Poker & Jackpots at Pearl River Resort...MS

At halftime of the Super Bowl, The Baboo looked over and reminded me that she had a dentist appointment the next day. She threw out that since we were going to her dentist in Dekalb MS., we might as well go the other 23 miles to Philadelphia and do a little gambling at Pearl River Resort. We both have way more room offers at Pearl River than we would ever use so it was just a matter of deciding whose name to put the room under. A quick phone call and we were booked into The Silver Star Casino for the next night. We alternate whose offer we use and always stay at the Silver Star when she books the room and always stay at The Golden Moon Casino when I use one of my offers.

After she met with her dentist, we quickly drove over to The Silver Star and were checking in at 1:30. With over a thousand rooms at the Pearl River Resort (counting the Hilton at the Dancing Rabbit golf course), you will always have a room ready for early check-in during the week. We were unpacked and I was headed downstairs by 2:00. She decided to take it easy for a little while to make sure she was over her visit to the dentist.

I settled in at the video poker bar over by Phillip M’s restaurant in the Silver Star and proceeded to drink a few Miller Lites while trying to stay afloat despite the absolute worst paytable imaginable. (6/5 Job) Because of these terrible paytables, I only play quarters while at Pearl River and take my time doing that. The beer was cold, service was quick and the machine was giving me just enough to keep me from having to feed another bill in. Not a great situation but I could live with it. I was like a cat on a curtain and just hanging on for a long while. I actually got down to my last 5 credits three times but somehow stayed in play. Finally The Baboo arrived and as usual, she brought me luck. Of the 7 full houses I hit, 5 of them came after she sat down next to me. I then hit a 4OAK (3) and wow, I was a little ahead. Baboo got her usual Captain’s and diet coke and fired up the machine next to me. Our plan was to hit the buffet as soon as they opened for dinner at 3:30. Once she finished her second drink, the buffet was open and we went in that direction. It is only about a 30-40 second walk from that VP bar to the buffet so it didn’t take long. I had played down until I was exactly even but The Baboo had lost a twenty.

One thing I noticed about the bar service. The bartenders are pretty liberal with their drink service. On two occasions while we were sitting there, a customer walked up and ordered a drink without playing and both times the bartender served it up without a blink. One was just a screwdriver but the other one was a Crown and Coke. I don’t know if they knew each other or what but there was no money exchanged for the drinks.

We had decided that since we were only going to be here overnight, we would do our best to stay on our low-carb diet. So we loaded up on meat and salad for dinner. I went to the carving station and got a slice of roast beef, a slice of turkey, and a link of sausage. I added a hunk of meatloaf and a salad with cheese and boiled egg to complete my meal. Hardly any carbs and plenty, plenty to eat. The Baboo followed a similar plan but she just had to have a small serving of dressing to go with her turkey. All of it was delicious. The Pearl River Resort may not be the most glamorous destination but man, their buffet chefs know how to cook.

After our meal, we thought it wise to walk a little of that dinner off so we took a stroll around the Silver Star. The tribe is doing some things on this side of the highway that just don’t make sense to us. The Silver Star once had a beautiful atrium with huge faux trees and a nice Tiki bar with VP. For some reason they just walled that area off and took down the trees. Of course the Tiki bar was closed. One of our favorite spots just gone. Long ago they had a blues bar with live music every night. A few years ago, they walled that area off and the house band moved down to 875 Lounge at Beau Rivage. (The Glen Parker Band) Not all that long ago, they closed The Villa restaurant and walled that area off. In it’s heyday, The Villa was a high-end Italian restaurant complete with strolling violinists. Now it is just a wall. The Dolce Ice Cream shop was next to it. We were up here a month ago and it was closed with a sign that it was being remodeled. Now it too is walled up. While they were putting the wall up, they went ahead and closed the little sundry shop next to Dolce too. We liked and utilized all of those places and now they are just an expanse of blank walls. If you want late night food or need a pack of razors/newspaper/ snacks; then you have to go all the way across the highway to The Golden Moon.

Anyway, we saw some good things too while we walked around. There were multiple low limit ($5) blackjack tables open and most of the other table games (craps. Roulette, LIR, 3CP) were also available at $5 minimums. These were 3/2 tables too, not that rip-off 6/5 payout for blackjacks. On the other end of the spectrum, there was at least one player and often two or three players at the $100 minimum blackjack table every time we walked by. The three card poker progressive was almost four thousand dollars. AKQ of spades gets the progressive. AKQ of the other 3 suits gets $500. There were plenty of slot machines available. Monday afternoon is traditionally a pretty slow time for PRR.

