Pictures of Dogs and Quads

Day 10

I was so busy losing yesterday that I forgot to mention the video poker tournament. This was a very small one at the California, only one hour of sessions. We had an excellent chance to cash some dough in this tournament because of the low number of participants (many of them potential Island Senior Girlfriends).

Shall I cut to the chase? I shall. Even though I was seated next to a very lovely I.S.G., with whom I chatted about tournament strategy, how we'd done lately, family, and even though I'd managed to avoid the conversation killer sump pump stories that had ruined so many other previous I.S.G. relationships, I got killed even on the tournament play.

I got no quads and had a little over 900 points. Just terrible. The Quad Queen had one quad for 250 points but didn't do much better. Still, there was hope, wasn't there? With scores like ours, we'd need a Royal on day two to get into the top three, or Aces kicker twice.

Not a savvy start to the tournament play.

Now on to our morning play at the California Hotel and Casino for Day 10. In a single word, 'fucking dismal'. My shaky texts to myself state that I played $210 in single line quarters. No quads. About $700 coin in. Brutal. It seemed like it was like this every morning. (Later statistical analysis by Jimmy Poon would bear this out. I'll never understand these strange trends.)

The Cal Queen had better luck, hitting three quads in the time I hit none. The high part of the morning for me was seeing pictures of super server Judy's dog in one of the Jameson's and Dishwater Delivery Windows. I tip double for dog pictures.

I ate breakfast in the room - delicious left over chicken satay meatsicles from Le Thai. Pure proteinacious mouth-fun.

It was time for me to put some effort into GrommetCon 2014 while Mrs. F continued the gambling pursuit. Here are the high points of her day. As you can see, they are few.

She was growing more and more depressed at the overall results of her trip. She had three days left to go and it wasn't looking like a winner. She'd need a dollar Royal to pull it out of the bag, or two or three quarter Royals - a tall order.

For GrommetCon 2014, I had to assemble 5000 buttons containing pictures of a size 10 grommet made of our new grommet compound which is 6% more resilient than the old grommet compound. We call it "NuGrommet". I pricked bleeding holes in my fingers with the little pins so many times that I looked like I'd just hand-butchered a 900 pound sow. In the end I assembled some 92 of the buttons and called it a day at 2:00pm sharp.

Lunch for me was chirizo-bean soup and salad bar at the coffee shop counter - it was delicious!

I think QQ had salad bar at the coffee shop, later, on her own, keeping it simple, and veggy.

Don't kid yourself, QQ's salad bar meals are loaded with chopped egg, olives, dressing, sugary bean salad - it's not so healthy that you want to kick the person in the shins and tell them to quit making you look so bad. Not at all.

That reminds me, the next time I see someone taking tofu from the salad bar, I may lay on a good shin kicking, and steal away with their I.S.G. up to the 2nd floor for some one-on-one all-coin-dropper, no tickets (riding it bareback) Jacks or Better buttony action for an hour. Afterwards, we'll have a smoke, and I'll hear about her grandkids. Yeah, that'll learn those tofu jerks.

Maybe I'm harsh, but c'mon, tofu isn't even a real word. Crikeydoodles!!!

Somewhere in there we did round 2 of the tournament. I was in the bottom 10% from day 1, it was that bad. I did get two quads on round two and ended up with a pretty good score. I figured I'd be just out of the money and indeed I was - the terrible first round was too much too surpass. I was something like 68th with the top 50 paying money. The Quad Queen did terribly again and was way out of it.

I got some ice and poured us each a stiff one back up in the Parlour Suite. We sat on the indestructible nylon clad couch and talked about what to do.

It was serious.

Really serious.

The Quad Queen was deconstructing everything, because she wasn't able to do what she wants to do - which is play heavily hour after hour - without losing a bundle.

"I think I'm just going to play nickels from now on."

"WHAT?! What about ratings, offers, your Emerald line-cutting card?"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. We talked about it, she could play without a card on nickels and parlay up to quarters, then use the card... all sorts of crazy scenarios. She could play 100 play pennies all the time, which she really enjoys. Smooth out the variance. But the paytables are shite.

In spite of all the quads though, she was losing, like I had last trip. Losing badly, the worst monetary beating she'd taken in 50 trips - in other words, of all time. It was as if she'd eaten tofu. She was down about two grand on the trip so far with three days to go.

The Quad Queen, my video poker heroine, curled up on the bed and started futzing around on her niPad.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm not enjoying this. I want to go home. I'm booking an early flight out of here."