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After I dropped five hundred of my own money and $100 freeplay chasing a
progressive royal (up to $1145) on the 10/7 Double Bonus machines at the Four
Queens, and another $300 at poker, I had to bring my gambling down to no loss
gambling for a while, if I were to manage my bankroll over the remaining 15
nights of my 22 night stay. I did not know then that two royals would pull me
out of my slump and into good profit. That would not happen for a couple
weeks.
I decided to drift over to the El Cortez poker room and drink
and visit into the early morning hours. I knew the losses would be small
there.
The game is still there.
Jackie is still there.
However, the alcohol selection has been downgraded. No more Myer's rum;
nothing but well drinks and bad ones at that. No more Corona with lime; nothing
but those piss water beers.
The staff there at the poker room are
wonderfully friendly and greet me by name. The brush seated me right next to
Jackie, pulling up a stack of chips that had kept the seat next to him
empty.
As he melts more into senility, Jackie's filters have fade, and
the staff is careful who sits next to him. Also, he flashes his cards, so anyone
who sits next to him has to look up to avoid taking unfair advantage.
I
do that most of the time.
No one can do it all the time.
As I sit
down, Jackie checks me out. He raises up in his seat and leans back, maybe to
get the right angle of his glasses and gives me one of his intense direct looks.
"How ya doin' Jackie? Good to see ya again,"
I say to the welcoming
stare.
He doesn't really remember anyone. If anyone asked, "Do you
remember me?" he used to say, "Yeah, you're the guy who took all my
money."
But then he used to say, "One for the money."
I don't
hear any of those chestnuts tonight.
After they explain the new alcohol
limitations, I order a hot chocolate while I think over my alcohol choices, or
rather the lack of them.
And we play.
The pots are small. No
"its-only-money" tourists are playing. Also, no one I know is playing.
Sad.
At one point Jackie reaches over and lightly pats my tummy.
Although
really I've been losing a little weight, I say, "Yeah, Jackie, I'm gaining
weight."
The table laughs.
A while later he takes his hand, and just
barely strokes my hair the way you might with a young son.
I'm not too sure
I know what he means, but I say, "Yeah, Jackie, I need a haircut."
The dealer
says, "Don't you want to touch his beard, Jackie," and he looks at me a minute
while the dealer adds, "He looks like Santa Claus."
Jackie just ignores all
that.
I'm not certain what it was all about. Perhaps with more of his verbal
skills retreating, he finds some communication in touch.
In his light touch,
I can get just what a sweet old man he was and is. I am sorry to see so much of
him gone. They call him a living legend, but left now is more of the legend than
the living.
Chris and Albert are dealing, and it is fine to get caught up on
news. I hear about some of the old fellows who don't come anymore.
Action
Jackson is out at Boulder now. I suspect that is because he can smoke there. I
won't play there for the same reason. He is also dealing the World Series again
this year.
The table is friendly, but I miss the old raucus table of
characters. Here everyone plays a quiet game of cards without many stories or
joking banter or dramatic posturing, and I am quickly a bit bored.
I decide
to try their shelf whiskey on ice with a bit of lime. After all, I drink second
rate whiskey often at home and often I can't tell this difference. I figured
these well drinks can't be so bad.
But the whiskey was terrible. Really.
Awful.
Whatever “well” this came out of was poisoned long ago.
It might be
good for cleaning the shelf, but it would never be on even the bottom shelf.
This stuff would have to be stored under the bottom shelf in the basement near
the septic system
I know better than to try cheap rum; I know I don't like
that. So I follow up with a cheap beer, and that is just okay.
I play a while
and Jackie splashes the pot, chasing anything of any potential value and
catching rivers, frustrating his opponents who hope to win. I can hold my own,
but I won't be making money at this table unless the players change.
Also, I
am really missing the smooth taste of my Myer's rum that I have associated with
this spot for many years now. It had not been my intention to come and play
serious poker, but to come and throw away hands and do some serious
drinking.
Because the table is tight and quiet and the drinks are awful, I
decide to quit and wait until the tourists come or in some way the game
changes.
