Polaroid Vortex Turbo Lucky Streak

Reposted from the classic 2013 Spirit of Savvy trip report.

Jan 8, 2014 Spirit of Savvy - Day 11 - Tuesday

Our last day in Vegas. (Or was it?...)

It's been a pretty crappy trip in many way and I had to really wonder if and when I would ever see another Royal Flush.

In fact, I got my last one on the first full day of the previous trip, so some 18 or 19 heavy play days had passed since I'd achieved The Hand.

We walked down the hallway to start our morning video poker sessions and I said, "Well, today's the day. Royal day."

"That's because there isn't any other day," replied the Quad Queen.

"Exactly! They're always one step ahead of us!!!"

My morning started as usual with nothing good happening but before long it became apparent that the Quad Queen was on a tear.

QQ Quad number 1.

QQ Quad number 2. Note it was dealt on the redeal after holding the Queen.

QQ Quad number 3. Dealt.

And finally, after she used the Strict Rules of Parlay (Queensbury variation) to move up to dollars...

Yes, after all the hours and hours of play, all the losing, all the close calls, she finally nailed a ROYAL FLUSH.

I felt a huge, huge weight lifted off my shoulders. This was part vindication of our approach, which is predicated on eventually getting Royals, of which we had had exactly fuck-all none doughnut goose egg. Until now.

You also get a free t-shirt when you hit a Royal at the Cal. She could now wear a head-to-to 'go anywhere' outfit provided entirely by the casino - a Cal hat, and a blue t-shirt.

Obligatory money on the bed photo.

Carrying on with our day, we did some triple play at Main St. Station and then had our traditional rest break (for the sickly and weak).

I checked out the news and flight status and found that the Polaroid Vortex had completely cluster-fucked Pearson airport. They'd closed Pearson because, according to officials, "it was a bit nippy out there, and some of our ground crew did not have sweaters."

This stranded people on planes for hours, and caused huge backlogs in luggage processing, not to mention canceled flights and such - SOP (standard operating procedure) for Air Fuck You Canada.

The savvy thing to do in this case was to confirm that we could rebook our flights online without any penalties (confirmed) and rebook for Friday (rebooked).

As if being stuck in Vegas an extra 2 days is not punishment enough, there may be a looming Velveeta cheese shortage. Crikey!!!

Later, at the Fremont, where we went to play, weirdnesses continued. We sat down to play some Pick'em and heard the 'happy music' coming from the other side of the bank.

"Hit something good?" I shouted to the woman I'd seen settling in to play video keno.

"Hand pay," she replied.

Yes, it was a hand pay all right. But one I'd never seen the likes of before.

Someone trundled over, paid her a penny, and shut off the 'happy music'.

Mrs. Flusher continued her lucky streak hitting a straight flush on Pick'em for $300 less a quarter.

We tried some other stuff - I continued to lose of course until I had a moment on good ole dollar Boner Deluxe.

Dollar Boner Deluxe Quad for the R.F.

I rustled up grub - same-day comp seafood buffet - and we ate crab legs and about six cheesecakes each. Why? Why not!

They label the cheese for your convenience. In case you don't know what sliced cheese is.

We did some triple play and this and that at the Fremont and we were getting very close to another of our goals for this trip - to get my card up to Emerald status.

The last of the Quad Queen's turbo luck streak.

Luck did finally turned for the Quad Queen and I started my usual slow slide into an unrecoverable losing day.

Another weirdness. Never seen this display issue before on a VP machine.

We had more points to get so after a brief refresh in the room (this coughing 48,184 times a day tires one out) we did the final march on triple and five play quarters at MSS.

It ate quite a bit of dough with no wins but I now own a couple of shiny new Emerald cards that I can use to skip the lines at the Cal coffee shop with and up my bonus point return from 0.2% to a staggering 0.3%

Q.Q. up on the day $3200 (would have been more, but taxes withheld on the $4K, don't forget).
R.F. down on the day around $500. What else is new.

Down on the trip a low quality beater used car.

MGM Grand Lion's Share Progressive Slot!

Reposted from the classic 2013 Spirit of Savvy trip report.

