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Odd goings on in the midwest.
Generally speaking, trite, but this is a new twist to me.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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My first post talked about my comps and the hotel, and my second post talked about the gambling. This post is about my bottom line, which involves some whining. You can find my review on Tripadvisor here, but this is the text:
I’m a blackjack player, and my trips are almost always just about that. That makes this a difficult review to write. In most ways, Park MGM is a phenomenal resort. The staff went out of their way to be helpful and make me feel wanted. It’s the only smoke-free casino on the strip. The spa was incredible. Just awesome. There were two issues. The first is minor: I had a Nighthawk suite. It’s bathroom wasn’t as nice as the bathroom in a regular room at Mandalay Bay. It’s floor plan is meh. Instead of walling off the bedroom, giving you the added privacy you’d expect from a suite, the foyer is instead what’s walled off. The foyer has no tables, chairs, etc. That results in wasted space. Not the end of the world. The second problem will keep me from going back. In my first four hours of blackjack, I won $1,150 on a $2,500 bankroll. Even by my standards, that’s remarkable. However, I was constantly taking with other players, so there’s no way I could have been counting cards, and how else could I be cheating? (Note: Card counting should NOT be considered cheating.) Nevertheless, one of the pit bosses made inappropriate comments towards me, constantly delivered dirty looks, and even made another player uncomfortable by suggesting I was cheating. This is unacceptable to me, but if it isn’t the sort of thing that affects you, then by all means, stay at the Park MGM. You’ll love it. I, however, will be highly unlikely to return. A single, unprofessional pit boss can overshadow the positive experiences I had with literally every other member of the staff.
This is an honest review. If you don’t gamble, or if you always lose, then you should seriously consider the Park MGM. My room is always comp’d at any MGM resort because of my M-Life Mastercard, so I don’t know how expensive it is relative to others. I’m sure you’ll spend less at Excalibur and Luxor, but among MGM properties, Excalibur is bottom of the barrel. You’ll survive there, but paying a small amount more for Luxor goes a long way.
Gambling
I skipped Vegas last year, and I’d never been to Park MGM, so prior to the trip, I went to that cesspool known as Reddit, found the Vegas subreddit, and asked what the betting limits on the tables were. I guess I bring out the trolls because all but a couple people that responded were arrogant and insulting. They all acted as if they were high rollers, ridiculing me for even inquiring about low-limit tables, which they defined as $50 per hand. (I seriously doubt these trolls play $100 tables, but if so, they’re completely tone deaf to the experiences of most gamblers.) They also accused me of thoughts I never expressed, and put words into my mouth (easily refuted by what I actually wrote) to justify their insults. I don’t know if they were ignorant or trolling, but either way, they flat out lied. Unfortunately, that subreddit gets far more foot traffic than my blog, so I’m posting this to both my blog and that easily-googled subreddit. You’re more likely to find the subreddit. This is the actual truth.
I visited (didn’t necessarily play) Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, NY, NY, Park MGM, and Aria, and I played from Monday evening to Friday morning. My comments are limited to these casinos on those days, which are the days I told the trolls I’d be gambling. I took notes so that I could verify whether the trolls were full of shit. Wanna guess whether or not they were?
Vegas still has many $5 tables on the strip at Excalibur, which goes out of their way to advertise them on a billboard of lights, and there are a plethora of $10 and $15 tables at Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, and NY, NY. Because of inflation, those tables aren’t the money-makers they once were, so it’s understandable that those tables pay only 6-5 on blackjack to make up the difference, but contrary to what the trolls claimed, $25 tables still pay 3-2 at Mandalay Bay, NY, NY, and Aria (at least). The trolls were claiming that you have to go to a $100 table for 3-2, but the $100 tables at Park MGM pay 2-1. I played at one for my “last hurrah” before flying out Friday afternoon. Moreover, at NY, NY, the $25 tables allow multiple splits on double aces, which is great for players. That is, I drew four aces in a row and played four hands. (On a table beneath $25, if you draw two aces, you get one card added to each ace, and that’s it. You can’t take a second hit, and if your second card on one of those hands is an ace, you can’t split again.) The point is that the rules on $25 tables are still reasonably fair to the players, and those are the tables I prefer for that reason.