I'm irked anyway by the El Cortez and all the decisions of the new
owners: $25 added fee for more than 7 calendar nights, all the complaints I have
read by regulars on discussion boards about the cuts in comps, and now they've
really spoiled this gem of a poker room for me.
What happens in Vegas,
changes in Vegas.
So I get my American
Casino Guide $10 freeplay coupon and decide to entertain myself with slots
and get drunk on Myers rum.
While they don't give out the good stuff to the
poker players anymore, a penny slot player still qualifies for Myer's rum.
So I am going to take my irk and make it work. For me, not for the bean
counters.
To put the freeplay on my card, I push through the small crowd who
are hoping to win in some drawing.
There are more and more drawings than
comps all around Vegas. It is a cheap way to encourage play. No matter how many
people play for chance tickets, the cost to the casino is the same. Mostly it is
a local-focused game because tourists rarely can be around on the day of the
drawing.
I put the free $10 on my card.
"Do you want your 5X points
today?" the clerk asks.
"No, I don't think so," I answer.
"Well, they
expire at the end of June," she warns me.
"Thanks."
I am not expecting
to risk any real money. Just the freeplay.
I roll up to the Texas Tea slot
just as the same drink person who informed me of the alcohol changes gets there,
and I order Myer's Rum.
She apologizes again for not being able to serve me
in the poker room.
"Hey, it is not your fault."
This particular
waitress seems to take everything personally. She is too apologetic. When I tell
her I'll be playing a while, meaning she can bring another, she warns me about
how much of the casino she serves and that she won't be back for at least a half
hour.
"I'll be here a long while," I tell her.
I don't like it that she is
in constant apology mode. She must be taking crap for all the drink changes.
Without me having to see her, she shows up with a Myers whenever she passes, and
that is just wonderful, but she still imagines I am annoyed at her for
something. So I tip her $2 instead of the $1, and then she gets that I am happy
with her.
Whenever the EV of slots is compared to live poker or advantaged VP
pay tables, the argument on the side of slots is that entertainment is the goal.
I get that.
I let this
slot entertain me as I play just a penny a spin. That way I don't have to
actually pay for the entertainment.
Often slot players think that slot play
requires no thinking; however, that is totally incorrect.
Once entertainment is the goal rather than just winning, to get a
full serving of entertainment, the mind must in some ways engage the
multiplicity of the game, so that the player can perceive what is happening.
There should be some delight in the characters, and some anticipation in the
icons as they fall, as well as some disappointment when there is almost but not
quite a win.
My inner child is perfectly able to delight in these little
characters, but I can't follow more than three lines, and if I am going to drink
rum which will come every half hour, one line is really plenty to entertain my
inebriated mind as I stretch my freeplay out as long as possible.
Playing one
line I can see the first icon snap into place and hope for a match as the others
follow. I can see where a winning icon fell on the line below or above and
groan.
Years ago I loved the video poker at the El Cortez because the cards
were dealt slow enough for the mind to anticipate possibilities and be rewarded
or disappointed.
This is just the opposite of what the professionals do,
slapping out their advantage in fast as possible play. I think that is rather
hard work and dull.
Anticipation accounts for some of the fun of Hold em as
well. At each round of betting there are more or less possibilities, joys and
disappointments.
As Nick the Greek put it,
“The next best thing
to playing and winning is playing and losing.”
But to do that, I have to
bring the lines down to something I can really watch.
Because the mind cannot
see scatters as they hit, Texas Tea offers the snap of a whip for each owner
icon. It also offers a clunk for the oil wells. I never get an oil well video.
Perhaps there is minimum play for that, but the clunk is there, and I get plenty
of owner scatters: 11 for 8 credits, 4 for 15 credits.
Oddly, not all the
icons will come to pay me. For the most part, it is the armadillos that pay me.
I like that. The armadillos are my favorites and as the rum starts to work,
I will sometimes just sip rum and watch the little buggers jump up and wiggle
their tongues at me and sip more rum and laugh for quite a while after a lucky
hit on my one penny line.
Perhaps the game is programmed to use the
armadillo more often.
I notice that each time the oil well owner writes me a
check, that there is an armadillo in one of the office chairs watching.
I
imagine the armadillo has a role similar to the fool in Shakespeare, and it is
an important part.
