Quads? You Must Be Jokering

Day 7 Tuesday Dec 26, 2023 and I'm enjoying Wynn as always, even though there's precious little video poker to play.

Not sure why, maybe it's the various pillows that are different from what I'm used to, but I've woken up with a headache each and every morning. Sore shoulders too. Maybe it's the pillows and the button pushing. It's certainly not the quality bourbon.

I keep meaning to check out the Fontainebleau and have waived on it twice while driving right by. Oh well.

This morning, I gave the Little Giant the day off and had coffee with breakfast like a genuine luxury hotel-dwelling person of some financial stature might due, courtesy the $100 resort credit that Wynn lavished upon me based on the $1000s we gave them last winter.

Baby, I know the taste of victory, and it tastes exactly like three gargantuan chicken apple sausages.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

I was still feeling a little iffy but was starving and it was a beautiful morning here in Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada, so I opted to eat a civilized breakfast in the lovely, bright Terrace Pointe Cafe.

Like I said, I was seriously famished after having just snicker-snacks for dinner and no lunch the day before - I wrecked the above, all except for one crescent of inch-think pancake, and the stem of the strawberry half.

It was excellent. Little Giant, you've been put on notice, I might be opting for $33 breakfasts every day in Vegas from now on! Or maybe a buffet, if I can get a third mortgage to finance it.

I'd written up the blog the night before, so I didn't have that activity to distract me from gambling - so I gambled!

The Joker Poker went fairly well I guess, but I had to move after 20 minutes when the woman at the machine opposite fired up a cigar and smoked me out. It was one of those flavored ones, too, which please the palate of the peach schnapps mint lavender bubblegum vanilla chai bubble tea flavored cigar-loving dufus 'enjoying' it, and sicken everyone else.

There is a place for cigars, and I've smoked a few in my day, but there is no place for those flavored ones - in my opinion.

My opinion, my choice. I moved.

Since I'm bitching about opinionated stuff, I will also bitch about the fact that Wynn is playing Christmas music on Boxing day, which is totally uncalled for. Let it go, Linus, let it go.

So I moved to some other machine, and my mojo was off. I lost some of my initial hundy at Joker thingy, and then tried $20 on Triple Double Bonus, and $20 or so at Keno, and then more Joker, and then more Keno until I was tapped out, down $100 on the day.

OK. Regroup.

I decided to walk over to Encore, which is less crazytown, and more reserved.

It's also the last place the Quad Queen and I ever had an uproarious drunken, winning video poker session.

Fair enough. These things have to be faced.

I put a hundred bucks in and mentally implored QQ to help me out here, facryinoutloud.

All I can say is I went on the most ridiculous quad run I've seen in years. Now, these are fake quads, but they are still worth $20 instead of the typical $32.50.

But just gaze upon them! And there was a string in there where I got three or four just a minute apart each!

I made it all the way up to $220 from $100 and then the qrazy quads stopped qoming and in half an hour, I slid back to my original buy-in.

But it was great, I didn't lose, and I played for almost 2 hours. I ended up with four to a royal four or five times, too. The more of those you get, the closer you are to the elusive Royal Straight Flush.

Back in the room, I took a long break, enjoying the view, and some sunshine. Then I crashed out on the bed for a long while, taking a nap, and thinking about how to win some money.

The 250 game losing keno ticket had to be cashed in, and the only thing was to get a new 500 game losing keno ticket.

So I figured I'd take the car downtown (with me in it), see what my Keno ticket won ($32), and get a new simple 5 spotter with numbers suggested from my beloved from the beyond, 20 cents a game, for 500 games. That way I can hang around the room in my underwear and still gamble. I'd stop off at the Fontainebleau on the way back. And somewhere in there I'd get food, and maybe some pop.

Downtown I went, and it should be noted that the D has invested in its live Keno-playing clientele, with the addition of some pretty sweet new leather padded Keno-playing-while-falling-asleep-while-smoking Keno lounge chairs.

My original ticket, it has to be admitted, was a bust. And that's the beauty of Keno, it's all about the next game, which is full of hope and excitement, until it too falls to the ground like a 3 year old's ice cream, a bust. God damn it, I do love it so.

Heading out of downtown, I wandered east, and then south and then east again on Charleston and by the geez I found me an Albertsons. And I found the perfect provisions for an iffy asshole. (You can take that any way you want.)

