caesars Diamond players might lose enough in the cruise ship casino to make it worth giving them a free cruise.

I wouldn’t personally put $150,000 through a video poker machine since, based on the right set of circumstances, I would expect to lose up to 1%, which means $1,500 lost. That’s a high price for Diamond status. However, there’s some variance at play, so you could end up ahead or you could end up even further behind. Either way, that’s not really the way I would prefer to earn status.

However, there can be an easier path. Caesars resorts sometimes run tier credit promotions whereby you earn more tier credits during specific windows of time at specific casinos.

A Caesars 10X Tier Credit Promotion

This week (May 19-25, 2026), there is a 10X tier credit multiplier on offer at the Caesars properties on Lake Tahoe, about an hour’s drive away from Reno. In other words, for every one tier credit you earn, you’ll earn an additional nine tier credits after the event is over, provided that you remember to swipe your card at a kiosk and activate the promotion on your account before you play. That step is always necessary for promotions like this.

I believe that bonus tier credits post about 1-2 weeks after the tier credit multiplier event, so I don’t expect to have Caesars Diamond Plus until sometime next week or the week after.

I should note that 10X tier credit multipliers do not happen frequently. They do happen throughout the year, but the dates and locations will vary. Promotional 5x tier credit multipliers are a little bit more common, but your mileage will still vary.

Make sure that you’re signed up for email alerts from Caesars Rewards to find out about these events. Additionally, Debra at Traveling Well for Less has a list of tier credit multiplier days on her website (while it looks like an old post, you’ll find a link to a list of 2026 tier credit multiplier days in there), along with all of the Caesars locations that have them.

A 10X tier credit multiplier makes Diamond status far easier to achieve with video poker, since you’ll essentially earn ten tier credits per $10 put into a machine. Suddenly, Diamond requires significantly less “coin in”, at only $15,000 wagered (actually less).

If $15,000 sounds wildly crazy to you, it might not when you consider that a loss of 1%-2% on that $15,000 would be $150-$300. That’s around your expected loss if you had to gamble through the full $15,000 (depending on the pay tables and how well you play — I’m accounting for some imperfection with that calculation). However, because Caesars offers additional bonuses for earning certain numbers of tiered credits in a single day, you’ll actually put through even less money.

A separate section will address variance and how you might play a different game for a 10X tier credit promotion to earn Diamond at a predetermined (higher) cost to eliminate variance. Earning Diamond status that way will be more expensive, but you’ll know going in exactly how much it’ll cost you. I’ll come back to that.

How many tier credits do you need to earn to get Diamond in a day with a 10X tier credit promotion?

You might reasonably assume that the answer to this question is very simple. Since you need 15,000 total tier credits for diamond status, you might assume that you need to earn 1,500 tier credits on a 10X day in order to earn diamond status. The truth is a little bit more complicated.

Caesars has a number of different daily bonuses depending on how many tier credits you earn in a single calendar day:

• Earn 500 tier credits, earn a bonus 125 tier credits
• Earn 1,000 tier credits, earn a bonus 1,000 tier credits
• Earn 2,500 tier credits, earn a bonus 5,000 tier credits
• Earn 5,000 tier credits, earn a bonus 10,000 tier credits

Note that those tier credit bonuses only apply to your base earnings in a single day, before the multiplier. Also note that a “day” is not defined as a calendar day. In Las Vegas, the “day” for the above bonuses starts at 6am. I’m not sure about Tahoe, but I would guess it is similar. I was going for Diamond in a single session, so the timing for the purposes of the daily bonus didn’t matter.

Because of the daily bonus, you need to earn 1,400 tier credits in order to earn Caesars Diamond status in a single day on a 10X day. That 1,400 tier credits will become 14,000 tier credits based on the 10x multiplier. Because you’ll have earned more than 1,000 base tier credits in a single day, you’ll trigger the 1,000 tier credit bonus. That will bring you to 15,000 tier credits, which is good for Caesars Diamond status.

All of the above means that you actually need to put $14,000 “coin in” on a machine that earns 1 tier credit per $10 wagered for the purpose of earning enough tier credits in a single day to earn Caesars Diamond status. That still probably sounds like a ton of money to someone who is not a casino regular, but consider that you could be doing it at $1.25 per spin, $10 per spin, $50 per spin, or some other amount, all depending on your personal threshold for reasonability and the machine you choose.

