Vegas Diary 2: Pig in the City
Well, back to Vegas
again last weekend. Hal was still in town for a different convention, and offered to share his room at the Wynn. Gift horse? Mouth?
Friday: V minus 1
I pull $3000 out of the bank for a trip bankroll. Based off my theoretical max bet of $150, I'm estimating that will make my risk of ruin for the weekend... fairly high, I guess.
Idea is to leave town moderately late Friday night to escape worst traffic. As I'm on the way to the gas station to fill up, I run out of gas, and have to do the jerry can thing to make it the last quarter mile. Not an auspicious start. Traffic, however, really isn't too bad, except for the accident on the 215. Arrive at the Wynn about 1AM, head directly to the elevators with my two bags (bump into a guy with his two prostitutes), and crash into a deep short sleep.
The Wynn is, as expected pretty fancy. For decor, imagine that 4 different hoity-toity country clubs had garage sales, and it was all crammed in one place. Very WASPy, which is ironic since Steve Wynn is apparently Jewish. The golf course looked pretty from the hotel window, I hear the green fees are $500. As for the tables, on a weekend night they'll have one token $15 CSM table, but mainly $25 mins, and most of the shoe games have $50 or $100 mins (this is on main floor, not high-roller land). The cocktail waitresses are pretty good looking, but there is significant variance.
Saturday: V Day
Got up moderately early (9am), and tromped downstairs at the
Wynn. Miracle of miracles, I found a 6D shoe game (only one table) with a mere $15 minimum, and it was nearly empty! I went ahead and plunked down my cash. The penetration is fairly mediocre at Wynn (1.5-2 decks cut off), but I still had a stretch where the count pegged at maximum, and I began deploying bets of 2x$100. End up with a win of about $700. It was a nice little morale and bankroll boost, since I was concerned about ROR for the trip. Also, I got to mark "played cards at the Wynn" off my to-do list.
Figured I'd check out the south strip area while it was still earlyish. Parked at
MGM Grand. At that time (just before noon), all of the tables (8D) were $25 min. Curious. I backcounted into one and wonged in near the end of the shoe. Probably lost one bet. Then, after the shuffle, I figured I'd play one bet and "let it ride" until I left or the count turned positive. Well, on that first hand, I got three 8's, a double-down, and lost all bets, so I lost about $130. Time to find cheaper tables.
NYNY has solid 6D games. It's also full of stereotypical tourists. Sat at a table with 2-3 other players, had one positive swing, then a negative swing, walked away with $5 less (which was accounted for by dealer and cocktail waitress tips).
Monte Carlo was the same as last week, even the same floor supervisor, and the lack of getting rated with bets under $25. Was playing mainly at an 8D game after wonging in. Had a fairly high count early, but I lost some of the bets, putting me down a few hundred. After the shuffle, I didn't drop immeidately to $10, but put a single green chip out with a $1 dealer bet "riding" on top. The count went in the toilet, but I had a streak of wins. Eventually, I noticed that the same $1 dealer bet was still riding, the three players had consumed four decks of the shoe! Left with a win of a couple hundred after about two hours, due almost entirely to blind-ass luck. The dealer got a crapload of tips out of it too, which was fine, because she was much nicer than the initial cranky dealer.
On way back to car, went through
MGM Grand again. By late afternoon, they had a lot more tables cookin', including $10 and $15 8D tables (all H17). The "permanent" $25 tables seem to be S17, and the swing $25 tables seemed to be H17. Strange. Anyway, did some backcounting at a table with three other players. Count got fairly high, fairly early. wonged in and started playing two hands of $50-$75 pretty quickly. Aces and tens began falling from the sky onto my spots. The other players were getting crap, but I was getting great cards. So great, in fact, that the high count burned itself out before the shuffle. I worked my bets down to $10, finished out the shoe, and then left at the shuffle, up over $300. It's nice when an ideal wonging scenario works out like that.
By now it was Saturday night, I had pretty much given up on finding decent conditions. Me and Hal checked out
Bill's Gamblin Parlor (ex-Barbary Coast). Grabbed dinner at their steakhouse, which is decent, but incredibly tiny. It almost feels like the closet of some larger restaurant. The tables were pretty much Harrah's standard issue, lots of 8D shoes and DD games with questionable penetration, and 6:5 single deck all over.
Tried to go to bed early to get going on Sunday. Not only was I wired from being up for the day, but I learned that Hal snores like a sawmill. It was a long uncomfortable night.
