shadroch said:
Didn't you recently post that you had never left Vegas with a profit?
I believe the exact line is that I have never left Vegas with more money than I arrived with. The vast majority of the time I leave up in terms of blackjack and poker, and frequently that means I leave with more cash than I arrived with, but I spend a lot in Vegas: drinks, rooms, meals, golf, spas, shows, clubs (in roughly descending order of cost
). I also play a fair amount of EV negative games because my friends want to play - craps, roulette, and pai gow poker.
My main purpose for the trip is to reunite with old friends, not to make money. I play poker and blackjack to subsidize the trip, not to pay for it outright. One year I would have paid for the entire trip had a friend not flaked - we had planned to split a room three ways but one guy left early, so I ended up paying for half a room instead of a third on the last night, and I ended up about $20 shy of paying for the entire trip.
I've estimated my edge at about 1%, and I give up about half of that in tips (I'm actually 1 SD above EV right now, so I might be underestimating, or I might be lucky). Sonny once estimated that I'd need to play about 250 years at the rate I'm playing in order to hit "the long run".
Still, not playing much and not playing very seriously doesn't mean that I play like a total idiot: I've developed my own style and tried to back it up with as much math as I can do on my own PC (I've never paid any money for blackjack resources). I Wong in/out a lot, and I've got hand-drawn maps of most casinos so that I can scan a huge number of tables in a relatively short amount of time. Basically, I try to make the best out of a short amount of playing time and a small (but replenishable) bankroll.