Jan 7, 2014 Spirit of Savvy - Day 9 - Monday

The Cal casino in the morning. The attentive cocktail waitresses bringing freshly brewed coffee, the gentle chiming of winning machines, and the World War Three roar of the new enemy of the people, the carpet Zamboni.

This machine seems to resurface the carpet and is self propelled, with, I think, the same Pratt and Whitney J-2 turbofan jet engine as my brother-in-law's Megalon Ultra-Fryer employs.

We played some and again, I had trouble getting much at the Cal in the morning. I did get another 'almost' Loser Flush though.

 Triple Play at MSS was more fruitful and included this nice dealt set of Deuces.

The day was unfolding in a less dramatic fashion than others, but I had an idea. It was time to hit MGM and the Legendary Lion's Share Longshot Progressive.

But first, a trip to the Peppermill for lunch.

The Quad Queen had a burger with sweet potato fries. She said it was absolutely delicious.

I had a Philly Cheesesteak and rings. I said it was absolutely delicious.

Server Crystal, with gum.

The Peppermill is old school Vegas and it seemed right for a bash at the Lion's Share. Here's the Fireside Lounge, which looks like a great place to hang out and pretend to be color blind.

Just as we were about ready to leave, the guys opposite got up and one of them dropped something on the carpet. It rolled right to me and settled at my feet. A $25 chip.

"Hey buddy!" I said to the guy, and returned the chip. He said thanks and off they went.

"Twenty five dollar chip. Maybe that will change our luck," I said to the Queen.

"Maybe."

"You gotta do the right thing though. He was right there..."

"Yeah. You gotta do the right thing. Maybe he dropped more of them."

"Let's not look until they are out of the parking lot!" I responded, savvily.

Sated, and unable to find more lost chips, we scooted down to MGM, self parked, and found the Lion's Share right where I'd left it last time, still ringing up higher and, fortunately, unoccupied.

This 20 year old machine, because it is part of a progressive, can't be taken from the MGM Grand casino floor until the prize is won. It's been sitting, by itself, the last standing member of what was once a bank of machines, for years. You win the progressive of two million dollars plus, you get to keep the machine.

Jackpot as of January 7, 2014.

She's 20 years old now!!!

We put in $101 each for a total of (wait for it...) $202. And we bashed away for all of 20 minutes. We had two hits of $60 but that was all and before long, the $202, along with our dreams of $2.3 million, were shattered.

We played $100 each in the high limit room and I lost all mine. Mrs. F cashed out $170, so she did okay at MGM.

Time to haul ass back downtown, drop the QQ off at the Cal, and return the rental, but not before buying gas at the Fort Chevron, just a few blocks from Fremont, where barricading the booth jockey includes pill box like fortifications, two roof mounted 50 cal. machine guns, and various tank traps and incendiary devices. Things must be kind of tough in that neighborhood.

I slipped my bucks through a little slit in the stationary tank 'booth' and pumped my gas without losing life or limb.

Car returned, I headed back to the Cal. We rested up and repeated last night's shenanigans.

Play triple play, get scratch cards, drink whiskey, get comp buffet (fortunately without any Mambo Hamburgler incidents), roll up the coin in.

I relaxed and just enjoyed the play and didn't worry about the money.

Did any Royals show? No. But we did get $49 in scratch cards. The Quad Queen was in fine form and at one point, she'd hit 15 quads to my 2.

We did maybe $25K in coin in and as for the Royal, we had lots of time for that - with one day left in our trip.

R.F. Up great meals, whiskey and experiences, down blah-blah dollars on the day.
Q.Q. Ditto but didn't lose as much as me.

Trip: down a high quality used automobile

Note to self - rename this blog post something along the lines of  'Loin's Share and Peckermill'.

The Mambo Hamburgler of the Garden Court Buffet

Reposted from the classic 2013 Spirit of Savvy trip report.

Jan 7, 2014 Spirit of Savvy - Day 9 - Sunday

The world is full of wonderful and interesting people. And I've met a lot of them here in Las Vegas, and in particular, downtown, with its branch office of the Looney Bin. But I'll get to that in a moment.

I know these reports are getting kind of repetitive, but that's about all I have energy for. I write it like I limp through it. So apologies for that.