The problem with Park MGM is that all the tables are either $15 tables or $100 tables. There were literally no other tables available. Of course, I can (and did) play $25 hands on the $15 tables, but then I was limited to 6-5 payouts on blackjack. My money was tied up in an account with Park MGM, so all I could gamble (practically speaking) elsewhere is what I had won. Fortunately, I won enough ($1,150) to move over to NY, NY, where things went particularly well because of the better ruleset on the $25 table. Next year, I’ll probably send my funds to NY, NY for that very reason. I could also send them to Mandalay or Aria, but Mandalay uses “continuous shuffle” machines, which I like to avoid. I didn’t notice if their $25 tables used those machines.
My strongest advice is to ignore the comments that follow on the subreddit because the trolls will just be trolls. I’ll immediately unfollow my own post because I’m not interested in what they have to say. They’re all full of shit or simply have no idea what they’re talking about. What I wrote above is what I saw with my own eyes. and it wasn’t much different than what I experienced two years ago. Ignore the trolls. You won’t get good blackjack payouts on low-limit tables, but they absolutely exist if that’s where your budget takes you. There’s no shame in that. If, like me, you play on $25 tables, then absolutely nothing has changed since 2023.
I’m no more a whiny little bitch than the casinos are.
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My earlier post talked about my comps and the hotel. Now, onto the good stuff.
I finally got to a blackjack table. I withdrew $2,000 from my accout and the spent four hours at the table. I won $1,150. This is very unusual. It’s tough to earn 50% of your bankroll, but to do it in fewer than 10 hours is nearly impossible. The only reason I stopped is because I was very hungry.
Then I went to dinner at Strip Steak in Mandalay Bay. It wasn’t open when I arrived, so I spent 45 minutes losing $300 or so. After dinner, I returned to Park MGM and spent 3 hours turning my remaining $850 into $1,400. So, as of Tuesday night, those are my earnings.
Two side notes. 1) For some reason, everyone wanted me to cut the deck, and before the night was over, they were calling me the Lumberjack. 2) Until tonight, I’d never had a pit boss watching me as if he thought I was cheating. Not only did a Park MGM pit boss do that, but he actually told another player he was watching me. He made sure I heard it, and he wasn’t kidding.
This means that all my expenses that comps don’t cover are paid for. came back and won another $250 in about 3 hours, which is more in line with what i should expect. Now I’ve made enough money to pay for my airfare (< $550), tips on meals not covered by comps (maybe $300 if I tip ridiculously), and a lower bowl seat to the Vegas Golden Knights game on Thursday ($350). That gives me $150 in wiggle room to assure that, in all ways, this trip will be absolutely free despite having so much fun and eating so well.
But it’s still Tuesday, so we’ll see how much damage I can still do.
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Well, I took a year off from Vegas and didn’t miss it, but this year, I came back because of all the ideas I had for a stateside vacation, it was hard to ignore the fact that my Vegas comps made the trip here so damn inexpensive. I arrived yesterday (Monday), and I’m fimishing this post up at about 10:30 am Tuesday. There’s some good and some bad, and as always some lessons to be learned. Let’s home the rest of the trip is more of the good and less of the bad.
The Good, or Should I Say the Really Good
First off, I have an M-Life Mastercard, which means that every time I pay for groceries, utilities, internet, dinner at a restaurant, etc., I earn comps as if I’m gambling. Over the course of a year, these add up, such that I walked into my trip this year with $465 to pay for meals — including alcohol but not including tips — and entertainment. I don’t drink very often, most of the entertainment options don’t appeal to me, and those that do aren’t available during the says I’m there. So, that meant steak dinner every night.
But wait! There’s more! My suite (yeah, suite) at the Park MGM was free for four nights without me having to spend any of my reward points. It just comes with the card. Nevertheless, my smoke-free room at the only smoke-free casino on the strip comes with a $400 resort credit, so in fact, I have $865 to spend. Maybe I *will* drink after all.
Oh, do you think I’m finished? Nope. It just gets better. I don’t play slots, so all these years I’ve built up a balance of “Slot Dollars” I never used. The current balance was $1,181, so I was expecting to have to burn through those dollars playing slots. If I made $10, it’d be a free $10, so why not. Well, I went to the cage to set up my account (I had wired my gambling funds ahead of time) and asked what I thought was a stupid question: “Can I covert my Slot Dollars to regular rewards?” They said yes, so now I have over $2,000 to spend on dining.
Pretty sweet.
There’s no way I’m spending that much, but the points don’t expire, and I’ll be heading down to the MGM National Harbor in Maryland in January for our office holiday party, so I plan to get there early and have a free, overpriced dinner before our event. Also, there’s always next year.