Baboo decided to play around a little bit before going upstairs to watch one of her “must watch” shows. (The Bachelor) I made the walk over to The Golden Moon to see if I could get a seat in the poker room. I had made a quick stroll over here before we ate to check things out and get some steps on my fit-bit. At that time they had one 3/6 limit table and one no-limit table going. Now, all they had active was the no-limit table. I got on the 3/6 list and went up to the Center Bar to wait on them to find enough people to open the table.

I got a beer and took another swing at some VP. These machines only have dollars and five dollars as denominations. Even with these higher denominations, the paytables are still 6/5 for JOB. I play one coin and mostly drink. Even at that, I am giving them more action than most do. They remodeled this center bar a couple of years ago and it is very nice. It looks great in their commercials. The problem is that they never have anyone playing VP on the 10-12 machines that they have because of the lousy pay tables. The bar itself is a big oval and one side of the bar doesn’t have any VP machines but you rarely see anyone just drinking and having a good time on that side either. PRR thinks this is some kind of ultra lounge that they can charge exorbitant prices and that just doesn’t fly in Neshoba County, MS. This bar has great potential. It could be every bit as good as The Breeze Bar at the Beau Rivage but they are wasting that potential. This is a small thing but it is indicative of lack of attention this bar gets from management. There are 5 nice HD TV’s on each side of the bar but way too often they tune all five in to the same channel. So as for variety, it is like they only have one TV on that side of the bar. Anyway, that is my take on the situation. I owned a bar for 27 years and I would love to make a few changes in the way that they operate this one.

I went back to the Poker Room and talked to one of the floor people I know to try and find out if there would be a 3/6 game later. I knew this friend of mine would be honest and he told me that it was highly unlikely until the regular Monday night No-Limit tournament was played. With that being the case, I decided to play the tournament. This tourny has a $1,000 guaranteed prize pool. Entry is only $35 but you can buy more chips for $10 a thousand when you enter. You start with 3,000 and I added another thousand so I had $45 invested. It is also a re-buy tourny that you can get back in for another $35 if you bust out. After the first hour, the tourny changes from a rebuy to a straight freeze-out format. This tournament also has an add-on feature after the first hour of play that allows you to buy more chips at $10 per thousand. The guy next to me wound up investing $135 before he busted out for good.

We started the tournament with 18 people and 11 made it to the first break. I won several nice pots before the re-buy period ended and didn’t do any add-ons and definitely did not have to re-buy. One other thing is that this tournament had a “bounty” element to it. When we got down to 9 players, we consolidated onto one table and every player left got a “bounty button”. If you knocked one of those last 9 players out, you got their “bounty button” and could cash that in for $10.

I did OK in the tournament. I stayed around the chip lead until we got down to 6-7 people. The levels were only 20 minutes a level and the blinds were going up at a meteoric rate those last couple of levels. We got down to 5 handed and it was costing over 3,000 in chips for blinds and antes every round. This was a bad time to go card dead but that is what I found myself battling. I was almost sure we would chop the payouts if I could hold on just a little longer but it didn’t happen and I busted out in fifth place. When one more guy busted, the remaining 3 players chopped it $500, $300, $200. The tourny worked out to be an overlay with the thousand dollar guarantee not being offset by the entry fees. So the tournament was a good deal financially but I didn’t get a part of it. OTOH- I had only invested $45 to play and got $20 of that back when I cashed the two “bounty buttons” I had acquired. $25 for over two hours of entertainment was a fair deal. I enjoyed playing and it was relatively cheap.

Once the tournament ended, we did get a 3/6 table going but with only five players. We were all hoping to get some additional players but we just couldn’t find any. I have much better results with a full table but played this short-handed table for an hour or so while we tried to entice some more players to join us. I was slowly bleeding off chips and got down to only $35 of my $100 buy in left when we lost a player and started playing four handed. Then a good news/bad news development came along. The good news was that I managed to win one of the few big (relatively) pots of the night. The bad news was that our fourth player had invested all of his chips in that pot and now he was broke. He decided to call it a night. I wasn’t going to play 3 handed so that broke up the game. Luckily that one big pot had enough in it to get my stack back up to $95. Considering that I probably tipped out more than $5 to cocktail waitresses, I pretty much broke even on the 3/6 table.