When the rum is working well enough for me to find
comparisons to Shakespeare in a game of Texas Tea, then I know I am truly being
entertained.
For a long while, I rooted for three flowers, but then when
they came, they were so pathetic compared to the armadillo, that I was
disappointed.
I could not get a cactus pay.
A few cows mooed their
rewards, and the owner beeped his car horn a few times as well.
As I sipped
the four rums I was to drink over the course of my freeplay and flowed, "into
the zone" as they say, the short bits of music became clearer and my mind also
could sort those bits from the music in The Parlour bar.
Nice.
I
can't remember all the tunes, but Bobby Darin singing, "Somewhere Beyond the
Sea" latched on to my inebriated emotions with flashbacks to being in 8th grade.
I also caught Elvis singing, "In the Ghetto."
However, I am not a full
fan of that song. It is just too negative and sung from such an outsider
position.
It grates on my love of good blues, because it should be blues,
and it isn't.
Now, I don't want to leave the impression that I recklessly
played through my free money as fast as I could at the extravagant rate of one
penny per pull, or that I chugged the fine smooth taste of my free Myer's rum.
I sipped the rum slowly, ate the ice, and sometimes sucked the lime. I
played slow.
Also, dealer Chris came over on his break and talked for a
while, so I had a complete break in the play. Then Doug stopped to get a sense
of the game from us, and he remembered my name. I was flattered.
I'd rather
talk to Doug away from the table than play poker with him. He is the best player
there. Sometimes I have played him for long hours, gone to bed, and found him
there in the same seat in the morning with a fine chip stack when I woke up the
next day.
He sees and knows things I don't.
My only defense against his
expert play is to be unpredictable.
I did not feel I had the concentration to
play him on this night.
And there were other purely imaginary visitors
who added to the entertainment of the slots. One of my best friends, Jerry,
recently moved from my home area to his new retirement home in South Carolina. I
miss dropping in for breakfast. He is a great lover of Texas Tea and after two
rums, I could feel him laughing over my shoulder.
I kept a running total
of my freeplay score. That would insure that I played through all the pennies
and did not waste any of them, but that once they were played through I took my
profit. It would also give me a fine stopping place for the rum.
At three
drinks I told the waitress, just one more and really it was one too many. I
don't drink much at home. So my few nasty well drinks and beers set up the rum
to push me over the top.
At first I stayed ahead in the gambling thanks to
the funny armadillos, but gradually the negative EV asserted its grinding
mathematical will, and I fell behind.
When the freeplay ran out, my
score was $6.66 but I recklessly played it down to an even $6 and then I cashed
out.
Myers Rum at the bar costs $4, so the value was $16 in rum. For a couple
hours of entertainment at no risk whatsoever, I raked in $22 and the
casino lost.
Had I drank the same rum at the poker table, I'd have
contributed a lot more money when a winning pot was raked, so the casino lost in
another way as well.
And I'm glad!
It is the best play I could make
against the recent plays the El Cortez have established. I'll make it again if
it is still possible.
And all this talk about the place now attracting
the affluent young and restless, ready to whoop it up and spend….well…..each
time I was there I saw the same old tired, lower middle class faces, and I never
saw it packed even when the Fremont Experience was packed shoulder to shoulder
with people, and the downstairs of the D and the Golden Nugget were packed with
players.
After my free rum and freeplay, the El Cortez poker table still
did not look inviting, and with Doug on the list, it was going to get harder
still.
How I would love it if that game started to attract the young and
party folks that some speculate are just waiting to lose their money at the El
Cortez, and how fine it would be for those mythical youngsters to take the seats
of a few of the tough, tight old regulars.
But this night the table
looked unprofitable, and because the first strategy of limit poker is table
selection, I waved good night to the dealers, and staggered down Fremont, had a
hamburger and onion rings at Hennesy's and played until almost 2AM at the Golden
Nugget.
There too the American
Casino Guide coupon gave me my winnings. It was worth 10 dollars and in
spite of being at a table of bad players, that is exactly what I left with as
winnings when I quit, just $10.
