As luck would have it, we set sail on Royal Caribbean's newest ship, Jewel of the Seas, shortly after its Casino Royale inaugurated the cruise line's newest gaming innovation: a slot tracking and reward system called the Blue Chip Club.

Each of the 194 slots on the Jewel has a Blue Chip Club insert on the front, where players simply slip the same Sea Pass they use when reboarding the ship into a card reader.

The Blue Chip Club then tracks your play during the cruise, and each $5 in coin you wager on reels -- or each $10 wager on video poker -- earns points that can be redeemed for rewards ranging from a free casino drink up to dinner for two in one of the ship's fine specialty restaurants.

The system seems to work well, though the one negative at present is you need to redeem all your points before the end of the cruise. You can't accumulate points for one of the big rewards by carrying them over to a future sailing. But as Royal Caribbean deploys even more advanced versions of the Blue Chip Club slots on additional ships, and moves toward letting you collect your winnings directly on your Sea Pass, the ability to carry over points may not be too far in the future.

For those who prefer table games, the big news on this sailing was that the Jewel has joined the ranks of Royal Caribbean ships offering the highly popular Texas Hold 'em. In this case, a blackjack table on one side of the casino had been reconfigured for poker afficinados, leaving four eight-deck tables and one single-deck table for blackjack players, as well as one Caribbean stud poker, one three-card poker, two roulette and one craps table.

Most of the table games had a $5 or $10 minimum. For those desiring a higher stakes game, most nights there was a single blackjack table with a $25 minimum and $500 maximum.

Perhaps because there were quite a few New York and New Jersey players fleeing winter on this cruise, the level of play at the $25 table was better than we have found on most cruise ships. About what you would expect to find, in fact, at Atlantic City or Foxwoods.

The dealers on the Jewel were friendly and competent, and casino management was particularly attentive to members of the Royal Caribbean Players Club. However, several blackjack players betting decent amounts of money were overheard lamenting the lack of a reward system for table games -- suggesting that a stronger outreach program aimed at making more VIP players aware of the Players Club (and a slightly more generous policy on comped drinks) might help build a little more Royal Caribbean casino loyalty.

Overall, this was a fun casino in which to gamble. While it tended to be a little less oriented toward high-stakes players than the larger casinos on the big Voyager class ships (and it generally closed about an hour earlier), we would note again that the Radiance class ships are the nicest to cruise on in the Royal Caribbean fleet (and many other fleets as well). The Jewel is, indeed, a jewel.

--The Savvy Cruiser