Is there a Royal in the house?

I am really worried that I am not going to get a Royal Flush this trip. It's been a long trip, with a lot of hours at the machine, and we really should have more than one between us.

So let's do some math to make me feel better.

Over about 30 days combined play, make that, conservatively, 5 hours per day at 500 hands per hour. That's 2,500 hands per day times 30 days, which is 75,000 hands of video poker. I think this is a low estimate, but anyway...

Royal Flushes occur about once ever 40,000 hands, so we really should have had two of them by now. Unfortunately, statistics mislead 38% of the time, over the long run. And, say, 9% of statistics are made up on the spot.

For a trip of this length, it's not unreasonable that we should have had 3 Royals by now. And this would account for a lot of the ass-reaming losses I am pretty much responsible for.

But let's look at another angle here. We've had 14 room nights so far, all comped, and most of our meals comped as well. Add in a significant amount of freeplay. I've kept track, and so far it totals around $1800. Really.

So this means that instead of me sustaining a gambling loss of some $2,600, I'm really only down $800. Over 14 days in Vegas, that's very, very savvy gambling on my part.

And maybe the fact that it has been raining in Vegas is a sign of some sort of cleansing of bad luck. Maybe.

And with this thought, a spring in my step, and some very savvy moves on Mrs. Flusher before heading down for breakfast, we started a new day in the El Cortez. I've been saying 'the El Cortez' but I suspect when translated, this means 'the the Cortez', or more specifically, 'the the house of Cortez ass reaming'.

I'm getting to like the Cafe Cortez a bit, with its not bad food, and soft porn music soundtrack.

Breakfast was yummy indeed and featured their special 'breakfast potatoes'. I am impressed that they are able to separate the breakfast potatoes out from the lunch and dinner potatoes, because one spud looks like another, if you ask me.

Mrs. Flusher had corned beef hash. I do not know if it was made with breakfast, lunch, dinner, or afternoon tea potatoes. Most likely breakfast potatoes but who's to know?

You may have noticed I have had very few quads lately - and I am officially in a 'quad drought'. I am hoping for a bailout package. Fortunately, the day for me did start with a nice little $50 set of deuces on Bonus Poker, so I had the ice broken early in the quad department.

Quads make days. Royals make trips.

You want a winning day, you need quads. You want a winning trip, you need Royals Flush.

One of the short-pay progressives was up to $860 on the Aces with kicker (from the usual $500 starting point) so we gave that a shot, but no luck there.

By the time we decided to go on casino walkabout, later in the morning, I was down only $20 on the day, and  Mrs. F. $300. What the heck??

Our destination was Main Street Station where we wanted to play one last time, get scratch cards, and hopefully win some dough. We also had some business at the cage - the test marker I drew last spring was not able to be withdrawn from my account due to routing errors, and we wanted to clear this up.

It looks like things are really going on at the Lady Luck, which is going to become the Downtown Grand. I guess I can deal with that, never having stepped foot into the L.L. when open. I was hoping it would reopen someday, but I guess it won't really be the same old girl as before.

Some of the windows were out - on purpose, I presume. And there was some activity going on around there, but still no signs of heavy duty construction - there was not enough in the way of vehicles or people to suggest large crews hard at work on my next gambling conquest.

At the Cal we played a few things, me being very conservative. I lost 20 here, won 20 there, that kind of thing. Mrs. Flusher dropped a hundy on the 50 cent BP machines where she hit the Royal last week and I made a bit at blackjack.

At MSS I repeated the deuces quad for $50 and a scratch card ($2). After that things got quiet for me and I resorted to a slot longshot for some dough. Mrs. Flusher hit up the triple play and managed a couple of quads, but generally, the days of 31 quads in a single 24 hour period seem to have fled us.

$50 slot win

For some reason, Mrs. F decided to try the last of her high stakes play (which has been pretty much an unmitigated high stakes ass reaming disaster) on $2 video poker - $10 a hand. It went up a bit, and then down a lot, right to zero.

The best part of the foray to MSS was seeing the cocktail waitresses in western garb, confirming that 'Hot Towels' is still there (the waitress whose whinny of 'cocktails' sounds like 'hot towels' as noted by other esteemed Vegas travellers and writers.)

And... by getting a couple of thousand points at least, we qualified for lucky stuffed toys emblazoned with Pepsi logos. I'm sure these are destined for little hands to indoctrinate them into the consumption of Pepsi - but really, what does it matter, with Pepsi's manifest destiny push into every place that I want to go and can no longer choose a fucking Coca Cola??? By the time those little soda drinkers grow up, you won't be able to get anything but Pepsi anyway.

Dispensing the indoctrinating corporate logo toys.

On our loop back, we stopped at Binions and tried the Double Double there. I lost $20, but Mrs. F hit a quad for $62 and kept it. I did the swipe and wipe promotion and got $10 freeplay, which I promptly dumped back into the machines.

No accounting for Love at Binions.

Maybe we'd have more luck at the Four Queens, where we needed to say so long to Mike and Mike and the crew, and Fremont, our next stop after that.

Peewee and Elvis in da house.

So off we went.