My New Favorite Hobby

Back in May I took a trip down to Vegas to meet up with some friends. Over the course of the trip I did pretty well at the tables which was mostly due to luck. When I got home I decided to get the blackjack books off the shelf and give them another read. Since then I've been trying to make trips every weekend to play. Part of it is nice to get out and drive to places I would never otherwise go. And to be honest, I'm doing pretty well. So when one of my friends asked me if I wanted to go camping this weekend my first thought was 'how can I make this into a gambling trip'. On Friday afternoon I withdrew $1,000 from my bankroll, packed up some gear and drove out to the campground. We were camping in the Olympic National Forest which is only about 40 minutes from where I live. Staying up late drinking and then sleeping on the ground isn't probably the best choice for accommodations the evening prior to a gambling junket, but why should I let my 'second job' get in the way of my life.

Actually, that brings up a good point. Why should I let my first job get in the way of my life? Wouldn't it be great if I could just quit my job and spend my life driving around the country playing blackjack and visiting my friends. I have about 100 friends and family spread out across this country so I could visit each for 3-4 days a year and live on the road playing Blackjack for gas money. To do that I'd need to A) be good at blackjack and B) have a serious bankroll. Neither of which I have yet achieved.

So I woke up this morning and packed up my tent and hit the road. First stop was straight down US 101. A neat side note about US 101 is that since it hooks around the Olympic Peninsula the to get to the northern terminus of the road, you actually have to go south for the last 100 miles or so. But that last part is some of the most scenic. The road hugs the foothills of the Olympic mountains and runs right along the Hood Canal. You can stop at oyster stands along the side of the road of some fresh ones right from the source.

I continued inland towards Shelton - A lumber mill town that appears to have seen more prosperous days. I stopped at the Safeway and bought an apple and a peach to eat just outside the store. There were lots of people just loitering around looking shady. I decided to keep moving, I had to get to the tables.

The first casino I stopped at was Little Creek casino about 10 miles south of Shelton. Somewhat in the middle of nowhere, this Indian casino resort was the nicest I went to today. It was just remodeled last October and has opened a championship golf course this year. The only bad thing may be that a girl about my age died there last week.

Little Creek Casino

My strategy was to attack 4 casinos on today's junket. I'd planned to walk into each one with $400 and walk out with either $200 or $600. So even if I had terrible luck at the first three, I would still have $400 to win it all back at the last stop.

My luck didn't start out so hot at Little Creek. The 80 year old gentleman who was chain smoking next to me seemed to be getting all the good cards on his $5 table minimum bets. The smoking didn't bother me too much, I already smelled like a campfire. After an hour or so I was down to $200 and ready to leave.

I had stopped there because it was on the way to the better casinos. The next casinos wouldn't be as nice, but they offered better rules. I'd rather sit in a basement and double my splits than have to endure not hitting 9's against dealer 6's. So onward.

To get to the next joint I had to travel to the end of US 101 which terminates in Olympia, our State Capitol. It was exactly 2 years ago today that I arrived in Washington on my move out to the Pacific Northwest. I spent most of that drive listening to Rancid sing about being on the highway back to Olympia, WA. Today, I cranked that up as I made the wide turn and the Capitol building came into view.

I drove through the (pretty cool) city and decided to visit the capitol. I present the dirtiest rotunda in the union:

I also found out that instead of a state supreme court building, Washington chose to go with a "Temple of Justice" which I insist is as silly sounding as it is impressive.

After my short sightseeing trip I continued up I-5 and to a place called Hawk's Prairie. I settled in at a decent table with two other patrons. The first was a lady who bet big and probably spent $60 an hour tipping the dealer. The other guy was wearing a MMA shirt and was an Atlanta Falcons fan. We seemed to get along pretty well and it was a pretty fun visit. But it was about business too. The first hour I was pretty much even. The second hour I started to hit some big hands. I got a good lead going and kept riding it. By the time I decided to move on I was up $300 at the joint. But after my poor showing at the first place it meant I was really up only $100.

