Ornoth

I started taking casino blackjack seriously about ten years ago, and the venue for three-quarters of my gambling junkets has been Foxwoods. Over those years, they’ve been very good to me.

A frequent birthday ritual has been to take the day off and drive down to Connecticut, play some blackjack, and then stop off at Purgatory Chasm on the way home.

The timing of this year’s trip was a little interesting for three reasons. First, it occurred during my last week working at Buildium. Secondly, the remnants of Hurricane Patricia—one of the most powerful storms on record—passed through New England the night before. When I left that morning, the overnight rain clouds were just beginning to break up, promising a beautifully warm and breezy day. And finally, this would be my last trip to Foxwoods before moving away.

Upon arriving, I first went to their Fox Tower casino. I wanted to check it out, because I hadn’t been there since a 2011 loss, back when it was the MGM and brand new. Sadly, all they had were $1 tables, which was an obvious waste of time. So I hoofed it back to my usual haunt at the Grand Pequot.

Once I sat down and started playing, all the chips just got sucked into my gravity well. It took a mere 23 minutes to achieve my predetermined “win” threshold, so I got up, took a deep breath, and cashed out.

It might seem silly to drive four hours and only spend a few minutes at the table, but I don’t go to a casino to play games; I go to win. Winning makes me happy, and you can’t win if you don’t walk away when you’ve won. And if it only takes 20 minutes to achieve my goal, then the sooner I get out of the casino the better! Except, well, I did stop to have a big ice cream before I left…

So that was my last expedition to my favorite casino. They had the most favorable rules I’ve come across, and I’ve only lost on one of my past eight trips, which exceeds all reasonable expectations.

However, that may not be my last opportunity to find a good game of blackjack. There’s a casino right in Pittsburgh, and their state law mandates rules that are even slightly better than Foxwoods’, who annoyingly started hitting soft 17 a couple years back. So we’ll just have to test whether the Pennsylvania government are going to be as generous to me as the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut!

Of course, since I was in the area, a stop at Purgatory Chasm was also required. It’s always an amazing, fun, breathtaking, spiritual place, which inevitably provides a dramatic juxtaposition with the overstimulation and consumerism of the casino. The warm weather was a special blessing on what will probably be my last visit there, as well.

And because I was in a self-indulgent birthday mood—and because it was National Cat Day—on the way home I stopped by Boston’s Angell pet adoption center and socialized a few cats, just for fun. It’s been just over a year since I lost Grady, and there’s been a lamentable lack of feline presence in the house.

So overall it was a good day, even though it was the last time for this particular set of rituals.

Another birfday.

Woke up and dumped $250 worth of scotch down the toilet. I’ve gone 18 months without any alcohol, so I didn’t want it laying around taking up space anymore. I’d offered it to several people, but no one seemed motivated to take it, and I felt a little ambiguity about the karmic consequences of giving it to someone, so it went down the tubes.

The sad part is that it included an entire bottle of Bruichladdich, the last remaining bit of my beloved smooth Highland Park 12, and some of the unbelievable and expensive 1982 Port Ellen, an amazing and rare and revered scotch from a distillery that shut down 26 years ago. I do miss the scotch and several scotch ales, but not enough to break that vow I made to myself.

On the other side of the proverbial morality coin, I grabbed a rental car and drove down to teh Foxywood for my first day of casino blackjack since my post-layoff trip last Xmas. I shall leave it at this: my third winning trip in a row, and my most profitable session evar, with some absolutely ludicrous hands. Details follow flocked for the flist.

Then I drove east to Bourne, to check out some alternate hotels for the Pan-Mass Challenge. Mostly disappointed that the places all have two-night minimums.

Drove home to drop off my booty, which took enough time to get two city of Boston parking tickets. Huh.

Then off to the final session of my five-week Metta (lovingkindness) practice group at CIMC. Details of that will be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, some F*c*book “friends” knew it was my birthday, so some public observances happened. Fortunately, they remained at a tolerable level, and did not annoy or offend much.

So all in all a nice birthday. Next year I’d like to have one that doesn’t include a rushed trip back to the meditation center, please?

So my buddy somervillian, who hosted a few of the Hold ’Em tournaments that I’ve attended, aspires to become a “serious” poker player. A couple days ago he pinged me and asked if I wanted to make a trip down to Foxwoods with him. (For the out-of-towners, Foxwoods is an Indian casino in Connecticut, and presumably the largest casino in the world).

I’ve only been in a casino once before. That was also at Foxwoods, but seven years ago, and I lost a couple hundred bucks on blackjack during that visit. On the other hand, I feel I have a pretty solid grasp of casino blackjack, and I had some extra Xmas cash lying around, so why not go down and give it a shot?