Those bought, I drove exactly and expertly to the Fontainebleau and... waived it off yet again. I'm old, all of 64, and my life and brain cells are basically over, and I have no energy to do anything difficult past 3:00 pm. Back at Wynn, I spent 20 minutes searching for a parking spot on the coveted Level 2 of the Wynn parking structure (which has access directly to the casino floor, no stairs or elevating devices required), and failed miserably. For the first time maybe ever the concept of going for El Primo Spotto proved completely and utterly useless. I was foiled, and foiled again.

Fuck it, I gave up, used my room key card to exit Level 2, and dropped it in the process, and fretting, went to Level 4 where there was tons of open air parking, parked (in El Primo Spotto), spent 10 minutes moving the car seat back and forth and searching under same using my piPhone 3.14 as a flashlight for said goddamn room key, and then giving up and finally finding it in the cup holder, all the while chanting 'don't forget your reading glasses, don't forget your reading glasses' which I wear all day long in the casino, as they do enough distance and enough reading to allow a good overall gambling view, and then hauling my shit out of the car, locking it 17 OCD fucking times, braving the COVID elevators, fighting upstream through the throngs of thousands of Hong Kong travelers each with 500 kids with their own wheeled luggage that they have no idea how to propel, through the dragon's lair of the security guy guarding the elevators, and then finally into my sweet, sweet quiet, safe room to unload the groceries, start manically checking the new Keno ticket, only to find that... I have forgotten my reading glasses in the car.

FUCK.

Flushiepants may be neurotic, but he is also prepared - with a spare set of SUPER reading glasses, that show everything in microscopic detail, but are useless for wandering around casinos, or anywhere there are any sort of obstacles, for that matter, in.

But they are perfect for checking Keno progress, looking for new Twitter notifications, and preparing dinner in the Hot Rockin' Logic Hot Pocket Mini Travel Oven.

Tonight's Room Camping Menu

Lucky me, I managed to cram both entrees into the HotRocketLogicPocket Oven thingy, because the fried rice one had a cardboard container that I could crush in a bit on one side.

It took quite a while to heat these up from frozen - like over 2 hours - so I spent that time writing most of this blog post and keeping an eye on my keno numbers.

At this point in the day, I was down $100 from the morning, I'd broke even on the Joker Poker fake quad run and had over 2 hours of play. I was calling it down $100 for the cost of the Keno ticket, and any winnings, I'd just count as won on the day I picked them up.

And I won $32.20 on my previous $100 Keno ticket.

So going back to the casino I could easily go through $130 and end up down $300 on the day.

But! I have an Ace in my Hole as the Dutch poker players say. While poking around in the slot club menus, I found that I had over 6,000 points, which I figured wasn't much. But these points can be converted to free play at the rate of 500 points for $5 worth. Huh? I had a cache of $61 freeplay I could tap into.

I also wondered if there were some points on the Quad Queen's card. 

And, I did some poking around in my email and I have $50 at Mirage, and $25 at Cosmo to use at some point.

Dinner was very palatable and tasted like food, too. I poured a generous traveler and headed to the casino to play some video keno.

The Quad Queen had $7 available. Freeplay here is actually 'free credit', the kind where you play with real money, and after each spin they pay you back for the bet, alongside any winnings. Same as MGM's system.

So, I put in $10, and punched up Four Card Keno, with a quarter on three four spot tickets, and 50 cents on the five spot, all overlapping numbers. When the QQ's $7 had run out, I had $14 or so on the meter. Thanks, baby!

I switched to my card and went to work on my $61 in freeplay. Once it was done, I figured I'd keep spinning and either win, or go out (duh) but at that point I'd have to decide whether to commit a third hundred for the day.

Well, I never got that far. On one game I saw a couple of numbers come in early, then a long series of misses, during which I kind of lost hope on that particular game, and then very close together two more numbers, and I thought I was going to have another near miss, and then on the last number, the very corner filled in, and holy shit, I'd done it again.

I hit 5 out of 5 for a grand total of just under $500 won. I could scarcely believe it.

The video keno hits this trip have just been stellar and sure make up for one of the recent trips where I couldn't hit anything all week.

And as far as the trip goes, I'm in good shape.

Day +$340 Trip -$10

Down ten bucks on the trip? Savvy!!!! And, I've got that 500 play Keno ticket running, so that will bring in some money, maybe a little, maybe more than a little if it hits. (As of this morning, no 5 out of 5s... yet.)

Plus I've got $75 in freeplay to go and collect.

What a great day today was. I feel like I had some help, and Karen's philosophy was always to load your plate and go for it. I'm glad I went back down to the casino instead of lounging in the room!!!

The only thing missing (besides her, of course) is a Royal. Who knows?!