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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

She wins some, you lose some


Keno, the old-skool way. I mean, really, really old-skool. Like 1950s.
We dragged our luggage from the Four Queens to the El Cortez down Fremont Street, past the Fitz, past the Heart Attack Grill, past Walgreens, past the never-open hookah cafe, past Insert Coin(s) past the El Cortez, past the Western, back past the Western and to the El Cortez and checked into a south facing tower room. They suit us just fine and have a nice view of the Fabulous Stratosphere and the Fabulous Las Vegas Fabulous Strip beyond.

The Quadruple Bypass burger has no calories if you have milk with it.

We hit the bar Double Double Bonus and while I lost most of the rest of my day's stake, the Queen de la Quad employed her 'press it' strategy. This consists of winning on quarters, then moving up to 50 cent play, winning on that, and then moving to dollar play, kicking my raggedy ass the entire time.

Do you have any idea how painful it is to try to cough up these snappy, colorful, humourous comments while I am being out-gambled at every turn? It's a good thing we are in a partnership on this and I can sneak some of her winnings into my stake every night immediately she drops into her bar-induced coma.

Honestly? I would never do that. I would wait 35-45 minutes for the bar-induced coma to really take hold, and then sneak some stake money.

The woman is amazing. While I got no (none, zero, donut, zip, diddly) quads, she was banging out $62, $200, $125, and $400 beauties.
A $400 beauty that I didn't get.
It's quite astounding and infuriating to watch.

Meanwhile, my day's stake was gone, gone, gone. (I'd take some time to think of other words for 'gone' here, but you get the picture don't you.)

Mrs. Flusher made a tender offer. "You can play for me."

What a sweetheart!

She continued, "But I keep the winnings."

Instead, I decided to apply some Euro-zone inspired pumping up of my day's stake.

We played in the new Parlour Lounge. I lost, generally speaking.

It's amazing how a great hotel casino like the El Cortez can take something like one of their great bars with great bartop video poker and completely fuck it up. Because that is what they've done with the Parlour Lounge and its a shame.

According to unnamed sources, business there has dropped by about 3/4. For a while they gave away rounds of drinks to folks waiting for their table at the Flame steakhouse, just to fill the place up and give it some much needed 'buzz. Instead, patrons have the feeling they should just 'buzz off'. At 9:00 last night there were 4 people in there. The fact that the bartop video poker starts at the 50 cent level doesn't help either.

This is the worst thing to happen to the ElCo since they took out the diner-style counter at the coffee shop, and threw out all the rubbies to go and play penny video poker at the Western. (Fortunately, the Western is closing, which should provide a bumper crop of replacement rubbies.)

The crew at the bar is as good as always, but it makes me wonder what the hell management was thinking. Like the time they removed all the cafeterias in the North American Veeblefetzer plants and replaced them with those revolving sandwich slot machines. That lasted about 2 months of work-to-rule and the cafeterias, with their vats of chili and their greasy Egg Veeblemuffins for breakfast were put back.

We played some more, and the QQueen hit a sweet straight flush on dollars for $250. She's been pressing it, playing back a decent amount of these hits, trying to hit a dollar royal or some other goodies.

Meanwhile, I've dumped $120. This is just the way it is going to be.

Sweet straight flush that I didn't get.
About this time, we'd had a decent number of drinks, and found ourselves in what we call the Dollar Cave - a little alcove by the cage filled with wonderful old school coin dropping dollar machines with old out of focus CRT screens, just like your mother used to play.

Norma, our favorite cocktail waitress, kept 'em coming about every 7 minutes while we played. Or I should say, while the Queen played. And actually, she cashed out some coins, and we sat side by side, playing coins the way we used to when we started on this gambling adventure, some 17 years ago. The rule was you had to put coins in, and you had to cash them all out.

So I've literally got drinks backed up on the counter between the machines. I'm on Bonus Poker, and she's on Double Double. We're pretty much hammered, our hands black from the greasy dollar coin action. I'm singing little congo line songs to try to drum up luck: 'Full. House. Full-house! Full. House. Full-house!'.

Norma kept 'em coming, and we are having a blast. I hit something stupid like three of a kind and we shriek like 20-somethings on a bachelorette trip. People look over to see if we've hit a huge Royal or something. We keep pounding the coins in and pounding the drinks back.

Yes, the degeneracy even goes as far as the men's room. God forbid I should be without my Jack on the rocks.
Something very odd happened on the Queen's machine. She hit three jacks for $15. And cashed the $15 in coins out into the tray, per our stupid inebriated coin-play rules. Then the machine display disappeared and it went into the boot-up sequence, just like the grommet calibrator on the size 7 grommet line back at North American, when you restart it. It said 'verifying game memory'. And then it paid her again, I shit you not.
Note the RESTART message. Strange things are a-foot at the El Cor-tez.
Not only that, it mis-paid at some point, because she ended up with 2 extra coins in her tray somehow, when all the payouts are in multiples of 5. Weird stuff. In fact, in the pic above, it says "PLAYER PAID 16". So I think maybe it payed out $16 the first time, realized it fucked up, rebooted, and then fucked up again and paid another $16.

The Quad Queen has me hit the button for her because she is double-fisting whiskey and cokes. Dealt three 2s. So she tells me to hold them and I do. She tells me to hit the Draw button and I refuse.

This is because I suck.

Well, she hits the button, and you'd think we'd just won at Keno or something, we are screaming like idiots, laughing, high-fiving, drooling on each other, the whole drunk gambling 9 yards o'fun.

Oh hell YEAH we've pulled in a $400 hit.

The $400 quad 2s that I didn't get any of the profit from.
Next hand, she's dealt... nothing. Razgu. Nothing to hold.

"Hit Draw for me", she says.

I do, and we hit...

nothing.

"LOSER!!!!", she screams, subtly.

We play around a bit, some Bonus Poker at the bar near Keno, and I manage to hit just my second quad of the day. Yes it is that bad.

"Oh my God, hit a quad", I say.

"Your winning, is just beginning."

We laugh like nuns on a roller coaster for the first time.

Don't ask me what the hell that even means, I have no idea, but it sounded good in my head, so there it is.

I tried the Deuces with the $500 prize for four deuces, and just for good measure hit two natural quads which are worth sweet fuck all on Deuces. Even so, the quad count is something like 17 to 4.

And the day's results bear this out. I'm down $600 on the day, and am now over $2K down on the trip. What a shitkicking.

And the ever ebullient Mrs. Flusher (except when she's had too many Jameson's, in which case, she can get kind of squibbly), is up $900 beans on the day, and is now up $575 on the trip.





    2 comments:

    1. Great Story Flusher - and nice site. While I dont like what the ELC did with their once great inventory, I like how they fixed up the place. You forget your in the bowels of Downtown LV ! If you really want to see coin dropper heaven, walk over to the CALIFORNIA. Near Valet parking , there are about 20 coin dropping dollar 9/6 jacks machines that are always busy. Great Fun to take 3 rolls of $20 , and quit at $100.

      ReplyDelete
    2. I love those coin droppers!!! Unfortunately, they have converted some of them so that they can spit out tickets. Blasphemy!

      And even worse, I heard some suits talking about taking out the coin dropping Bally Pick'em machines at the Fremont.

      ReplyDelete

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