35 Years of Advantage Play – Part 10

Last week I left you with a photo of 23 DayMinder planners. Yes, in 1997 I finally began to keep organized records, after 13 years of scribbling in a journal some sketchy details of our gambling activities.

1997 was the year I finally jumped onto the online highway, buying my first computer.   I had resisted for years.  “I’m almost 60 years old and never was good with technical stuff.  Back when I taught school, I had to depend on students from the AV Club just to show movies to my classes.  Besides, I’m retired and why would I need to bother learning how to use some complicated machine.  All I plan to do is play video poker.”

Well, we can see that I had no idea what my future would be like!

After I did get my first computer and learned the basics, my friends told me that now I could keep good gambling records.    My problem was that I tried to teach myself to use Excel, but not being  technically savvy, it seemed to take more time than keeping hard-copy records.  I should have taken some computer lessons, but I was too busy taking advantage of juicy casino promotions. So, I stuck with my DayMinder planners, never thinking that I would need to buy one every year for the next 23 years!

Fortunately, I did learn to use Word.   Back in 1996 I had started jotting down in long hand copious notes “in case I might want to write a book sometime.”  This book idea became strong in my mind, so I asked daughter Angela if she could help me out.  I was too busy in the casinos to spend long hours on my typewriter.    But on some of Brad’s and my road trips to visit casinos I could talk on tape, and then send them to Angela and she could organize and type out my thoughts.  I spent hours talking into the tape recorder and she spent many more transcribing.  She had a difficult task since I did a lot of “revising” on the fly: “Skip that last sentence and add this new one.  Go back and rewrite that whole paragraph.”  On and on it went.  But finally, she handed me a nicely typed rough-draft book manuscript.

Of course, the English teacher in me took out a red pen and the “bloody” manuscript looked like a major crime scene. I had always written in extremely small script so as I made changes – hundreds – maybe thousands of them – it looked like armies of mice with tiny dirty feet had waged war on every page.  And this was the way The Frugal Gambler got to the editor desk of Deke Castleman.  He “cleaned it up” – like he would do for my writing the next 22 years, but it would be the last time he would have to deal with my never-ending tiny handwriting revisions.  So, he joined Angela in rejoicing that I had finally jumped on the information highway.

By the way, if you have come lately to the world of video poker advantage play, you might want to read this first book and perhaps also the second one, More Frugal Gambling, both majorly discounted here on this website.  Of course, the information in both of these  has been updated in my newest book, The Frugal Gambler Casino Guide, but they not only would give you more interesting details about “how it used to be” but you might find some techniques that could be used even in today’s Covid casino world.  There are some wise building blocks for smart gambling that never change.

I haven’t mentioned much about our families in this series, focusing on the casino details.  However, from the get-go, our casino pursuits never took away from our family activities.  In fact, casino comps allowed us to plan luxurious family vacations we could have never been able to afford otherwise.  When Angela graduated from high school, we flew her and a girlfriend for a celebration in Vegas where they spent much of their time flirting with the lifeguards at the Riviera pool when they weren’t ignoring my warnings about underage gambling and sneaking out to play the nickel slots.  When she attended BYU, she would invite a carload of her friends to drive down to Vegas where they were amazed that they could stay and eat for free all weekend. When we still lived in Indianapolis we could see Brad’s family who mostly lived locally.  Once we gave up our condo in Indy, no one was sad because then they could come see us for an exciting free Vegas visit.

Once Angela married an Army Ranger and the two grandkids came along, there was no keeping us from seeing them grow up, no matter where the Army moved them.  I always said, “That’s why God created airplanes.” Many of the trips were comped by a casino, but occasionally we would actually pay for one of these.  That was the situation when Steve was stationed in Hawaii, one of the few states with no gambling, not even on the cruise ship we took around the islands.

 1998

A major change for us is coming up in 1999.  Next week I will tell you about us doing something we had said we would never do!