BTW, despite having recently reserved this room at Park MGM for this trip, I can still get a free room at any other MGM property. There’s got to be an upper limit to the number of nights I can get per year, but I’ve spent four nights here, and spent four nights earlier in the year (will explain in a second), and yet I havent reached that limit yet. Unbelievable.
One last thing before we get to the bad news. MGM’s program merged with Marriott Bonvoy, so those four nights spent earlier in the year? They were at a Courtyard Marriott in Ft. Wayne, IN.
I can’t imagine a better rewards program as long as you like Las Vegas.
The Bad: The Hotel Itself
The staff is great, and the fact that the entire building is smoke-free is awesome, but for me, Vegas is a blackjack trip. After eating breakfast at my favorite breakfast joint in Vegas (Ri Ra between Mandalay Bay and Luxor), I came back to Park MGM to play. There were only two blackjack tables open at 9:30 am, and both were full. I asked the pit boss if he was opening new tables, and he said, “Not until shift change at noon.” As you might expect, he unhelpfully told me that I could always play in the high limit room (minimum bet $100 per hand).
Gee. Thanks, buddy.
Moreover, those tables, and all the tables I saw last night, were $15 tables that paid only 6:5 on a blackjack.
For those not understanding, this is something of a scam. If I bet $10 on a hand and win, I get $20, which is my $10 bet plus the $10 I get for winning. Simple enough. If I get a blackjack on that same bet, I win a bonus amount instead. Traditionally, that bonus amount was another $10 (2:1), but over the past couple decades, that’s dropped to $5 (3:2). Now these low bet tables pay only $2 (6:5). There’s a logic to this — inflation makes the low bet tables worth less to the casinos — but it really cuts into any chance you have of winning without counting cards, which most people can’t do, and even fewer people can do without getting caught.
Fortunately for me, this year I planned to play only one day, which was Tuesday. I play $25 base hands, and I don’t count cards, so it seems like this isn’t much of a burden. However, if there are no 3:2 tables available, I’m stuck as if I’m playing only $10 or $15 hands. Considering that my money was tied up in an account with Park MGM, that’s where I had to gamble. If this were nothing but a blackjack trip, wiring funds to Park MGM would have been a disaster for me. In order not to have to carry $5,000 with me on my way home — I almost never carry more than $20 cash and have only $8 in my wallet for this trip — I can’t move my money over to another casino.
Side note: Because I was staying at Park MGM for the first time, I went to that cesspool known as Reddit to ask the Vegas subreddit what the tables were like there. In addition to these guys trying to swing their dicks and pretend they’re high rollers (or if they are, completely ignore the fact that most people aren’t), they all flat out lied about the nature of the tables while needlessly insulting me. (Seriously, there was no reason for the insults. They came out of left field.) On my walk to breakfast, I verified that Excalibur, Luxor, and New York New York still offer plenty of $10 and $15 tables, and $25 tables still pay 3:2. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I was stuck at Park MGM for gambling.
Now, the suite itself is large but not terribly impressive. Mandalay Bay’s bathrooms in ordinary rooms are far superior. It has a foyer separated from the bedroom and living room, which makes no sense. The bedroom should be separated from all the other rooms (but connected to the bathrooms). As it is, the foyer is simply wasted space. That still makes the room bigger than an ordinary room, but meh. It’s hard to ignore how great a slight redesign could be.
All of this is to say that despite coming here virtually every year for decades, you always learn something new.
More to come.
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I’m in the unfortunate position of not being able to fully participate in my company’s Halloween costume contest. I have to wear something that can be quickly removed and put back on, so things like face paint are out of the question. In order for people even just to like my costume, I have to tell a story. Last year, I wore a prison jump suit. This year, I give you the prequel to that costume.
It’s hard to be scary when everyone knows they can outrun you.
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My office really gets into the holiday spirit regardless of what the holiday is. For Halloween, most people are in costumes, and the office is decked out in Halloween decorations. For the past two years, everyone in the office was assigned someone to whom to give a gift bag. Once they received it, they’d have to give one to their assigned recipient. Both years, I was the last recipient, so I didn’t have to give anyone anything. (As a recovering Catholic, that makes me feel very guilty.) That’s probably a good thing, because as you’re about to see, I don’t understand these people at all.