The whole night was just great fun for no
money, and that is exactly what I needed to stretch my bankroll over the rest of
my 23 day trip, when the first week had me down $800.
progressive royal (up to $1145) on the 10/7 Double Bonus machines at the Four
Queens, and another $300 at poker, I had to bring my gambling down to no loss
gambling for a while, if I were to manage my bankroll over the remaining 15
nights of my 22 night stay. I did not know then that two royals would pull me
out of my slump and into good profit. That would not happen for a couple
weeks.
I decided to drift over to the El Cortez poker room and drink
and visit into the early morning hours. I knew the losses would be small
there.
The game is still there.
Jackie is still there.
However, the alcohol selection has been downgraded. No more Myer's rum;
nothing but well drinks and bad ones at that. No more Corona with lime; nothing
but those piss water beers.
The staff there at the poker room are
wonderfully friendly and greet me by name. The brush seated me right next to
Jackie, pulling up a stack of chips that had kept the seat next to him
empty.
As he melts more into senility, Jackie's filters have fade, and
the staff is careful who sits next to him. Also, he flashes his cards, so anyone
who sits next to him has to look up to avoid taking unfair advantage.
I
do that most of the time.
No one can do it all the time.
As I sit
down, Jackie checks me out. He raises up in his seat and leans back, maybe to
get the right angle of his glasses and gives me one of his intense direct looks.
"How ya doin' Jackie? Good to see ya again,"
I say to the welcoming
stare.
He doesn't really remember anyone. If anyone asked, "Do you
remember me?" he used to say, "Yeah, you're the guy who took all my
money."
But then he used to say, "One for the money."
I don't
hear any of those chestnuts tonight.
After they explain the new alcohol
limitations, I order a hot chocolate while I think over my alcohol choices, or
rather the lack of them.
And we play.
The pots are small. No
"its-only-money" tourists are playing. Also, no one I know is playing.
Sad.
At one point Jackie reaches over and lightly pats my tummy.
Although
really I've been losing a little weight, I say, "Yeah, Jackie, I'm gaining
weight."
The table laughs.
A while later he takes his hand, and just
barely strokes my hair the way you might with a young son.
I'm not too sure
I know what he means, but I say, "Yeah, Jackie, I need a haircut."
The dealer
says, "Don't you want to touch his beard, Jackie," and he looks at me a minute
while the dealer adds, "He looks like Santa Claus."
Jackie just ignores all
that.
I'm not certain what it was all about. Perhaps with more of his verbal
skills retreating, he finds some communication in touch.
In his light touch,
I can get just what a sweet old man he was and is. I am sorry to see so much of
him gone. They call him a living legend, but left now is more of the legend than
the living.
Chris and Albert are dealing, and it is fine to get caught up on
news. I hear about some of the old fellows who don't come anymore.
Action
Jackson is out at Boulder now. I suspect that is because he can smoke there. I
won't play there for the same reason. He is also dealing the World Series again
this year.
The table is friendly, but I miss the old raucus table of
characters. Here everyone plays a quiet game of cards without many stories or
joking banter or dramatic posturing, and I am quickly a bit bored.
I decide
to try their shelf whiskey on ice with a bit of lime. After all, I drink second
rate whiskey often at home and often I can't tell this difference. I figured
these well drinks can't be so bad.
But the whiskey was terrible. Really.
Awful.
Whatever “well” this came out of was poisoned long ago.
It might be
good for cleaning the shelf, but it would never be on even the bottom shelf.
This stuff would have to be stored under the bottom shelf in the basement near
the septic system
I know better than to try cheap rum; I know I don't like
that. So I follow up with a cheap beer, and that is just okay.
I play a while
and Jackie splashes the pot, chasing anything of any potential value and
catching rivers, frustrating his opponents who hope to win. I can hold my own,
but I won't be making money at this table unless the players change.
Also, I
am really missing the smooth taste of my Myer's rum that I have associated with
this spot for many years now. It had not been my intention to come and play
serious poker, but to come and throw away hands and do some serious
drinking.
Because the table is tight and quiet and the drinks are awful, I
decide to quit and wait until the tourists come or in some way the game
changes.
I'm irked anyway by the El Cortez and all the decisions of the new
owners: $25 added fee for more than 7 calendar nights, all the complaints I have
read by regulars on discussion boards about the cuts in comps, and now they've
really spoiled this gem of a poker room for me.