A different strategy without vairance

Setting aside the big numbers for a second, one of the biggest things to consider is variance. While perfect play might mean that, on average, over the long haul, you’ll get more than 99% of your money back when playing full-pay video poker at a perfect strategy, the truth is that even if you’re able to play perfectly for hours at a time, the laws of probability mean that there will be variance in your actual results. The numbers that apply over an infinite number of hands aren’t necessarily relevant to you when you aren’t playing an infinite number of hands. Rather, you’re playing a finite number of hands, and after that finite number of hands, you may be on the winning or losing side of variance. Your mileage may vary is very apropos in this situation.

If you hate variance, you can potentially play these 10x tier credit multipliers in such a way as to eliminate variance and know exactly how much money you are going to lose. It requires a different inferior strategy, but for those who are risk-averse while still wanting Caesars Diamond for free cruises and free Atlantis stays, it could be worth consideration, though note that I did not pursue this path and can’t confirm it will be available wherever you go for a tier credit multiplier.

At some casinos, on some video poker machines (particularly on some of those machines that exist at casino bars), in addition to video poker, you might find a digital form of roulette. In those rare instances with a roulette game on the video poker machine, some machines will pay tier credits at the same rate as video poker. Again, your mileage may vary here because casinos don’t like to make this stuff easy, and it is possible that some machines earn tier credits at different rates. It would require some diligence on your side to check the various machines and know that you’re getting what you’re expecting. However, if you find the right roulette machine, you could earn one tier credit for every ten dollars put into the machine (before the tier credit multiplier).

If you find one of those machines with a 25-cent bet, it would be possible, at least theoretically, to play every single number on the roulette wheel (some casinos no longer allow this, so your mileage may vary). Assuming a double-zero game, you’re going to bet 38 quarters ($9.50) on each spin and get back 36 quarters ($9) when your number hits (assuming the ordinary 35:1 payout when your number hits). One of your numbers will hit every time since you’re selecting all of the numbers, but it pays out less than what you are paying to spin. In other words, you’re going to lose $0.50 on every single bet. You’ll be earning not quite but almost one tier credit per spin. You would need to spin the machine 1,474 times in order to earn the necessary tier credits (assuming 1 tier credit per $10 coin in). If you spin 1,474 times and you’re losing 50 cents every time, you’re going to lose $737 in order to earn enough tier credits for Caesars Diamond status.

I think $737 is too high a price to pay for Caesars Diamond, but I also recognize that Diamond status could be worth more than that to some folks, given waived resort fees, complimentary valet and self-parking at most Caesars properties, complimentary four-night stay at Atlantis (though you do pay resort fees), and the potential to match to free cruises. I could see someone getting more than $737 in value out of that, and it certainly might be more appealing than spending $50K on the Caesars credit card.

To be clear, I wouldn’t pursue Caesars Diamond status that way. Still, it may be an option for someone who is too risk-averse to accept variance or uninterested in learning video poker strategy.

However, there are things to note here. For roulette to work, you need to be able to find one of these roulette machines on a poker machine setup at a place that has a 10X tier credit multiplier (not as easy as it sounds), you need to make sure that it’s paying out the expected number of tier credits, you need to put in the time spinning the machine mindlessly without any hope of winning, and you need the machine to actually allow you to place a bet on every number.

It is my understanding that at some properties, you’re not limited to betting no more than 20 numbers at a time. That would eliminate the possibility of playing this strategy.

My experience using Video Poker to earn 15K tier credits

As already stated above, the strategy for Caesars Diamond in a Day improves significantly for those who are willing to learn how to play video poker well.

The first key is finding a good pay table. When I talk about the return to player being north of 99% given perfect play, that’s only true on machines with what’s called a full pay table. “Full pay” video poker (the basic “Jacks or Better” format) pays 9 times your wager for a full house, 6 times your wager for a flush, and 4 times your wager for a straight (otherwise known as 9/6/4 or 9/6 for short). The rest of the pay table is typically constant from one machine to the next for the same game.