Sunday: V plus 1
Stumbled downstairs, found the one $15 table again. Table population kept varying between heads-up and up to 3 other people, and back again. Grabbed a breakfast of a bloody mary and a red bull/vodka. Actually got a little bit buzzed (I'm a lightweight), and realized I should have taken it slightly easier on the hooch. Initial plan was to play a little over an hour, but my watch stopped running, and I ended up player over 3 hours. I had to dig fairly deeply into my wallet, but at the end of the session, I had a $950 win. Kind of nice being able to cash $1000 out of the cashier without them batting an eye.
Decided it was time to do some low-rolling on the Boulder Highway with Hal. Was excited about the idea of finding a cheap BJ table and just killing some time, since he was starting to get interest in this "basic strategy" stuff. Dropped by
Boulder Station, since it was the first we saw. Sat down at a doubledeck table, filling it up. On the
first hand Hal gets a 9 to the dealer's 6. He forgets how things work in a pitch game, and so instead of doubling down, he tucks his cards. Dealer ends up making a high pat hand beating most of the table, and when he reveals Hal's cards, all hell breaks loose. The overweight sassy black woman to his left begins giving him grief, while the dealer beins to apologize in broken english for not being seeing his cards to stop him. I just begin laughing at all of the helpful advice that he's getting. Hal decides that he "didn't sit down at the table to take **** from anyone," packs up his chips and leaves. So much for that experiment. I play a few hands, realize that nothing is going to happen at a full table, and leave, even.
I'm then left with the rest of the Boulder Strip to myself, and go on a coupon-cashing and playing spree. Next stop is
Arizona Charlie's. Find an empty 6D game with a new dealer who gave great penetration. But then the replacement dealer comes in and, while he's a nice guy, he cuts off 2 decks. Still play for a almost two hours before leaving, because the counts were
this close to turning good. Most fun had was in harassing another player at the table who was a stereotypical asshole New Yorker.
Next was the
Longhorn. Man, what a tiny place. Four tables crammed right next to each other. I'm playing at the $3 table, which only has one other person playing, since it's the high-roller table. The $2 table is full. There's a neat mirror on the ceiling where the pit (and me!) can view the other tables. Longhorn has an interesting liberal rule: allowing double down on any
three cards. I may have had one opportunity to use this, but missed it because my play was on autopilot. The big problem with the game there is the crappy penetration. At least 2 decks were cut off the back, but they also deal out the first card face up, and then burn that number of cards without showing them (shoe a 5, burn five cards). Played for little over an hour before I was satisfied that the penetration was crap (was consistent through 3 dealers)
Next door is
Nevada Palace. Definitely a low-roller haven. I sat down at a $2-$200 6D table that was, initially, totally empty. I think this is because I was at the high-roller table. The other, more crowded table might have been a $1 table. Besides being treated like a while if you use a green chip, the other thing I appreciated about this joint was the good penetration at the 6D shoe. Two different dealers only cut off
barely over a deck when I was playing (CBJN lists fairly crappy penetration though, so maybe it's high variable). No surrender offered on the game, though. Played about an hour.
Last place I checked out was
Sam's Town, which was much larger than I expected. Played about half an hour at a doubledeck game, realized that penetration and crowding was an issue, and split.
Now that I was done with the boulder strip, and it was nighttime to boot, I decided to head to everyone's favorite joint,
El Escortez. And actually, compared to where I had just been, EC seemed pretty darn classy. On a Sunday night, it was relatively deadsville. The doubledeck tables all had a few players at them, but there were at least 3 completely empty single deck tables. It was strange. I played for exactly one hour.
Ironically, of the 6 or so coupons I used that day, I think I lost on every one of them.
It was a radically successful day (up almost $2500 since waking up), and I was starting to get tired, so I ate a celebratory banana split at Wynn's ice cream parlor, watched the UBT Legends match on TV, and went to bed. Was still wired, and Hal was still snoring like a freight train, so the sleep wasn't very high quality again.
Monday: V plus 2
Got a slightly late start, and I was a little bit anxious about gambling too hard, both because I kind of wanted to hang on to the win, and because I needed to leave that afternoon.
Walked over the the
Venetian, because I just wanted to check it out. Was surprised to see $10 shoe games (8D) available, even an empty one! Unfortunately, the table filled up pretty quickly, and the penetration seemed pretty crappy to me (2.5 or so decks cut, by my poor estimation). I moved on with a slight win of about $60.
