I wondered just how good a bargain this $200 offer might be, or if it was, in fact, a bargain at all. So, with curiosity getting the better of me, I phoned The Mirage reservations desk, where I requested a one-bedroom suite during the dates of the offer. The reservations agent quoted a price per night ranging from $450 for a petite suite to $725 for a penthouse suite. Spa charges of $20 per person per day were additional. A little simple arithmetic reveals that the Internet special would save me at least $250 per night on the room, and $40 on the spa. Not too shabby from my point of view!

This incident prompted me to do some quick Las Vegas casino website surfing, and within the next half hour, I discovered two sites offering discounted rooms at major Strip properties (one for $59 per night available on eight specified dates in April, and the other for any Sunday through Thursday stay during March or April at $19 per night for up to three consecutive nights).

My web surfing during this half hour also unearthed a special, high-value funbook available only with a coupon printed from the casino's website, another printable coupon good for bonus slot club points when presented at the casino's slot club booth, and several similar promotions at other sites. Good Lord, I was excited! I felt like I had stumbled into King Solomon's lost mine and found the Las Vegas motherlode!

Since then, I've been doing some serious website surfing before each of my gaming odysseys. It's amazing what even a minimal search will uncover, and I strongly encourage you to give this a whirl when you decide to make your next trip. To help get you started, let me share some information and a few tips that I have found useful:

First, special promotions aside (though we'll get back to them shortly), casino websites are primarily designed to provide potential patrons with substantive general information about the most significant features of the casino property. Most website home pages, despite their superficial design differences, are really very much the same. They contain a wealth of easily accessed information through "hot button" topic choices such as reservations, gaming, slot club, restaurants and entertainment. Clicking on any of these hot buttons will take you to a new page that features current information on that subject.

For instance, if you're interested in staying at a certain casino, but would prefer to peek at a room before committing, most websites will give you that option. Want to know what the entertainment lineup is for the next month or so? Pertinent information is just a click away. In fact, many websites will even let you join the casino's slot club online by filling out the same form you would complete were you standing at the booth. What a super convenience this feature is! It allows you to entirely avoid the long and torturously slow lines at the on-site booth. Instead, with a simple click of the submit button on the form, you electronically whisk your application through cyberspace to the head of the line. In the next week or so, your slot club card will arrive at your home via snail mail. And, if you're already a club member, a few casinos, such as Fitzgeralds in Las Vegas, make it possible for you to check your slot club point balance online at their website .

These conveniences are nice, but the real joy of websites is their promotional features. To give some semblance of order to the stunning variety of these promotions, I've arranged my discussion of them into three categories, beginning with lodging offers.

There are offers aplenty at casino websites that are valuable to every kind of casino visitor and every level of gambler. But by a large margin, the most frequent special offer involves some form of discounted (often heavily) room promotion. Clearly, offers such as these are not very useful to locals. And frankly, because Mary Lou and I play enough video poker to have our rooms fully comped in advance, offers such as The Mirage special mentioned at the beginning have limited appeal for us.

However, if you are an infrequent casino visitor or if you're on a strictly limited gambling budget, these website room offers are wonderful. And from my surfing experience, because this seems to be the largest category of promotions available on the Internet, you should have little trouble scoring a very good room deal with a minimum amount of effort. If you're at all flexible on casino choice and dates for your visit, you'll find a host of tempting offers in all the major gambling locations across the country.

A second category of offers is what I call the funbook type. Casino funbooks, as I'm sure most of you are aware, typically present a smorgasbord of coupons, such as slot club bonus points, 2-for-1 buffets and show tickets, match plays for table games, bonus bucks buy-ins, free or reduced price drinks, and so on. Likewise, many casino websites also offer special promotions that are often far more generous than a casino's on-site funbook goodies. For example, Mahoneys Silver Nugget Casino (www.mahoneyscasino.com) has an ongoing Internet promotion that gives you a choice of two "gifts." The first is their Slot Play Gift, where they will match your first $20 slot play with $20 of their money. Just accept and print this offer from their web page and take it to the casino. There, you present the coupon to an attendant who will insert a twenty dollar bill into the feeder on any machine, after you have inserted your twenty. The second offer, designed for bingo fans, is even more valuable. Their Bingo Gift Vouchers permit you to purchase a 12-on rainbow pack for $11, which they'll match with another 12-on pack. This offer is good three times on different days, for a total value of $33 in free bingo packs.

