StingerHook July 27-29 @ Cosmo [LIVE]

Good luck!

 

Good! You got the view, the cilantro, the wings, the piggy, great trip so far, what next? Suspense.

 

So, the gambling last night was going pretty well until I caught an absolutely awful stretch of numbers on the roulette wheel. Combine that stretch with the fact that my style of play has a martingale-ish element to it and the end result is that I let myself get tilted out of yesterday's bankroll.

However, today is a new day and I'm ready to start a disciplined clawback of last night's donation.

View from the terrace at night:



A pre-bedtime snack:

 

Good Luck and Have Fun!!

 

Going on tilt happens, it is hard to always play in cold blood, but the consolation of the view is surely marvellous, and it must be very soothing and comforting at night with the fountains dancing and perhaps the company of some booze or bubbly.

 

Sadly I stay there and spend not enough time out there.

 

So, about the gambling this morning (apologies for the long post, but sometimes it's necessary)...

Went down ready to get after it and started plugging away at the roulette machine that did me in last night. Had a good session and clawed back some money - the comeback was on track!. Figured I'd go to the other roulette station (by the new Sports Bar), pull two or three more hits from that one then take a break and re-visit things in an hour or two.

The way I play is essentially a 'cover 2/3 of the wheel' strategy. I play 3 units on 19-36 and 1 unit on 7-12 (granted, my level of play doesn't afford me the single zero wheel, but so it goes...) - a 'hit' wins me a net of 2 units. If I miss, I usually triple each bet for 9 and 3 units in play, respectively. If that bet misses, I'm willing to triple again but that's where things can get hairy with 36 units in play.

This morning I went in with the approach that I wouldn't start betting until a 'bad' number showed up - my reasoning here is that I'm banking that a 'bad' number won't show up 4 times in a row. Math folks, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand it the chances of getting a string of 4 'bad' numbers in a row on a double-zero wheel is (14/38)^4, or about 1.84%. Another way of looking at it is that I have about a 98.16% chance of one of my numbers showing up at least once in any stretch of 4 consecutive spins.

So I sit down at the new station, and a 'bad' number shows up immediately. As I'm loading my cash, another 'bad' number - so now I'm essentially banking that one of my numbers will show up at least once in a set of 5 consecutive spins - a 99.32% chance using the math/reasoning from earlier (again, correct me if I'm wrong here).

Sure enough, 3 more bad numbers show up in succession and I'm left shell-shocked.

I've got about 30-35% left of the bankroll left for the trip - probably shutting things down at Cosmo but may play some VP at Aria later today. We'll see.

 

After the roulette debacle I decided to take a drive around town - walked around some of the outlet stores and visited the pinball hall of fame (shoutout @pphold). The pinball joint is pretty fun but definitely a dive. I liked it.

In the room doing quality control on some booze right now - redeeming the following myVegas rewards later on today:

- Dinner buffet at Aria
- One night stay at Aria (the dinner buffet requires a one-night stay at an MGM property and I have a shit-ton of LPs so I figured I'd book a room and use it as a food-coma-recovery station)
- Vegas Night Flight with Maverick

Other than that I'll probably take a stab at Row 802 at Aria or maybe some blackjack or Pai Gow. Not chasing the money I've already lost but would be nice to at least play a little bit more and take a swing at getting bits and pieces back.

 

Checked into my room at Aria. Buffet time!

 

Systems work when they work and when they don`t work, they don’t. There is nothing wrong it seems with your calculations, but maybe your expectations of their application was too dismissal of variance, which is all important.

Let me give you a simpler example from VP. The probability of hitting nothing on a hand in full pay Jacks is about 0.545 (54.543..%). If you play seven consecutive hands the probability of hitting nothing in any of those hands is 0.014, which means that the probability of hitting something in one or more of those hands is 0.986 (98.6%). So one possible system would be to go to a machine with seven different denominations and play the lowest, if nothing is hit, then go up, say, from nickels to dimes; hit nothing, go from dimes to quarters; hit nothing, go from quarters to half-dollars; hit nothing, go from half-dollars to dollars; hit nothing, go to two dollars; hit nothing, go to five dollars. Okay, when that does not work, awful, when it works, wonderful. Let me add that I have sometimes played twenty hands consecutively in JB and hit nothing, ouch. The other tail of the curve is what happened in the movie “Casablanca” with the Marx Brothers. They bet 17 at roulette consecutively for hours, and 17 comes out all the time, and the they win mountains of money and the table has to be closed.


Have a lucky hit at Aria, or before the end of the trip. It is nice when you hit something good just before going, and you get your money back and more, and don’t have time to play it all back. Good luck!

 

Aria buffet was very good. Ate about 5-6 plates worth of stuff before heading back to the room to let the food coma hit. Slept for about an hour or so & woke up feeling great.

Found out the scale in my Aria bathroom is definitely broken, as I weighed myself before & after the buffet and the net result was a loss of two pounds haha.

Gonna grab a quick shower & tub soak at Aria before doing this helicopter flight tonight. A bit of gambling after that.

 

Hope tonight is going well.

When gambling goes a little bit south, it's always nice to have a great room and a bottle of booze (or a 6'er of Zima, for me) to regroup.

Let's turn it around, Ace.

 

Where is row 802? Asking....for a friend

 

Maverick helicopter flight was quick but pretty awesome. You're only in the air for about 10 minutes, they take you on a lap from behind Mandalay Bay/Delano to downtown and back. I wasn't in a good seat for photos but I'd recommend it to anyone interested.

After the helicopter ride I headed to the casino at Aria and found the two DSTP machines I'd been looking for. Row 802's was occupied so I played on Row 804's. Loaded up the remainder of my bankroll and chose to go with 5-play quarters. My mindset was that I'd either run out of money or stop if I doubled my buy-in.

Well, I played for about and hour but didn't spend much time in the black. Had a few decent hits to keep me going:









Almost-but-not-quite-a-royal:



Packing things up in the room at the Cosmo before heading to the airport/back to a 'normal' life

 

if you're standing with your back against the Aria MLIFE booth (and I do mean back against it) it'll be your FIRST bank of vp machines on your left...bank of 4x4 slant tops.

 

DSTP is fun. It would be great to hit one of those dealt 20x royals. You did get some nice hits. Thanks for the report.

 

Your first sentence is correct, but your second one is wrong.

Before the first spin ever happens, the chances of getting 4 bad numbers in a row is 1.84%
On the first spin, you have a 37% chance of getting a bad number, and it's the same for every spin.

After the first spin is bad, now you are looking at what is the chance of 3 bad numbers in a row, and it's 5%
After the first two are bad, now you are looking at what is the chance of 2 bad numbers in a row and it's ~14%
After the first three are bad, now you're down to the chances on a single spin, which is 37%

 

I understand where you're coming from and I know the odds change as spins happen - I guess another way of phrasing my frame of mind is that if I collect a history of spins and choose any 4 consecutive results, the chances of one of those 4 numbers being one of 'mine' would be over 98%; the chances that all 4 are 'bad' are under 2%. That's accurate, no?