I’m not a video poker expert, but there is no shortage of websites and books that can teach you to play video poker if you want to learn, including how to identify the best machines.  I’m not going to dive deeply into that here because I’m not a video poker expert, and there are plenty of experts and expert tools out there designed to help you learn how to play.

Assuming that you need to put $14,000 through the machine in order to earn Caesars Diamond in a day, and you don’t expect to play perfectly, so you decide that your expected loss is 2%, it would cost you $280 to earn Caesars Diamond status. If you’re able to play closer to a perfect strategy, your expected loss could be as low as about $70. Keep in mind, though, that variance means that your actual results may be better or worse than that.

I had gotten a really good piece of information about the existence of a few 9/6/4 Jacks or Better games that exist between Caesars Republic and Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Even having that information, the machines I wanted were almost impossible for me to find. I spent a couple of hours looking around the casino for them.

Machines can be moved at any time, and both casinos are undergoing complete renovations, so the floor is an absolute mess.

It’s not an ideal time to go to Tahoe except for the 10x tier credit multiplier. Nonetheless, I pressed on, checking one machine after another. You’d be surprised at how two machines literally next to each other that look identical can have different pay tables.

Also probably surprising to those who aren’t familiar with video poker, the pay tables can differ depending on how many coins you bet on the machine. In other words, if the machine is ordinarily 25 cents a spin but you can alternatively bet 50 cents or a dollar a spin, you might see a better payout at the one-dollar mark than you do at the 25-cent spin level. A slightly worse pay table can decrease the expected return by 1-3%. Just like there is a big difference between a credit card earning 2% cash back everywhere vs a credit card earning 1% cash back everywhere, there is a big difference between a machine with an expected return of 99.5% vs one with an expected return of 96.5%.

I found that 8/5 Jacks or Better (an inferior payout structure) was very common around the casino, but some of those 8/5 Jacks or Better machines would become 9/5 Jacks or Better if you were betting a dollar or more (still not quite 9/6, but better). There were also machines that had worse payouts. I saw one that was 7/5 next to a machine that was 9/5. No informed gambler would choose to play on the 7/5 machine, but the casinos bank on the fact that most people are not very informed. I did find quite a lot of 9/5 machines if you are willing to play in dollar betting increments (which was not as high as the 9/6 that I sought). Betting based on $1 increments means that in order to get the full royal flush payout, you would need to be playing at least $5 a hand.

I found that on some machines that were one-hand at a time, and some machines that were 3, 5, or 10 hands at a time. Those multiple-play machines can be of interest because the way a multiple-hand machine works is that, for example, you play ten hands at a time, where you start all hands with the same cards, picking which cards you want to keep, and then they deal out the draw cards ten separate times. You have up to ten total chances to win. This helps to reduce the variance of the game. You’re not getting an infinite number of hands, but the more opportunities you get to draw on the same hand, the more opportunities you have to connect with a good hand and get closer to the true mathematical probability of each hand.

The multi-hand games can be of interest, but they can get really expensive. I considered playing a three-handed machine that would have cost me $15 per spin to get the 9/6/4 payout, which was an amount that seemed acceptable given that this game has relatively little house edge. To be clear, I would never consider betting $15 a spin on a regular slot machine (some folks do, but that isn’t my style).

However, I eventually found a 50-hand machine that offered the 9-6-4 payout table when betting in increments of 50 cents. That would have gotten expensive if I had played 50 hands, but with the 50-play machines, you can choose to play fewer hands, so I used a 50-cent betting increment and played 10 hands. The pay table pays more for a royal flush if you bet 5 increments of your betting unit per hand, so I bet $2.50 per hand ($0.50 x 5 on each hand) to max out the payout table with the minimum 10 hands. That means I was betting $25 total per spin.

On the one hand, that feels like a ton to me as someone who is not a slot player. I’m not even generally a $25-per-hand player at table games like blackjack. I was initially a little nauseated at the idea of playing $25 a spin at video poker. However, the better payout table makes a difference of about 1%, which becomes significant at scale.

