Laughlin, baby, Laughlin.
Well, that was interesting, I guess.
A while back, I got an marketing offer for a comped trip to Laughlin. You may have a hunch as to the identity of the corporation, but let's refer to it as The Corporation That Shall Not Be Named (TCTSNBN). It seemed like a great deal, as it included both a charter air flight, and the hotel stay. But the big gotcha was that I had recently been barred from another TCTSNBN property. I accepted, despite the chance for an awkward reception. Combined with being a little burned out on playing, burned out on travel in general, and going on the trip alone, I was dreading this trip before I left, but I was already committed (and it would have cost me a lot of money to cancel the free trip), so I guessed it was time to make the donuts.
It was the first time I've flown on one of these junket/charter type trips, and it was sort of interesting. The charter airline was borrowing another airlines checkin area and gates. Seat assignments were handled by TCTSNBN, not the airline, and I had to sign a waiver when checking in affirming that I was not required to gamble. And the Bullhead City, AZ, airport is so tiny, one of the terminal buildings is a temporary shelter. However, if you're a road warrior and don't generally like flying with leisure travelers (as I don't), then a casino plane is the worst.
I didn't really want to find out what would happen if I tried bopping around the table games with my tainted player's card. So, when I arrived, I scoped out the slot machines, and found an abandoned players card (incidentally, I also found two machines which had been abandoned with credits in them, and as I watched the machines, people returned a few minutes later). So, as far as TCTSNBN was concerned, Mr. Easy Rhino completely stiffed them on this trip. But Mr. Mahmoud Rashid Atiq had a lot of unexpected table games play. Crisis averted. I pity Mr. Atiq's confusion when he looks at his win/loss statement for the year.
Laughlin is a strange place. If you haven't been there, take the Colorado river, put it next to a gravel pit, then add casinos. It ain't pretty. All nine casinos are in a little "strip" about two miles long. It's not as hypercompact as downtown Vegas or Reno, but more tightly bunched than the Strip. I ended up doing a lot of walking (which wasn't all bad). Also, Harrah's is a bit seperated an up on a hill, so that's a minor hike to get there, going from there to Riverside at the other end of the strip was about a 40 minute stroll for me. Plus, Laughlin is usually hot as hell, but it was unseasonably temperate when I was there. Laughlin's also full of old people. On a weekday, I think I was the only person in town not collecting social security benefits. On the weekend, the place filled up with families and kids.
Laughlin's also got a hodgepodge of different games available. Single deck with Reno rules (Riverside), single deck with Sparks rules (Pioneer, Nugget), a lot of double deck, and shoe games. It's got pretty much anything you could want, as long as you aren't looking for S17 or DAS (midshoe entry or spreading are often restricted on pitch games too). It's also quite the low-roller joint. Most places have a decent selection of $5 tables (some $3), and the high limit tables are $10-$25. Maxes are usually $500-$1000. There are no "high limit parlors". The amazing thing to me about laughlin is that the pentration was as such a consistently decent level. The SD games seemed to be RO6, and the DD games were usually at least 75%. Even the "bad" DD penetration (like from a suspicious dealer) was about 66%, which is, alas, still better than many other places I've played. And one double deck game that I got creamed on featured the dealer inserting the cut card so far (>85%) that I nearly wept.
I learned that in Laughlin, if you sit down at a table, place bets over $100, and don't want to be rated, you're going to attract a lot of attention, generally getting at least three solicitations to be rated within the first ten minutes. My sessions were very short, only one went over 45 minutes, and some were as short at 20 minutes. Even then, I encountered:
- 7 calls to surveillance
- 2 whispered instructions by the pit to the dealer
- One dealer cutting pen on his own volition
- Two borderline ad hominem insults from pit critters
- One bitter dealer
- One PC loudly announcing to another "... and I've already called surveillance on this guy."
I felt like a bull in a damn china shop. And you know, it was sort of fun, because I didn't really care too much what the casino would do to me. Except for the rude comments, those kind of made me a sad panda.
Playing rated tended to tamp down the initial level of suspicion a lot.
I also encountered with a few funny old-timer dealers, some amusing drunks, an incredibly polite high-rolling foreign couple, and more families with baby strollers than you can shake a stick at.
I also had a few personal firsts:
- Spotted a reliably flashing dealer at three card poker. I was very excited, and played for a while, (this was the first time I've seen it). Upon later consultation with Professor Monkey, I realized that, if the bets were dropped to a reasonably safe levle to account for the variance in the game, that it gets incredibly unattractive from a dollars per hour standpoint. But I'm glad I was able to do it just on general principal.
- Played some positive-expectation video poker for the first time. Three joints in town have full pay deuces wild (100.7% payout, only on quarter machines). Not very appealing from a $/hr or variance perspective. And I was only able to play about an hour before I got crushingly bored.
- Saw Riverside doing a weird thing with their single deck shuffle. Instead of putting the cards in a discard tray, the dealer just flipped the cards over to the bottom of the deck. After dealing the requisite number of rounds, the dealer would flip the cards again, and reshuffle. It made it harder to visually track the number of hands played, but since it was single deck, it didn't matter much.
- Saw Harrah's doing a strange thing with their doubledeck game: ASM shuflfes cards, player cuts the deck, dealer inserts cut card at a seemingly awesome level (<20 cards), but then takes those cards and burns them all. Then deals towards the bottom of the remaining cards, deciding to shuffle "whenever". It didn't really affect a count game, except for hurting peneration, but it might throw a wrench some advanced techniques. Strangely, I don't think Harrah's did this on all their games.
Oh, and I may have stumbled into another counter at one of my tables. Fairly serious guy, doing some bet ramping, but at lower amounts than I was. Fairly inconspicuous, and may not have been using a big enough spread on double deck games (or, his act was just much better than mine... in which case I was awesome cover for him). I didn't think much of him while playing, but only got suspicious after the fact.
I made two notable mistakes:
- I committed the blackjack war crime of sitting down at a 6:5 table. I was at a crowded unfamiliar casino, looked around, spotted an empty pitch table. But something felt wrong, I just couldn't figure what. I asked the dealer "Is this a regular blackjack game, no gimmicks?" she said "Nope." Then when I started to buy in for a couple hundred bucks, she said "You know, blackjack only pays 6:5, that's fine if you're betting $5, but you might want to try one of the other tables." Man, I'm such a noob.
- At one place, on Day One, I played unrated, and really aroused the attention of a particular floorman, including a probable call to surveillance. Day Two, a different shift, I went ahead and let myself be cajoled into being rated, and there didn't seem to be as much heat. Day Three, the suspicious floorman is there, and like a donk, I hand him my new player's card. But he's still hyper vigilant, and sweated my game hard. I'm not sure what I was thinking, I may have already burned myself out at that joint. Fortunately, I'm not too broken up about it.
As for the financial results, I had some swings up and down, none were too large because my sessions were so short. But at the end, the negative sessions won, and the trip finished $-1200. Considering that's smaller than many individual session results, it wasn't too big a deal. On the upside, my total travel expenses for three days were only $46. Bankroll snapshot: under $35k (this is a drop of only a couple hundred since last time, as I received two smallish online cashouts a couple weeks ago)
As for the other apects of the trip, it was tiring, boring in parts, lonely, and stressful. On the upside, it was educational, occasionally amusing, not as tiring as I expected, and I didn't get kicked out of my hotel in the midlde of the night, or thrown in jail.
So I guess it was better than expected.