What happens in Vegas,
changes in Vegas.
So I get my American
Casino Guide $10 freeplay coupon and decide to entertain myself with slots
and get drunk on Myers rum.
While they don't give out the good stuff to the
poker players anymore, a penny slot player still qualifies for Myer's rum.
So I am going to take my irk and make it work. For me, not for the bean
counters.
To put the freeplay on my card, I push through the small crowd who
are hoping to win in some drawing.
There are more and more drawings than
comps all around Vegas. It is a cheap way to encourage play. No matter how many
people play for chance tickets, the cost to the casino is the same. Mostly it is
a local-focused game because tourists rarely can be around on the day of the
drawing.
I put the free $10 on my card.
"Do you want your 5X points
today?" the clerk asks.
"No, I don't think so," I answer.
"Well, they
expire at the end of June," she warns me.
"Thanks."
I am not expecting
to risk any real money. Just the freeplay.
I roll up to the Texas Tea slot
just as the same drink person who informed me of the alcohol changes gets there,
and I order Myer's Rum.
She apologizes again for not being able to serve me
in the poker room.
"Hey, it is not your fault."
This particular
waitress seems to take everything personally. She is too apologetic. When I tell
her I'll be playing a while, meaning she can bring another, she warns me about
how much of the casino she serves and that she won't be back for at least a half
hour.
"I'll be here a long while," I tell her.
I don't like it that she is
in constant apology mode. She must be taking crap for all the drink changes.
Without me having to see her, she shows up with a Myers whenever she passes, and
that is just wonderful, but she still imagines I am annoyed at her for
something. So I tip her $2 instead of the $1, and then she gets that I am happy
with her.
Whenever the EV of slots is compared to live poker or advantaged VP
pay tables, the argument on the side of slots is that entertainment is the goal.
I get that.
I let this
slot entertain me as I play just a penny a spin. That way I don't have to
actually pay for the entertainment.
Often slot players think that slot play
requires no thinking; however, that is totally incorrect.
Once entertainment is the goal rather than just winning, to get a
full serving of entertainment, the mind must in some ways engage the
multiplicity of the game, so that the player can perceive what is happening.
There should be some delight in the characters, and some anticipation in the
icons as they fall, as well as some disappointment when there is almost but not
quite a win.
My inner child is perfectly able to delight in these little
characters, but I can't follow more than three lines, and if I am going to drink
rum which will come every half hour, one line is really plenty to entertain my
inebriated mind as I stretch my freeplay out as long as possible.
Playing one
line I can see the first icon snap into place and hope for a match as the others
follow. I can see where a winning icon fell on the line below or above and
groan.
Years ago I loved the video poker at the El Cortez because the cards
were dealt slow enough for the mind to anticipate possibilities and be rewarded
or disappointed.
This is just the opposite of what the professionals do,
slapping out their advantage in fast as possible play. I think that is rather
hard work and dull.
Anticipation accounts for some of the fun of Hold em as
well. At each round of betting there are more or less possibilities, joys and
disappointments.
As Nick the Greek put it,
“The next best thing
to playing and winning is playing and losing.”
But to do that, I have to
bring the lines down to something I can really watch.
Because the mind cannot
see scatters as they hit, Texas Tea offers the snap of a whip for each owner
icon. It also offers a clunk for the oil wells. I never get an oil well video.
Perhaps there is minimum play for that, but the clunk is there, and I get plenty
of owner scatters: 11 for 8 credits, 4 for 15 credits.
Oddly, not all the
icons will come to pay me. For the most part, it is the armadillos that pay me.
I like that. The armadillos are my favorites and as the rum starts to work,
I will sometimes just sip rum and watch the little buggers jump up and wiggle
their tongues at me and sip more rum and laugh for quite a while after a lucky
hit on my one penny line.
Perhaps the game is programmed to use the
armadillo more often.
I notice that each time the oil well owner writes me a
check, that there is an armadillo in one of the office chairs watching.
I
imagine the armadillo has a role similar to the fool in Shakespeare, and it is
an important part.
