Another BJ trip report

After I finished writing that up last night, I realized that I left out a fairly large chunk of funniness that happened.

Foxwoods is about a 10 hour drive from Toronto and in the past we had played so much poker and blackjack at Turning Stone Casino (5 hr drive) in NY, that we were often offered free rooms. I had been going there for years already to play poker and I don't think I ever came out of that casino a winner from poker. I used to be a pretty big nit and would get pissed over losing a few hundred dollars. When I was just getting going in 1st year, I dropped 1k playing cash and MTTs and was very upset for a long time. I had been back there a few times over the years but still came away with marginal losses from $60 MTTs. February of 2007 had Daniel playing blackjack while I was just playing poker. In one tourny, Dan busted out and within 15 minutes, he comes back into the poker room and says "I just won more money then first place even pays out." Obviously I overreact and start dropping some f-bombs and the grouchy seniors at the table get super pissed off and Dan gets thrown out of the poker room while I get warnings from the dealer and the room manager.

In the past, we had played poker so when Dan and I came to Turning Stone in August of 2007, no one suspected a thing. It's pretty common for poker players to come to the pit and drop a bunch of cash when running good or bad and I guess that's what the pit bosses and people upstairs assumed. So we played it up, wore poker gear and set out to count the tables. I don't know what it was, but we stayed there for 7 days, playing in only their 3 different pits and while we did get a fair bit of attention, pit bosses looking at us and talking to us, we never got warned, backed off or banned. We were just playing pretty stupidly. Sure we had some poker gear on, tried to react emotionally within hands to make it seem like we weren't really focused, but when 2 kids in their early 20s come into a casino and start betting $100-$500 for a full week, playing 8 hours a day, something has got to be up. We barely even played poker and I don't know if casino security realized this. They just loved us, talked to us in a friendly manner and comped the shit out of us. Free rooms, free dinners and this place was nice. We even got comped free gas. Pretty sweet to be taking cash off the casino and getting everything paid for it. Some moron must have told ever pit boss and casino security "eyes in the sky" that an 8 deck blackjack shoe couldn't be counted. In that summer trip, we took $4.3k in that week. This was big money for us as we increased our roll by 50%. Turning Stone obviously wanted a shot at this money, so they invited us back.

Coming back in May 2008, it was like nothing had changed. I half suspected that once we walked in that we were going to get "backed off." This means that casino security walks up to you and bans you from blackjack, but you can still play other table games and poker. We just walked in there with Jeremy, checked into our 4 star hotel room, played a little bit and got some meal comps. We were only going to stay there for 2 days. Just a nice break before we went to Foxwoods. We'd get our meals for free and probably the 2nd or an additional night free, so why not stay. As I said, we started off with about 20-25k, I can't remember the exact number, but we didn't have that cash on us yet. Jeremy went downstairs to play when we arrived with a few thousand and Dan and I went to the local Bank of America to make a large withdrawal. Of course when we get there, we don't even have a bank card as it hasn't come in the mail. We don't even have our account number. Also it's a joint account and our occupations are listed as Student/Gambler. I joked with the lady in Buffalo where we set up the account to also write in "aspiring writer," but I doubt she put that in. At least it adds a little bit of credibility rather than just "gambler" (since I had just finished school). We're standing in the Rome Bank of America and they figure out our account number, but they are still confused, wondering how 2 Canadians can have a US bank account. We need a lot of cash since we're going to Foxwoods afterwards and our betting ramp was between $100-$500 on 1 spot or $50-$400 I think on 2 spots. The way we were betting, you could tear through 4-5k pretty easily and we didn't want to go broke mid-trip, so we asked to withdraw 20k or so. Obviously the teller is shocked and says she can't give us more then 6k total. Except the 6k isn't really in 100s, it's mostly 5s, 10s, 20s. At this point, our pockets are bulging with small bills but we clearly need more cash. We drive back to Turning Stone to give Jeremy more money and then we set off to the next closest Bank of America, which is 40 miles away.

We arrive in Utica after getting lost and we show up at the bank. We walk in and go to separate tellers and try to withdraw as much as possible. They ask where the other account holder is and now we have to say that we are together. Then they ask us why we need more money since they can clearly see we just drove an hour from another bank after withdrawing $6k. After arguing with the bank manager for a while, they give us whatever they can afford, which was about 14k. We walk out with a 20k roll in a relatively safe town, but still you can't feel that comfortable with that much money on you. Surely some people had seen us stuff so much money into our pockets and in these down and out cities, I can see people getting robbed for a lot more. We leave the bank and race back to Turning Stone to put in a few sessions before getting dinner.

We divide up all the money and hit up the pits. They really only had enough tables to sustain 2 counters, so the other guy just played poker, chilled in the room, jacked off, whatever. We killed time. It was a year after Dan and I had last been there, but they definitely recognized us. I can't imagine too many young kids go in there, stay for a week and just play blackjack betting $100-$500. Our cover play was kinda marginal, but it didn't seem to matter. If they hadn't figured it out by then, we were probably safe for at least 2 days. Pit bosses knew we were together, we didn't try to hide it. They'd walk up to us and ask how we were doing, how the "team," was doing. They didn't know we were a team obviously, just some friends. Betting up to $500, most of the time we were betting the most in the casino, so we got the royal treatment. We were also getting much more play because we started playing double deck games too. We had no idea they were going to have them, but we knew the edge and we knew the deeper they dealt, the better it was for us. They were only supposed to deal 1 deck deep and then stop and at that point, the player edge with counting is pretty small. But since there was no mid-shoe entry, we had to play the whole shoe from the start and ramp from $50-$300. Often if we played with the same dealer's, we would talk to them and get them to deal deeper. They often complied, not really consciously, but we just convinced them by saying "there's enough for another hand" or tipping them. These double deck games were absolutely brutal. There are very few hands in blackjack you ever remember, or even shoes, but I remember some of the dealers that dealt me some of my worst shoes ever. In a double deck game, maybe you'll get in like 10-15 hands and most of the time, you're betting $50, obviously until the true count goes above 2. Within the one shoe, I must have lost $2700. I don't know how, but it was probably lots of insurance bets gone wrong and then the dealer waking up with something like A9. So I lose my insurance bets and then the hand too. Just a lot of sour stuff.