In addition to these Silver Nugget promotional gifts, if you sign up for their E-mail Buddy Club by simply posting your e-mail address to the website, you'll also receive ongoing weekly freebies each Sunday. Obviously, offers like this are especially attractive if you're a local resident. But no matter where you live or how often you may be able to take advantage of such deals, you can't get them at the casino. They're only available through the casino's website.

One significant word of caution: I mentioned the possibility of receiving weekly offers when you give the casino your e-mail address. Many casinos request your e-mail address at their websites. In fact, that's exactly how I got The Mirage suite. I'd forgotten about it, but about three or so months before the offer appeared in my in box, I had signed up with my e-mail address for a different Mirage promotion. Now, I guess, I'm on their permanent list.

You might be inclined to think that's just fine, but if you indiscriminately give your e-mail address to casino after casino, it won't be long before you're swamped with messages, the majority of which you'll find useless. They'll simply be clogging your e-mail. So I suggest that you be selective in posting this information to any site. You should be pretty confident that you like and will patronize a casino before you give it access to your e-mail address.

Beyond the two major categories of offerings (discounted rooms and assorted funbook stuff), you'll find an additional wide variety of website promotions that defy any attempt at classifying them neatly. I suppose this represents the ubiquitous "Miscellaneous" category that's limited only by the wild imaginations of casino marketing honchos. My current favorite is the Mardi Gras Dollars Slot Tournament, which you'll find at the Barbary Coast website (www.barbarycoastcasino.com).

This free tournament runs continuously and permits you to play as often as you wish. Surf on over to the BC website and indulge yourself in a slot tourney. It only takes a couple minutes. Each month, the top three scores will win the following prizes: First place lands a free two-night stay for two; second place grabs dinner for two at the Victorian Room; third place nets a BC hat and t-shirt. The same contest is also active on the Gold Coast site, so if you favor one of these casinos over the other, you might want to play at your favorite.

The best way to go about finding a casino’s website is by simply typing the casino’s name into a search engine like yahoo.com. There are also several excellent sites dedicated to casinos that can also be found using a search. Some of the better ones include www.vegas.com, www.a2zlasvegas.com, www.gambling.com, www.casinocity.com, www.americancasinoguide.com, and Casino Player’s own website, www.casinoplayer.com. When you find a website you like, remember to bookmark it for easy return access.

Once you get to a casino’s website, you'll have to look around for an entry that reads something along the order of "Promotions" or "Specials." Simply click on that, and it should call up any current deals the casino is running. Some sites don't have hot buttons for promotions. In these cases, you can try two things. First, scroll down the home page. Sometimes special promotions are located further on down the page. If that doesn't work, try the "What's New" (or something similar to it) location. If you still come up empty, the casino probably isn't offering any Internet promotions at that time.

Here's another hot tip: The Las Vegas Advisor, a well-known and highly regarded monthly newsletter about all things Vegas, now has a new website up and running (www.lasvegasadvisor.com). While access to much site information is restricted to their subscribers, non-subscribers can still find plenty to like. One of the best features available is their "Free Stuff" postings. The LVA staff has done some of the detective work for you by searching casino websites for attractive offers. Based on the information posted to this list, they apparently do not search for discounted room offers, but all the other promotional specials attract their attention.

As I write this, they list nine excellent opportunities, including the Barbary Coast/Gold Coast Slot Tournaments and Mahoneys Silver Nugget promos that I've already discussed. To access this page, go to the LVA site, where you'll find a menu of choices listed on the left side of the home page under "Free Stuff." Next, click on "Freebies and Funbooks" and then on "Web Offers." You're there! I don't know if or how long this excellent feature will remain free to all, but while it lasts, you should be sure to check it out.

Of course, I can't predict whether you'll find surfing casino websites as pleasant, helpful and profitable as I have. But let me assure you that I'll never again plan a trip to any gambling location without surfing the casino sites in the vicinity of my destination. This has become another valuable tool, just as important to my gambling forays as searching Internet air travel sites for the best fares. So my advice to you is simple: Next time your travel plans call for Las Vegas, Reno, Tunica or Atlantic City, grab your keyboard and head for the web!