So yesterday we drove down, and I tagged along with my buddy as he signed up for a seat in the poker room.

At a casino, one element of success is in knowing what you don’t know. I clearly don’t know the wacky table games like craps and roulette, nor am I inclined to make the effort to learn them and gain proficiency at them.

But having taken second and third in two of the three friendly Hold ’Em tournaments I’ve been to, I think I could probably succeed at poker, but the casino game—and particularly casino players—are very different from friendly games, so I figured discretion was the better part of valor. I left somervillian to his own devices and I went to scout out the familiar blackjack tables.

Despite the fact that I lost money back in 1999, I feel I have a very solid blackjack strategy (even back then I started the day up and lost my winnings later). There are “strategy” cards you can download that tell you mathematically what you should do on any possible combination of cards, which makes things pretty easy. I don’t always play by the suggested strategy, but I limit my deviation from the strategy to certain specific card combinations where I feel that taking an additional risk is justified.

Of course, that takes care of a strategy for playing your hand. However, knowing how to win a hand is only half the equation.

You see, if you go by the printed strategy card, over the long run you’ll win about 40 percent of the time. That means that over the long term you’re guaranteed to lose money if you always bet the same amount. So in order to make money at blackjack you need not only a strategy for playing out your hands, but you also need a betting strategy.

My betting strategy is fairly straightforward. It’s based on the premise that the more hands I lose, the more likely it is that I’ll win the next hand, or that the more I win, the less likely it is that I’ll continue to win. In the short term, there’s no real correlation between one hand and the next, but over the long run, the player’s going to win 40 percent of the time, and if I wager and win enough money on my winning hands to cover the hands I lose, then I’ll wind up winning money overall. No?

So the key is if you lose on a $15 hand, you increase your bet to $25, hoping you’ll win the next hand. If you lose again, you increase your bet that much more, to $35, then to $50, $75, $100. Keep increasing until you win (just make sure you’ve got the bankroll to be able to double three or four times). Then, after you’ve won a big money hand, you back down to the minimum bet until you’ve had another losing run, when you can jump in again.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, and predicting how much to bet and when to jump is an exercise in experience and intuition. I’m not saying the strategy is perfect or that it would work for anyone else; I’m just saying that’s how I play.

So I found myself a blackjack table with a friendly dealer and a $15 minimum bet and put all this into effect. I got raped. As the French would say, I met the man with the hammer. I was getting shit cards and couldn’t win a single hand. I think I blew through my $200 initial buy-in in less than ten minutes, and plopped another $150 onto the table. Then I lost probably all but $50 of that.

I was hemorrhaging. At the abyssal nadir of my losing streak I coined a brand new phrase to keep my spirits up. Likening my losing streak to a airplane crash, I thought: Any table you can walk away from is a good one.

But you have to trust the math. I kept putting money out there, and finally the cards turned against the dealer. By then the minimum bet had increased to $25, which helped my recuperation (recoup-eration?). I trusted the betting strategy: lose, jump, win. Lose, jump, lose, double, win more. Lose, jump, lose, redouble, lose, quintuple, win big.

It took several hours, but I knew I was at least even when I looked down and saw about $400 in chips in front of me. The stack yoyoed a bit with each hand, but the overall trend stayed positive. When my buddy called me to say he was done for the day, I didn’t know precisely where I stood, but I knew I was pretty good. I was in fact pretty surprised when I went to cash out and took $875 in chips with me to the window. Wow. I had a $500 poker chip of my very own! I was flabbergasted.

Yeah. I didn’t actually do the math until I was in the car. Superstitious or something. And that waiting was very hard, because we had dinner before we left the casino (I paid, of course). Finally sitting in the car, I did the day’s tally: not only did I make up the $350 I’d lost initially, but I came away with $525 of the house’s money. Wow!

During the long drive back, we talked about strategy and what we’d both learned about our respective games. I’m afraid I must have been a pretty poor conversationalist, because I was so shocked that I could just play blackjack for a couple hours and walk away with a fistful of Bens. Sure, it was pretty nerve-wracking at first, and there were a couple hands where I had $100 riding on a single play, but I got away with the casino’s money!

The casinos project that you have the opportunity to win big, but ultimately they are in the business of taking money away from you in exchange for a little high drama and entertainment. There’s this theoretical chance that you might win, but it’s a pretty slim chance. Sure, my $525 is nothing to the casino, but it still shocks and awes me that I got away with what— to me—is a tidy chunk o’ change.