Went on a long walk down to
Bellagio. Was absolutely dumbfounded to see a large number of $5 and $10 tables. All CSM though. It looks like if you want shoe or pitch games, you need to bet $50 or $100. Bummer.
Took the long walk back to the Wynn. Played a little more at the $15 table. Count never got good, and lost a lot of hands and min bet, for a loss of about $135. The table min was bumped to $25 around 1PM, although the pit never even
mentioned the change to me.
Took a brief nap, packed up, and headed home. Traffic at 4pm was sort of bad in Vegas, very easy traffic on the rest of the way home.
Anecdotes
- At one joint, I there was one other player who was on his way to the airport (suitcase and everything). He went kamiikaze with his last $75 in chips (I was betting $10 at the time. He was dealt 6,6 vs dealer 3. While he was pondering what to do, I offered to help him split the sixes. We went "teamsies", and the dealer ended up busting. It was only when I got back to the hotel room that I looked up what the odds were with that play... oops. I really had no business taking a piece of that hand (although it was only
slightly negative EV for splitting).
- Elsewhere, at one table, after an hour or so, we ended up in a situation where if a player got a tough hand, and asked the dealer for advice, the dealer starting asking
me for what the correct BS play was. While being The Professor of the table was nice from an ego perspective, it sure didn't seem like very good cover.
- I hate tourists.
- While walking past the Mirage, I saw a duck swimming in the pond. I stopped and idly looked at it while drinking my frozen lemonade. The duck swam up to the side of the pond, climbed out on the grass, and stood right in front of me, acting nonchalant. I guess it thought I had food, even though I was basically stationary and silent. Conclusion: ducks love tourists.
- I think there might have been a lesbian convention going on in Vegas. I saw a lot of couples around town. And not the hot kind of lesbians that you see at Spearmint Rhino... just regular lesbians.
- At a few of low-roller places, I got to really fire up my bets to a high level. And I got to say, that was arguably the highlight of the trip. I'd like to go into more detail, but I'm already going into too much.
Skills:
- I got in an animated conversation with a dealer while playing heads up when we started talking about cars. Unfortunately, I flubbed the count when doing this (RC off +-5). It's great to be able to have a conversation while counting, but I guess I just missed the "while counting" part.
- Ended up playing some pitch game with a fairly new dealer (making little mistakes of procedures of payouts and card collectoin, etc). This was probably an ideal scenario to see some hole card action, but I didn't even
think about that until I had left. I'm just not trained on what to look for.
- At some point, probably on Saturday, I came to the conclusion that my bankroll had grown far larger than my skills. (The bankroll growth was due to online casino bonus whoring). Now that my bets were approaching being large enough to be noticed (at some joints), I figured it was only a matter of time before I was kicked out of every casino in the state.
- Kind of related, but I had the opportunity to bet it up big at some low-roller joints. Worried about heat from the get-go, I worked strenuously camouflage my bets. Kind of strange, since before I had worked hard to bet in proportion to the count... now I was trying to bet like a gambler. In general, I was only decreasing on losses, and only increasing on wins (or increasing on losses where the total bet was still small). Generally, my biggest adjustments were to double or halve my bets I was also spreading to two hands fairly early. In fact, a few times, I'd even deliberately size my bets differently. I think this helped me look like a doofus. It also provided more room to increase or decrease bets, depending on what the count did.
The method definitely succeeded at pushing more money out on the table, even if it just took longer to get there. At one shoe game, my maximum spread ended up being from one hand of $5, to 2x$125. On a single deck game I ended up going from $10 to about $70-$80. I didn't
seem to be attracting any adverse attention (although there was already attention, these being low-roller joints at all).
I know this technique is suboptimal, but I'm especially concerned about how I used it in a single deck game. It seems that there is a chance that my bets reacted far too slowly for the quick changes of a SD game. I have a hunch that I may have had a practical spread of only 1-4 or so, but my average bet level was just wandeing over a fairly large range during the session.
Conclusion:
I had winnings of $3400 over the weekend. By my standards, that's titanic. I kept telling myself that the EV was only a couple hundred bucks, but it was hard not to be a little euphoric. Afterwards, I decided to go ahead and pay for the gas expenses out of my gambling account, rather than my real money.
Two weekends. Two trips to Vegas in a row. Damn, I'm tired of driving, and I'm looking forward to not gambling next weekend. I did, however, get the chance to check out a ton of places I had only read about before, so it was definitely worth it. And the winning was just gravy.
