35 Years of Advantage Play – Part 6

It is now December 31, 1991, on our path of smart gambling – and the day we made probably the most important decision in our 35+ years of casino play.

I’ve told this story before.  We were staying at the Westward Ho and decided to walk downtown to the Gambler’s Book Club and buy Lenny Frome’s book Expert Video Poker for Las Vegas. We had been reading and hearing about how good it was to play Deuces Wild (DW) and we needed to find the strategy.  Although we had fiddled around with other VP games for a year or so when we weren’t playing our main game of blackjack, I knew, from our BJ experience, that one need to know correct strategy.  Back at the ‘Ho that evening, I was holding the book open at the DW page while Brad was playing the quarter coin-dropper DW game.  At first, we would consult the chart for the proper hold for almost every hand, finding many were not intuitive and certainly nothing for which live poker experience gave us help.  (No software for practice – I didn’t buy my first computer until 1997!)

We played for several hours, picking up speed as we were learning some basic rules for frequent hand types and didn’t have to check the chart quite so frequently.  The casino was crowded with New Year’s Eve revelers and extremely smokey, giving me  a splitting headache. I was physically exhausted from that long walk to and from downtown – and mentally beat from all that strategy thinking.  So about 10 p.m. I decided I would escape the smoke and clamor and lie down in the room to ring in 1992.  Back then Brad always had more energy than I did and he wanted to continue playing.  So, I left him the book, reminding him not to “guess” but check the strategy chart if he wasn’t sure of a hold.  And off I went to our very basic motel room behind the casino.

It was probably about an hour or so later – I had fallen asleep – when Brad calmly came in the room.  I sat up and saw him throwing hundred-dollar bills all over the bed.

“What is all this?”

“I was dealt 4 diamond face cards and a miracle happened – up popped the missing jack of diamonds!”

We have had hundreds of jackpots since that night – many a lot larger than $1000 – but probably none with the same thrill.  You always remember your first time!!!!

Talk about love at first sight.  We dropped blackjack almost immediately and started playing VP, mainly Deuces Wild. This is not to say we never played BJ again. From ’92-94 we were still taking advantage of “Gamblers Spree” promotions that provided free rooms and table game chips.  We took many cruises over the years and always played BJ in their casinos because there wasn’t good VP offered.  And for many years we would do a BJ tournament when the entry was comped based on our heavy VP play.  Of course, a favorite gaming promotion down through the years was couponing, and this led us back to the BJ tables often.

Most of our play in the early ‘90’s was in Las Vegas.  We still flew there from Indy for most trips but started driving there once a year to stay 2-3 months to avoid Indiana winters.  When we were back home, we were still hitting the Tonk tables at the Moose Lodge and the crap games at the Catholic Church Monte Carlos, which provided us with the means to purchase a condo in ‘92 without touching our casino gambling bankroll!

When the Midwest riverboat gambling started, we interspersed our Vegas trips with frequent visits to the Par-a-Dice casino riverboat in Peoria and also made a couple trips to Sam’s Town in Tunica, MS.  Although we mostly played Deuces Wild during this time, we had learned 9/6 Jack-or-Better strategy and sometimes played that as a progressive.  I’ll never forget playing one in Peoria, with me hitting the royal and it not resetting.  We kept playing and an hour later Brad hit the higher progressive amount on the machine next to me.  We weren’t sure what was happening but the suits were scowling at us and shut down the whole bank of machines after they paid Brad!

We mostly stayed at the quarter level 3 ½ years with just a few forays into 50-cents and no inclination to go up to dollars.  Still hitting promotions heavily and learning to use the slot club comp system to the max, we were getting most of our rooms free, usually covering our expenses, and often making a small profit.  I was still keeping a “trip diary,” as opposed to logging daily or sessions numbers.  In our first year of VP (’92) we had 4 trips and won 3 out of 4.  Then we had what we considered a fantastic 1993, staying in casinos 106 days and covering expenses plus a $4579 profit.

Our flying high trips crashed in 1994, and we had to face the reality of the roller coaster of even “good” VP played with lots of promotions and benefits.  We won on 3 trips and lost on 6, with some of the losses high enough to make us a little uncomfortable with our decreasing bankroll.  I noted in my diary:  12 days of playing VP and not one royal.  No, we would not go up to dollars and face possible losses 4 times as much!

The first half of 1995 we went to the other side of the bell curve – the good side. In fact, we got lucky in a Stardust drawing and I won a car.  And we started to feel a little better, realizing that volatility was just something that we would have to get used to.  But we were happy being low rollers and I had even started taking notes that I might put into a book “someday,” one that would help others be successful low rollers.

And then came another big decision in July, 1995.  Stay tuned.