At this point I'd like to note that I have asked without luck at every casino I have been to for a Coors Original. So far most cocktail waitresses act like they've never even heard of the Banquet Beer. I always grudgingly settle for the Silver Bullet.

The next casino was a micro-casino in Tacoma. The non-Indian casinos in the state aren't allowed to have slot machines and most of them aren't much bigger than a couple of pits, a bar and a cashier. This one tends to get most of their business from soldiers stationed at the nearby army base. The other main customer base is the Vietnamese. For whatever reason the Vietnamese love to gamble. Seattle with it's high Asian population has a large contingent of Asian gamblers. The funny thing is that only the woman seem to really gamble a lot, the men usually aren't even around. And the Vietnamese are notoriously superstitious. Since many of them gamble lots of them end up working in the Casinos. That's the interesting situation I found myself in at my third casino.

I'm sitting at a full table of me and 6 middle aged Vietnamese women. The dealer is as a Vietnamese woman, they are all speaking in Vietnamese and I'm right in the middle. It was an interesting sight, but I was sitting there first and at the time the cards were pretty hot, so what was I to do? I kept playing but the cards tapered off. I hit a $125 payout on a lucky ladies side bet that invigorated me but in the end I found myself walking out the door with $200 less than I walked in.

In the 6 hours after I had left the campground I had managed to lose $100. This was pretty dashing to any hopes that I could turn blackjack into a career path. But I had one last trick up my sleeve. I actually had to pass my next casino on the way to the last one. I had purposely done this because I knew no matter how bad things were I could make money at the last casino.

Since I hadn't lost much so far and this casino had slightly higher table minimums I decided to take $500 into this last casino. I found my usual table empty and proceeded to make it my proverbial bitch. I think I won $250 in my first 20 minutes there. Things slowed down a little after that but one thing remained constant: me winning. There are two reasons why it is so easy to make money at this casino. The first is that the deal nearly every card in their double deck games making it easy to predict what cards are left in the deck at the end. The second is that they have some of the best rules of anywhere around. After my second Coors light the cards got hot again. Before the pit boss could notice my chip stacks rising I quickly colored up. As the dealer counted out $1,020 in chips the pit boss quietly stated "I'm going to be in deep shit for this one". I had to keep a straight face until I was out of the casino. With those winnings I was up $420 and ready to head home. But not before I had a victory Jimmy John's.

Another interesting side note about the last casino. It is also staffed mostly by Vietnamese but the ones at this joint have terrific names. I had a dealer whose legal name is "Mom" and another whose name is "Dong". Just another reason to play there is getting to yell "HIT ME DONG!"

It was a pretty great day but even though I made money I don't get to go out tonight and spend it all. Everything goes back into the bankroll but the feeling of getting to drive home a winner and rub $100 bills all over myself makes it worth it. So 200 miles and 26 hours after leaving home I made it back home from a successful outing. I'll leave you with a map of my trip.

Blackjack

When I was first learning to play blackjack and hanging out at Casino Windsor paying 7$ for cans of Molson Canadian I picked up on something. The best people to sit next to at the Blackjack table are the old timers. The type of guys who know there way around the game and can shell out some advice that only 50 years of playing can earn. Although I haven't needed the advice on how to play my hands in quite some time, I still value the way generational gaps can disappear at the table.

A few months back I got talking with a man who looked to be in his mid eighties. He had that aura of a man who had lived quite the life. He had given his kids and grand-kids enough money to keep them at the slots long enough to leave him alone at the blackjack table. He started telling me about his life and I soon lost the count. But I found this guy to be more interesting than any 2% player edge. He told me of how he was stationed as a Marine at the base where I now work. About how during those times it was just an ammunition pier with 50 Marines and a few civilians. About how he met his wife at a dance at the gymnasium on a cold October night. About how he became the post master of a small town where everyone knew his name. Sure, it was like a poor man's Forrest Gump but I found it endlessly fascinating.