I woke up to another beautiful day (in other words, without freezing rain, Arctic Vortexes, wimp chill factors and all the other stuff that is gracing the North East US and Canada right now, including Flusherville) and got ready for the gambling activities by taking my lungs out of my body and rinsing them carefully in the sink.

This got rid of a lot of the sick crud and casino smoke that was clogging things up and I felt a lot better for it.

Our morning session was interesting from the standpoint of what didn't happen that should have.

In fact, this entire trip is an exercise in outlier events that are unlikely in terms of statistical expectations and standard deviations from the mean of normal results in a pseudo-random series of events.

In other words, we are fucking unlucky.

We played an hour and three quarters, mostly on quarters, with only one quad between us, and with $3000 coin in.  That's about 2,400 hands of video poker. Quads appear on average about every 400 hands. So, you can see that we are fucking unlucky.

On the other hand, if they paid for having streaks without quads, we would have had the golden session of a lifetime.

The Maltese Quad of the morning.

Keno! Refuge of the degenerate loser. I played this while blogging. I won $0.80.

Healthy gambler's breakfast because there's a banana there (that I didn't eat).

One nice touch here at the Cal... the housekeeper dropped off a couple of hats and a Mahalo (Thank You For Giving Us Your Cash In Exchange For Chinese-made Hats) card to thank us.

Maybe these are lucky hats??!!

I called our host at the Downtown Grand and explained that we'd have to take her up on her comp offer another time. We're just too beat to worry about changing hotels again. Being sick in Vegas is not recommended.

Main Street Station kept us busy with triple and five-play and we made hay on it, in terms of coin in and points and such.

Savvy flush draw - five for five.

We took a nap and I ate the left-over pizza from the night before. Our fridge has been set too cold and has been freezing the drinks and stuff in it. I kind of had to suck the pizza to thaw it. You haven't lived until you've sucked pizza at The Cal.

We had another bash at parlaying on single lines and I had my shining moment of the day (if you don't include pizza sucking).

I parlayed up to fifty cents and got Aces for $400 on Double Double. Shame the kicker wasn't there but yeah, I'll take it.

Back at Main Street, we did more multi-play, and I got a same-day buffet comp based on our play there. We hit lots of quads and got lots of scratch cards (including a $5 one) and didn't make much money - but boy did we rack up the coin in.

Quad Queen Dealt Quad on Triple Play.

It was at the buffet that the interesting person alert went off.

I spied this guy wearing a suit of clothes very fit for a 200 pound gentleman. The only problem was that the guy was about 98 pounds.

He was directed to a table but in a flurry of gesturing hands and garbled Spanish, he chose another table,sat down, and refused to move.

It looked a bit uncomfortable for the host, but this guy wasn't going to budge.

He took himself, and his gigantic shiny green sportcoat, to the fruit display and loaded up a plate mile-high with melon.

Vegetarian, I thought.

This was fine and he started nibbling, and then took off for the buffet again.

The Tower of Melon.

The guy loaded up another plate and put it down beside the melon and got very animated at picking at it.

Then he went up to the buffet again and got a plate heaping full of salad.

Round two for the bizarro world buffet version of Perez Prado.

So then he went back up to the buffet again and was just scooping out the lasagne and portuguese sausage and onions like he was slopping the hogs - and another heaping plate came back to the table.

The guy sat down at a different seat at the table and nibbled on a few things and then he did something I've never seen before

Fast as lightning, he jumped up and grabbed a fourth heaping plateful - except this time it was from someone else's table.

I happened to be chatting with some of the staff at the time and let them know that, uh-oh, the Mambo Hamburgler was at work in the MSS buffet.

It was at this point that I realized the guy had to be starkers. I kind of felt sorry for him, but I felt worse for the person who had spent probably 2-3 minutes carefully loading a plateful of gluttony feast, only to have it spirited away by Perez Prado in a gigantic inflatable suit.

Gambling wise this was a more normal day, and a more enjoyable day. Losses were a very reasonable $260 (me) and $180 (qq).

Our coin in was around $25K at Cal/MSS, right where we had a goal to be.

Overall trip losses, I don't go there anymore. It blows and we all know it. Better to focus on the Mambo Hamburgler of the Garden Court Buffet incident!

Hello, you've reached the Perez Prado School of Dance... you walk in, you Mambo out - UNHHH!