Betting $25 per spin, I was earning 2.5 tier credits with every spin. I would alternatively earn 2 tier credits on one spin and 3 tier credits on the next spin. I was glad to see that the machine had a tier credit counter at the top that showed exactly how many tier credits I had earned during the session. That made it really easy to track my progress toward the goal.

Because I was playing 10 hands at a time, there were very few spins where I didn’t earn any of the $25 back. I pretty commonly earned at least $5 to $10 back, even on “bad” spins. Obviously, I came out well ahead on some spins.

Earning 2.5 tier credits per spin, I needed 560 total spins to earn 1,400 tier credits (that 560 spins at $25 per spin would equal $14,000 coin in).

Before I decided to do this, I wasn’t sure how many hands I would be able to play per hour. I had assumed it would take me at least a few hours. In the end, I earned 1,401 tier credits in about 90 minutes. That averages out to about 373 hands per hour. The pace didn’t feel particularly frenetic. There were a few times I had to stop and think for a minute about which cards to hold, but there were also plenty of hands where it was obvious.

My final spin bumped me to 1,401 tier credits, and I cashed out without another spin. I was down $308.75, for a loss of 2.2% on the $14,000 coin in. I don’t know whether that represents poor luck (variance) or whether it represents my imperfect play, though I expect at least some of it is due to the latter.  I didn’t practice as much as I perhaps should have, a fact that became clear when I legitimately wasn’t sure which cards to hold a few times. I probably made a few mistakes along the way.

Still, I can live with a 2.2% loss. If it cost me $308 to earn Caesars Diamond status for nearly two years, that’s probably a pretty good deal. I’m even happier to have earned Diamond Plus (since I started with 10K tier credits and expect 15K more from this run).

And, in reality, after completing my mission in Lake Tahoe, I returned to Reno and played a couple of poker tournaments, winning enough money to cover my video poker loss :-).

For those curious about bankroll management, I loaded the video poker machine with $1,000 to start, though I had decided not to let my losses climb much past $500 before ditching this pursuit and labeling it a failure. Luckily, I didn’t have to abandon ship.

Why I pursued this 15K tier credit strategy to get Diamond Plus

As a reminder, I started with 10K tier credits earned from the credit card, so after the 15K I expect to earn from the Lake Tahoe 10X tier credit multiplier, I expect to earn Diamond Plus.

While Diamond status comes with a “complimentary” 4-night stay at Atlantis Bahamas in The Cove tower (you still pay a resort fee of almost $70 per night), Diamond Plus offers some months where you can get a complimentary stay of up to 5 nights in The Royal Tower (nicer room) with no resort fee (again, that’s only available during some months). If we go to Atlantis once for 5 nights, I’ll save 4 x $70 over the resort fee from a Diamond member booking + get an additional free night during those select months.

I’ll plan at least one trip to Atlantis. Because I’ll have status for the rest of this year and all of next year into January of 2028, I might get a second Atlantis stay. If I’m able to make that a five-night stay also, I’ll be pretty happy with my cash cost here.

Diamond Plus also gets a slightly bigger monthly bonus on Caesars online Sportsbook if that interests you ($30 per month after you opt in and wager $100, $60 in your birthday month).

If I am able to utilize my Caesars Diamond Plus at any point over the next ~2 years to match for a free cruise, I’ll feel like I came out well ahead.

Of course, some readers will correctly point out the fact that this Reno/Tahoe trip also costs me the flights to and from Reno, the rental car to drive to Tahoe, and the time (both in terms of time away from my family and physical time spent on this pursuit). In my case, I knew it would be kind of fun, so I was happy to go after it both because I knew I would enjoy it and I thought it would be useful for readers.

Would I do it again? Yeah, I probably would, particularly if a 10X tier credit multiplier fit in with some sort of a trip we organically wanted to take.

Bottom line

Caesars Diamond status can be earned for a fraction of the time and money during 10X tier credit multiplier events. Yesterday, I spent about 90 minutes in a casino in Lake Tahoe to earn the 15,000 tier credits ordinarily required for Caesars Diamond status for a cost of $308.75. Your results may vary, but probably not by a lot to the worse if you put in a little effort to learn how to maximize the 10X tier credit days with video poker. While it does require some gambling, there may be less risk and less bankroll required than one would imagine.

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