Spent 4 nights (2 with the wife) at the start of the year in LV. Here
is a summary of the trip
LAS VEGAS HILTON
Played $40,000 over 3 days, almost entirely on 25c AA. I was brought
in on 3 nights plus VP tournament. To test cash back I played 10
dollars though the machine and recorded cash back rate. This was
repeated 5 times and conclusions were drawn:
25c All American 0.4%
$1 Pickem 0.3%
5c Spin poker 9/7 DB 0.2%
Last year we played the exact same amount of time and had no royals or
straight flushes. In fact we had no 25c royals at all during 2005.
This trip we had 3 royals (one dealt), 2 within 4 hours. We also had
6 straight flushes. Yes! We had practiced for 15 minutes a day, 2
weeks prior to our trip so I am sure that helped a lot (one STFL came
from a J9 of spades hold, something we would never had done before).
Ended up getting $50 out of the tournament without hitting better than
a flush. This year was 2 rounds of 800 credits on 9/6 JOB. I like
JOB for a tournament as it reduces the amount of "lucky" hits needed
to place. There was however 4 Royals hit! My goal was to finish in
the top 200 (out of 400) for a $50 payout, which I just got. Cutoff
for payouts was 1340 and I scored 1380 (just one 4 of a kind would
have put me in the top 20 though).
GOLDEN NUGGET
After the Hilton I went on the GN by myself. I was sent 2 nights plus
$300 in free-play. This was too good to turn down. Since the 10-Play
DB had gone 9 (my main game), I played the Deuces progressive. I
tested the progressive with $10 of action, 5 times, when no-one else
was playing and found the following:
Progressive is 0.3%, 0.5%, 0.3%, 0.5%, 0.5%, 0.5% (Royal to 4-Kind)
I entered this in Frugal as (4660-1140-133-88-69-21-15-10-10-5) and
this turns out to be 100.08%. It is probably higher due to people not
holding correctly and the STFL was almost always higher than 69.
Hit deuces twice, both times for almost $300. I also played some BP
Multi-strike. I ended up playing $14,000 over two days (my normal
coin in).
WYNN BUFFET
Thanks for everyone's input on the best place for Alaskan King Crab.
In the end we choose Wynn because we hadn't been before. They did
have crab legs but they were not that particularly good (my
expectations weren't that high). We did enjoy the following though:
New Zealand lamb chops
All Indian dishes
Unagi
Chinese chicken Salad
Passion fruit sorbet
Carrot cake
Tiramisu
CONCLUSION
Up until this trip our largest winning trip was about $1,500 which is
still pretty good for 25c players. This trip was finished $3,800
ahead. Staggering! This more than covers last years loss (about
$600) and is a real nice start to 2006.
Cheers