I was back at the casino this past Sunday night. As rounders so eloquently put it "Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy... the outstanding tough beats of his career."

I'm sitting at close to a 3.5 count index. I had been playing for 4 hours and that was the best count I had seen all night. I had spent all night waiting for moments to strike, only to get beat by dealer 21's and the guy next to me not splitting his 8's against a dealer 6. I would slowly grind back up on minimum bets only to drop an hours worth of work on the variance of the game. But it was getting late and I had work the next day. I had an opportunity to get back close to even including the $10 I had lost on the Chargers not covering the spread against the Bengals. The cards came out; Ace, Nine, King, Jack, and then to me a Three. Everyone easily got 20's and 19's, but my second card was an eight and the dealer had a five up. This deck is mostly face cards and I have a 11 against a dealer five. I reached into my wallet to pulled out the cash to double down and the dealer gives me a whopping 3. Leaving me with an astounding 14. But the dealer still has a bust card and with this count, anything but a bust would be rare. His under card is a 10 leaving him sitting at 15 just like he should. But his next card is another five. It was a kick in the balls. I drove home in the rain knowing that I played it perfectly but the cards didn't have the same intentions that I did.

But that's not what I wanted to blog about. I wanted to blog about the guy who I was sitting next to for about 40 minutes of the night. Guy looked to be about 65, white with a mop of dirty hair that sat under a well worn hat. He was quite the character. Everyone else at the table seemed put off by him, but I really enjoyed him. He was chain smoking cigarettes and kept ordering straight shots of tequila and whiskey. But the cocktail waitress couldn't understand him as he was nearly unintelligible so I tried to interpret. No matter what he would get he would declare "Whiskey smells funny" before pounding the shot. He didn't keep his chips in neat stacks like everyone else but rather in a big mixed-up pile. After a couple more shot he started rambling about how he was going to sleep in his van that was in the parking lot. Then he started prodding the dealer about it. "I'm gonna sleep in yours [sic] parking lot whadda think about that!" I asked him about it and he started angrily mumbling about the "best damn biscuts n' gravy". Everyone kept looking at me trying to get me to stop talking to him, but I found it too amusing. Eventually he got up and announced to no one in particular "IM GOING TO SLEEP IN MY VAN" and then stumbled out.

Brian Accidentily Makes $28

The University often sends me emails asking me to participate in research experiments. But because they need a certain number of people to show up they usually double book the sessions to ensure there are enough participants. For those who show up after the session is full they give them $5 for showing up and send them on their way. I have come to learn that it is much more lucrative to show up near the start time and get the $5 then to actually spend an hour on the experiment for the $15.

So today I was working up near north campus and my shift ended at 6:50 and there was an experiment that started at 7. I decided it would be perfect. I could stop on the way home and pick up a fiver and then use that to drink for free all night. That $5 would mean that I could have two $2 pitchers and Mitch's and even have enough for a dollar tip. Those are 60oz pitchers so I could have a great night out on the $5 from stopping on the way home.

When I got to the lab it turned out that they weren't full so I actually had to participate. The basis of the experiment was to study decision making where you sat at a computer and were put into random groups of 6 students. You then had to rank letters based on certain payouts depending on which particpants had the highest priority which changed often. It was a little too complicated to explain on here but the basic premise was that the better you were at ranking things with high payouts the more money you got for the experiment. I quickly realized that this was just game theory and with a little bit of strategy I was able to find the Nash Equilibrium. I was able to consistently get a high number of points. They said at the beginning that the average payout was about $15. I made $28. Too bad that because I am a university employee it will come in my next paycheck (with taxes removed). Unlike the $5 cash that I could have gotten.

So my scheme of taking the $5 by showing up late might not be as good as my scheme to dominate choice experiments.