When the rum is working well enough for me to find
comparisons to Shakespeare in a game of Texas Tea, then I know I am truly being
entertained.
For a long while, I rooted for three flowers, but then when
they came, they were so pathetic compared to the armadillo, that I was
disappointed.
I could not get a cactus pay.
A few cows mooed their
rewards, and the owner beeped his car horn a few times as well.
As I sipped
the four rums I was to drink over the course of my freeplay and flowed, "into
the zone" as they say, the short bits of music became clearer and my mind also
could sort those bits from the music in The Parlour bar.
Nice.
I
can't remember all the tunes, but Bobby Darin singing, "Somewhere Beyond the
Sea" latched on to my inebriated emotions with flashbacks to being in 8th grade.
I also caught Elvis singing, "In the Ghetto."
However, I am not a full
fan of that song. It is just too negative and sung from such an outsider
position.
It grates on my love of good blues, because it should be blues,
and it isn't.
Now, I don't want to leave the impression that I recklessly
played through my free money as fast as I could at the extravagant rate of one
penny per pull, or that I chugged the fine smooth taste of my free Myer's rum.
I sipped the rum slowly, ate the ice, and sometimes sucked the lime. I
played slow.
Also, dealer Chris came over on his break and talked for a
while, so I had a complete break in the play. Then Doug stopped to get a sense
of the game from us, and he remembered my name. I was flattered.
I'd rather
talk to Doug away from the table than play poker with him. He is the best player
there. Sometimes I have played him for long hours, gone to bed, and found him
there in the same seat in the morning with a fine chip stack when I woke up the
next day.
He sees and knows things I don't.
My only defense against his
expert play is to be unpredictable.
I did not feel I had the concentration to
play him on this night.
And there were other purely imaginary visitors
who added to the entertainment of the slots. One of my best friends, Jerry,
recently moved from my home area to his new retirement home in South Carolina. I
miss dropping in for breakfast. He is a great lover of Texas Tea and after two
rums, I could feel him laughing over my shoulder.
I kept a running total
of my freeplay score. That would insure that I played through all the pennies
and did not waste any of them, but that once they were played through I took my
profit. It would also give me a fine stopping place for the rum.
At three
drinks I told the waitress, just one more and really it was one too many. I
don't drink much at home. So my few nasty well drinks and beers set up the rum
to push me over the top.
At first I stayed ahead in the gambling thanks to
the funny armadillos, but gradually the negative EV asserted its grinding
mathematical will, and I fell behind.
When the freeplay ran out, my
score was $6.66 but I recklessly played it down to an even $6 and then I cashed
out.
Myers Rum at the bar costs $4, so the value was $16 in rum. For a couple
hours of entertainment at no risk whatsoever, I raked in $22 and the
casino lost.
Had I drank the same rum at the poker table, I'd have
contributed a lot more money when a winning pot was raked, so the casino lost in
another way as well.
And I'm glad!
It is the best play I could make
against the recent plays the El Cortez have established. I'll make it again if
it is still possible.
And all this talk about the place now attracting
the affluent young and restless, ready to whoop it up and spend….well…..each
time I was there I saw the same old tired, lower middle class faces, and I never
saw it packed even when the Fremont Experience was packed shoulder to shoulder
with people, and the downstairs of the D and the Golden Nugget were packed with
players.
After my free rum and freeplay, the El Cortez poker table still
did not look inviting, and with Doug on the list, it was going to get harder
still.
How I would love it if that game started to attract the young and
party folks that some speculate are just waiting to lose their money at the El
Cortez, and how fine it would be for those mythical youngsters to take the seats
of a few of the tough, tight old regulars.
But this night the table
looked unprofitable, and because the first strategy of limit poker is table
selection, I waved good night to the dealers, and staggered down Fremont, had a
hamburger and onion rings at Hennesy's and played until almost 2AM at the Golden
Nugget.
There too the American
Casino Guide coupon gave me my winnings. It was worth 10 dollars and in
spite of being at a table of bad players, that is exactly what I left with as
winnings when I quit, just $10.
The whole night was just great fun for no
money, and that is exactly what I needed to stretch my bankroll over the rest of
my 23 day trip, when the first week had me down $800.