Leaving the poker room, I made my way back across the highway to The Silver Star. There were several open seats at the VP bar so I sat down to play a while and formulate a plan. The vibe wasn’t exciting and I just didn’t have any mojo working so I took off for the room after losing my initial $20 investment here. It was time to make my visit to Dreamland.

The Baboo got up a little early the next morning and went down to put in some play about 8:30 AM. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t so I went down and joined her around 9:30. She had switched from dollars to quarters because she wasn’t having a lot of success. I asked if she was ready to do our team slot playing before we left and she agreed that it was a good idea.

The Silver Star high limit slot room wasn’t far away and we made a bee-line to it. I got to pick the first machine and I chose a triple diamond with the nudge feature. About the only time I play slots is when we team play but the triple diamond is often my choice. We pulled two chairs side-by-side and each stuck in fifty dollars. We were fortunate enough to keep hitting small payouts that kept us playing for a pretty good while. Then, on one of my spins, I got a multiplier symbol, triple bar, and multiplier symbol on the payline. That gave us a win of 160 credits which was good for $800. Our total was over $900. We vowed to cash out if we got it up to a grand or fell back down to an even nine hundred. We kept on playing until we only had 20 minutes before we had to be checked out at 11:00 and cashed out at $900. She got $400, I got $400 and we kept a hundy to feed the next machine.

We rushed up to the room to pack. That took no time at all since we had only stayed for one night and had packed appropriately. After we stowed our luggage in the car, we returned to The Silver Star. Before jumping back into gambling, we decided to walk down to the VP bar and get a drink. The bartender on duty was a long time SS worker that we both knew so the drinks were excellent. We took our second round and walked back to the high-limit room. As we were approaching the entrance, we noticed a man & woman waiting for a hand-pay just outside on some $5 machines they have there. He had hit for $1,600 and we considered that a good omen. Once inside, we had that eternal debate of “Which machine looks lucky?”. I suggested we go back to the one that had already proven itself. Once we pulled our seats together again and fed in that hundy, we noticed a guy pacing around up by the door of the room. Upon closer inspection, the reason for his agitation was apparent. He had not one but two machines locked up waiting on a hand-pay. One jackpot was for $2,400 and the other was for $2,800. Lucky guy but another good omen. Our machine was certainly not on the scale of his but it wasn’t too shabby. We built up our credits until we had a little over $700. Our biggest hit was when we hit for 80 credits ($400). When we slid back to an even $700, we cashed. We got $300 each and had another hundred to feed the next machine.

Our first debate about what machine to play had boiled down to the triple diamond that we played both before and after checking out or another triple diamond just across the aisle. Wanting to give a new machine a whirl, we fired it up with the left-over C-note. This machine did not give us any big hits but it gave us a lot of 10-15 credit wins and we eventually got it up over $300 and cashed. While we didn’t hit anything big, those smaller hits were very consistent and we played on this machine close to an hour. Our cash-out gave me another hundred and The Baboo another hundred with again a hundred to prime the next machine.

The Baboo believes in chasing jackpots so she wanted to play that machine the guy had won the $2,800 on earlier. I think it was a Triple 7’s. I know it had something to do with 7’s of various colors. We went over and got the action going. Unfortunately, this machine proved to be our Waterloo. We literally spun those wheels twenty times without hitting one single credit paying combination. Well, there went our seed money. It was easy to convince her that we should take our winnings and be happy with it on the drive home.

By now, we were a little hungry and decided to take advantage of the great price ($0.00) and quality of the Silver Star buffet one more time before leaving. I was still paying attention to my low-carb restrictions but decided I could ease them just a bit as a celebration of our good fortune earlier. I still got roast beef, meatloaf, and grilled link sausage but I relaxed my standards by adding fried catfish to my plate despite the breading. The Baboo’s dietary relaxing consisted of two mini-desserts that were quite tempting to me too. All the food was great and we enjoyed our ride home talking about how glad we were that we got on up and gambled a little instead of sleeping in like we often do.

 

Sounds like ya had fun ...Thanks for your trip report

 

Nice report! And I love when you hit late in a trip!

Sucks to see their bartops are still horrendous though. Some people do actually notice!