A Good-News Trip Report

I’m always glad when I can write a cheerful and positive casino trip report. And I’m very happy to be able to do just that for a recent trip to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino.

“Oh, you hit a big jackpot!”

Actually, no, we lost this trip.

“Well, you enjoyed the leaf change at its gorgeous peak in this mid-October drive to the Smoky Mountains?”

No, it was pretty scenic on the drive north with some color change, but the peak was predicted for two weeks later.

“Then why can you write an upbeat optimistic report?”

For 37 years, we’ve never entered a casino expecting a guaranteed win, not even when we had the biggest edge. Sure, the more of an advantage we had on a particular play, the more winning sessions we’d pull out over the long term, but short-term results can never be predicted. Of course, we’re human and we want to win every time. But the more casino experience you have, the more you find out that the next best thing to winning is not losing more than you planned for or could afford.

Therefore, Brad and I always went into a casino with a plan: Play until we got xxx number of points; or play until we were going to meet someone for dinner; or just play until one of us was tired and wanted to go home or to our hotel room. We always had more than enough bankroll for any of our plans, whether in cash in our pockets or with a check or credit line. I don’t even really know how to use an ATM – I’m allergic to fees!

So my goal for this trip (our third one this year to Cherokee, a CZR property) was to reach the Diamond Elite tier, which I was happy to achieve with a reasonable loss, considering it was a slightly negative play. It would have been an increasingly positive play IF I’d been able to pick up all the extremely generous free play in the mailers that were filling my physical and virtual mailboxes. However, that would have meant visiting once or twice a week. This is one of the big mistakes many casinos make and is a major frustration for non-local players. This casino has my zip code and could have figured no one will drive upwards of 10 hours round-trip to visit that often.

However, although we haven’t been able to pick up most of the free play this year that would get us to positive territory, I’m already looking ahead and seeing some benefits we’ll have next year that might make up most of the loss in our negative play this year. I’ll share them in later blogs as those plans develop.

But now, I want to return to the reason I call this a “winning” trip. On our previous two trips to Cherokee earlier in the year, Brad showed very little interest in playing in the casino, spending just a couple of short periods of playing VP beside me.  Then he wanted to go back to the hotel room, heading straight for bed where he fell asleep the minute his head hit the pillow. Not a surprise, since he regularly sleeps 18-20 a day.

I figured this visit would be the same as before, especially the first day after the 5-hour road trip. And when we first got to the room, he did hit the bed immediately. Two hours later at 7:30 p.m., he woke up. I thought that he’d go right back to sleep for the night, as he usually does. I said I was going back down to the casino and casually asked whether he wanted to go with me, expecting a negative reply. Instead, he sat up with a surprised look on his face and exclaimed, “Of course I want to go!”

And go we did. The dementia has greatly reduced his range of emotions and he usually stays in everything-is-just-okay mode. But now he really looked excited, eager to find our favorite bank of  VP machines. We sat down side by side, just as we’ve liked to do for over 30 years. He was anxious to start playing, so I took the watch-for-accuracy job on the other machine. From his brief plays on the two earlier visits, I knew he remembered NSUD strategy fairly well, but playing $25 a hand, I wasn’t taking any chances!

I assumed he’d tire easily and we’d have to switch the play-and-watch jobs, but he was fully absorbed for long periods before he needed a rest.  I hadn’t seen him so engaged in one activity for months. We groaned together when we just missed getting a good hand and laughed together when we unexpectedly made a good hand out of nothing. For two hours we were together again, just like we had been for the first 35 years of our casino life.

The second day the magic lasted an hour. The third day it was gone. But the joy of that first night is a memory of a “winning” session that will last forever.

Thumbs up!!