Start Counting the Comps

Tuesday sort of took the shape of Monday, in that I woke up, had early coffee, tried a $20, had punishment breakfast in my room of stolen apple and emergency cheese, and some nuts as well. The Veeblefetzer crew and I headed out to GrommetCon where Norbert had me mindlessly shuffling heavy objects around the Royal Canadian Veeblefetzer booth.

There he was, hob nobbing with the odd customer but mostly hustling the booth babes that he'd hired locally, hoping to get them to the hospitality suite and drayage them, probably.

The best part of the morning was when Norbert had me moving some heavy boxes from under one table to under the other. Then he had me move them back again.

Norbert cranked open a liter bottle of water and offered it to one of the booth babes, just to try to find something to talk to them about, probably. No takers, so he set the open water down on the table.

I gave that table a linebacker shoulder to the leg and as if I'd planned it, the open water bottle fell into about 30 fucking pounds of pop rocks, open in a huge bowl.

The pop rocks went off like a D-day firefight and Norbert yelped like a scolded pup, spinning, eyes wide. The booth babes tried not to laugh at him. Last I saw, he was running to the men's room. I think he peed his pants.

An hour later, he still hadn't returned, so I said fuck it and told the guys that to tell him I had to go back to the room to enter more vital customer response forms.

I grabbed breakfast for lunch at the S Knife Fork Crossed O restaurant at the Downtown Grand.

I settled on the exotic sounding Huevos Rancheros, which, when translated, just means eggs. $9.95.

The server came right over, got me fixed up with coffee. Friendly.

"May I take your order sir?" she asked. A pro.

"Yes, I'll have the Huevos Rancheros Qué Estás Haciendo Güey."

She raised an eyebrow.

"That just means 'eggs'. Over hard, gracias."

It was pretty wonderful, no bull. Just the kind of thing I like, eggs, cheese, 'red sauce', and lots of prizes. And spicy!

I finished off my afternoon work, entering a bunch of customer response forms, but switching the customer names and the form information, just for laughs.

After a while, I felt a bit bad about what I'd done. It was going to make life difficult for some cold-calling grommet salesperson.

So, instead, I kept the right customer names, but reversed the ratings, so that if a customer rated us 1 out of 10 for service, that because a 9 out of 10. 7 out of 10 for grommet suitability became 3 out of 10.

More important things awaited - my evening of casino actioning! My $500 CAD because $458 US, and I had at it.

No kicker, though.

No kicker, though.

I wanted to get outside for some sunlight and fresh air, so I walked down to the Plaza to see what was what. They are getting on peoples radar these days for incrementally improving the property's offerings, communicating directly with customers, trying some interesting promotions, and keeping decent video poker.

Boner Deluxe wasn't my friend much, though, eating up $140 before I gave up the ghost.

I headed back to the Downtown Grand and stopped in to talk to my host, who I won't name, because she kept me waiting for 10 minutes, and then came out and it went like this.

"Hello, I'm so-and-so host. What is it?"

"Hello - great to see you again."

Blank stare.

"What can I do for you."

"Stopping in to say hello..." I said.

Blank stare.

"I'm Royal Flusher. I'm your guest here at the Downtown Grand..."

Handshake.

"We... met last fall? We spent half an hour sitting over there talking about the Grand?... You set up my stay???" - These are things I wanted to say but after cooling my heels for 10 minutes and then garnering zero recognition, I decided to just get on with it.

"Ok, can you set up late check-out tomorrow please? Three o'clock would be great."

"Well... if we go past two, it causes problems."

"FINE."

So, here's a case where grooming a host with a tip last stay and getting to know them did absolutely nothing for me. My view of it is this - if a host sets up a stay for a guest and a quiet downtown property that is struggling (or really, any property), a good solid host would have that information set up so that they would know each day which guests they'd brought in are on site. Higher players (not me) would get a greeting at some point.

But I did not like being treated like we had never met before.

And having taken care of said host, I couldn't even get a decent late check-out time. I asked for nothing more than that. The Nugget gives me four o'clock.

So that settled it, I saw no sense in further cultivating this host at this property. I'll just sit back and see what happens. Things are in flux at the Grand and said host could be gone at any time. It's also possible that they have very little leeway, since the Grand doesn't 'get' the casino business yet. And that's based on what I was told last fall.

Not the way I like to have things go, but there you are.

Here is  the end result of my $500 CAD:

Not too shabby.

Taking into account the Plaza loss, I was even on the day. I played some more.

No kicker, though.

When dinner time rolled around, I headed to the Four Queens. I had three things on my mind.

1) Eat an amazing Chicago style deep dish pizza free on points
2) Play Keno
3) Play $40 free play available to me and exchange it into a sum of real dollars to leave the establishment with. Hopefully a dollar Royal. I love to try to take their money, and some day I am going to get my first Four Queens dollar Royal. Some day.

I love sitting at Cragnolia's with the casino view.

The Pizza.

After dinner, I waddled over to the dollar Jacks machines. Let's see how I did.

Kept in the game with some Fulls House, and cashed out $120. I was halfway out the door when I remembered my keno ticket.

I cashed $13 on a $10 ticket.

I WON AT KENO!!!!!

Back at the Downtown Grand, I had a crack at the Aces progressive, but couldn't get it.

Stupidly, I counted how many times I got three of a kind and failed to get a quad out of it.

I hit 57 times by the time I gave up. It was a long stint and cost me a number of hundreds of dollars.

So how was I doing, trip wise?

Well, the next day, I sent a tex pointing out that so far I'd had $1,468 in comps and freeplay. When you start counting up the comps, you know you are in trouble.

Minus $1,645 trouble.

Be a savvy gambler, Dawg, Play Max Coins and read my blog. Burma-Shave.