Waiting for Wednesday

Bonnie and I regularly shop at a Sprouts Farmers Market, a grocery chain found in a few Western states. It’s kind of like a health food store — with less expensive produce.

One feature of the stores is that their ads run Wednesday to Wednesday. That generally makes shopping on “Double Ad” Wednesdays the most efficient because you get to take advantage of both last week’s sale prices as well as next week’s.

On a recent Tuesday, I was on my way home from somewhere and realized I would pass by a Sprouts market on the other side of town. I called Bonnie to see if there was anything we needed before the next day — which would be a Wednesday and our usual shopping day.

“No,” Bonnie answered, “but I just saw the new flyer. Starting tomorrow they’ll have yellow peaches for 77¢ a pound.”

“Excellent!” I responded. “I can’t wait for Wednesday!”

Okay. Maybe I exaggerated. I enjoy eating peaches and at good prices I enjoy them even more. But if I didn’t get them, my life would still work pretty well.

(For whatever reason, sometimes when I say things like that I get comments such as, “If Dancer really has a million dollars or two, he wouldn’t care whether peaches cost 77¢ or $7.77 a pound.” To that I answer that getting a couple million is one problem. Keeping a couple million or more is a different problem. People who live frugally have a better chance of getting a large bankroll AND have a better chance of keeping it once they have it.)

Let’s go from here to video poker.

I often plan my plays in advance. For example, as I write this I know that next Saturday beginning at 5 a.m. I’m going to play a certain number of points requiring quite a few hours on a particular machine at the M casino. There are reasons I play that much starting at that time. For this article, we don’t need to go into why I do that. For now, just assume I think it’s a good play. But I prepare my life so that I can be present and alert at that hour. This includes eating properly, exercising, monitoring alcohol intake, and adjusting my sleep time a day or two in advance.

I also played a promotion at South Point in September where I needed to play $1,600 a day on both my card and Bonnie’s every day anytime between midnight and midnight. Some days I get there at 11:30 p.m. and do the “today’s” play — and then after midnight do “tomorrow’s” play. That takes planning. I would NOT be doing that the same day as when I would have to be at M at 5 a.m.  I would be more alert during the M play if I’m sleeping at midnight the night before.

I may, however, do my Friday play at South Point sometime in the middle of the day and show up at 4:30 a.m. Saturday at that casino to do my Saturday points. The casinos are only a few miles apart and it’s efficient to go from one to the other in the same trip, but not if I have to kill four hours between one and the other.

In these cases, I am actually looking forward to the play. “Can’t wait,” so to speak. Part of the “game” is to be alert and be competent on the particular game I’ll be playing. I’m very satisfied with my competency at most games that I play and I don’t need to review them very often. But sometimes it’s a once-every-three-months play on a machine I play nowhere else and I need to spend an hour or more getting ready for it.

Sometimes, looking forward to the play is because of the stakes. Playing for hours at $50 or more per play requires more “getting ready” than playing $1,600 (for each of two people) for an entire session. The latter is done on $2 NSU machines and I’m basically always able to do that no matter how exhausted I am. But playing several hours at $125 a hand is another story altogether. My annual score isn’t going to be affected much by $1,600 coin-in sessions. It could very easily be affected one way or the other by $200,000 or bigger sessions. I want to be at my best at these times.

Another part of the “looking forward to it” is just the juggling of my schedule (which includes keeping Bonnie happy) so that I’m able to do what I want when I need to do it. This juggling is not always a trivial problem, but it’s a key part to being a successful player. A part that isn’t usually listed under “important skills to have in order to be a winning player.”

Often when you’re juggling your schedule you need to come to grips with the fact that you can’t always have it all. For me, that includes remembering that chasing every good promotion takes a backseat to doing what Bonnie wants to do. At least some of the time.

And I can also say that not wanting to wait for peaches to be 77¢ a pound is a lesser thing entirely than not wanting to be unprepared at 5 a.m. on Saturday.