For the past 4 years, my coworkers (yes, primarily women, including the boss) have been decorating my office, insisting on a pink motif right down to the mouse pad (not shown).
Maybe that’s why my costume this year is “old guy with no sense of fun.”
Here’s my gift bag.
Digging a little deeper, I received some socks. Women’s fuzzy socks.
I don’t think they understand me either. If they did, they would have included this in my gift bag.
Fortunately, I also received the following to wash away the frustration.
Maybe they do understand me.
Happy Halloween!
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Yesterday’s post sucked, so here’s something light-hearted.
I’m stupid.
If you know me, you probably disagree.
“How can you get a physics degree if you’re stupid?”
“You’re such an intellectual.”
“How stupid can you be if you have a law degree?”
Very. The answer is, “very.” Seriously, have you people never met a lawyer?
But those that really know me would say, “Yeah, he’s stupid . . . in his own way.”
The issue here is one of colloquial semantics that most people reading this blog (i.e., gamers) understand. I’m smart but, in many ways, unwise. But don’t worry. This isn’t a philosophical post. Nope. I’m going to tell you a funny story of how stupid I am.
The 1990s
In 1994, I was working as a contractor at Bolling AFB. Things were different back then. Widespread ownership of a Discman or something like it was relatively new. I finally bought one, and when the headphones wore out, I bought a nice, new pair. The problem with the new pair is that the audio was always too soft for my liking. So, I replaced them, then when the replacements ran out, I just stuck with the “quiet” pair. About a year later, I was on a business trip in Miami, and I finally realized that the headphones had a dial for controlling volume independent of the device I was using.
Now, this isn’t so bad. That sort of dial was a new thing for headphones. Besides, I was in my mid-twenties. Every one is stu . . . errrr, unwise in their twenties, right?
Fast Forward to Today
I bought my house in January, 2022. That’s about 2-1/2 years ago, and by “about,” I mean almost exactly to the day. One thing about the house that’s been super annoying but not worth spending money to fix is that the light fixture in my master bedroom, despite lightbulb changes, has always produced far too little light.
You know where this is going, don’t you?
Last night, I accidentally discovered something.
That small slider to the right of the switch acts as a dimmer, and all it took was 30 months of using the fixture multiple times almost every day for me to discover it.
I’m stupid.
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I wrote this post on January 31, 2023. I’m sure this is old news by now, but that’s not my fault. The fact that it’s been shared so much since the year started just establishes that you have poor comedic timing.
Mind. Blown.
Not really.
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Because I was out of the office on my birthday taking a “continuing legal education” course, most of my coworkers didn’t get to celebrate it. So, they decided to decorate my office, which I saw today.
The first thing I noticed was my wall.
That seems normal enough. The window did as well.
Soon thereafter, as I gazed across the room, I found myself asking, “What the shit?!”
Are my coworkers in love with me?
Wait a second. Why all the pink?
For this next one, here’s some context. Everyone has a nameplate that I designed a couple of years ago. We printed them in black and white, so it’s black lettering and imagery on a white background. Recently, I changed mine to white lettering on a black background. It’s looks awesome, and everyone was jealous (even though I copied it from a coworker that sits at the end of the office where no one sees her nameplate). It’s sort of like going from Adam West’s Batman to Christian Bale’s Batman. Well, Patricia apparently asked, “Why don’t we screw with Rob’s nameplate. He thinks it’s great, so let’s ruin it.” (Seriously, she admitted to it.)
What the shit?
Now, anyone that knows me knows I’m not what’s commonly referred to as an alpha male. I’m kind of an asshole, so sure, I have some similarities, but I’m no alpha male as that term is commonly defined. So, why am I an “alpha attorney”? And even if I am, why is there a Hello, Kitty image beneath it. Someone’s confused (besides me).
Of course, I’m not angry. Despite recent societal trends, I remain focused on people’s intent, and in this case that was trying to be funny and nice. Why would I be angry about anything they did or might do? Still . . . .
What the shit?!
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Here’s something I haven’t done since the late 90s: Baked a cake.
The top layer is French vanilla, the bottom layer is triple chocolate fudge, and the icing is milk chocolate icing. I even did the same thing with a few cupcakes I was able to make with leftover batter. Surprisingly, the layers came out well in the cupcakes.
I don’t really celebrate my birthday, but I knew I’d have to break my diet today anyway, so I went all in. I think is shows how long it’s been since I did this . . .
. . . but it tastes as good as anyone else’s.
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