During one of the nights, Jeremy and Dan went down to play around 1am and I'm in the room. I'm in the bathroom and after dropping 2k on a few shoes, I was pretty annoyed. So my first instinct is to rub one out. I'm about halfway through and fully cocked and I hear a knocking at the door. I don't want to get up for obvious reasons and I figure it's just Jeremy or Dan trying to get in without using their keycard. I keep going about my business, mostly because the door is locked, but the knocking persists. I get up and try to tuck in my penis into my pajama waistband (a trick I picked up in middle school) and answer the door. Well, it's not Jeremy and Daniel. It's 2 men dressed in suits and about 4 other guys who have Turning Stone uniforms on it. I'm kinda of out of it and I ask what they want. I clearly expect to be thrown out of the hotel room for card counting at 1am... a minute after I was jacking off in their 4 star comped bathroom. The men in the suit ask "can we come into your room, we need to discuss something with you?" I oblige and run to the bed where we have a copy of "blackjack attack," which is a book about card counting and I throw that out of the way. The man in the suit says "have you been smoking weed?" Of course, I said no. At this point, something is weird and I realize those other 5 men are wearing a patch that says maintenance. The men in the suit say "sir, your smoke detector is being read that it's disconnected, did you have anything to do with that?" I answer, "no, of course not, I don't smoke." The man replies and says "everything is alright, I think our system is wrong, we'll check next door." The men all leave and I am very relieved. It was 1 am, but they needed to check the smoke detector, that makes a lot of sense.

As Jeremy and Daniel get back, they see a man in a suit stand and wait outside around our door. He hadn't knocked and when I opened the door for Jeremy and Daniel, I tell them all the story. I also ask why them why the hell there's a man standing outside our door. Daniel and I think we're better off not saying anything, but Jeremy thinks it's better to just get it over with and come straight out with it. Often when casinos throw counters out, they like to play around with them so we are certainly not in the clear just because the maintenance people only needed to check the smoke detector. Jeremy walks outside and asks the man in the suit if there's anything wrong. The man says it's related to the people next door and we're in the clear. Obviously we laugh hysterically about the whole matter and say how close we came to getting "busted" just for having an open book of "blackjack attack" on our bed.

The next day we get in one more comped meal from their Italian restaurant and pack up most of our order. We had about $100 in comps and the average entree only costs $10 and they don't serve alcohol, so sufficed to say, we accumulated a lot of leftovers over the trip. We take as much as we can pack and throw it in my rental car. I had gotten in an accident a few days earlier before the trip started, so I was given a Toyota Yaris. The rental company said it got good gas mileage, but they were really just trying to unload it. With only 3 of us in the car, we were jammed up with very little room. So we were off to Foxwoods, down about $6k already in 2 days of blackjack and already at each others throats. Sure we got to stay in a 4 star hotel for free and had Chinese and Italian leftovers, but our trip roll was down to 14k.

Dan and I were already doing decently at poker and we figured our hourly rates were probably around $50-70. Jeremy had applied for med school after getting a good score on his Mcats the 2nd time. Unfortunately, his uni marks weren't great and he hadn't gotten accepted anywhere. He had hardly held down a job and because of this had little experienced. This blackjack team was all he had. Dan and I figured out that doing anything other than "big player" in Foxwoods was sure to get us banned, but doing "big player," the way the team was structured, would make Dan and I about $40/hr and Jeremy about $12/hr. Obviously quite pathetic for all of us. We constantly fought during that drive, saying we should break up the team and just play poker at Foxwoods and just enjoy ourselves. Blackjack isn't really that hard to get good at, but there's not tons of downtime. You're almost always counting shoes if the pit is big enough. We had gotten lost on the way to Foxwoods too and that didn't help morale too much either. Our once great summer plans seemed to be going down the drain. It was only a week into the summer, but we had already lost 6k at Turning Stone and another $4k the last week at Seneca Casino in Niagara Falls, NY. Our initial roll of 40k was now only 30k and we only had 14k left on us. It'd be damn hard to get more money out of our Bank of America account too because it would show we already took out 20k 2 days ago. We could still run up the money and we agreed to stick through it for a few days, at least to see what would happen.

We finally arrive at our hotel outside of Foxwoods in Groton, CT. The place wasn't quite as fancy as Turning Stone. Daniel and Jeremy are both Indian and I had hung out with them a lot and become an honorary brown person. Sufficed to say, I developed a 6th sense for cheapness as well. We had found a great deal. The hotel was only 15 minutes from Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun and it was only $50 night. It was a 2 star Super 8. We had 14k on us and we were staying at a flea ridden Super 8. Something wasn't quite right. We were all starving but everything in the sleepy town was closed after 11, so we had to dip into our leftovers. We pulled out some delicious pizza and chinese food and were about to throw it in the microwave. Except we didn't have any plates, any cutlery, napkins or paper towels. We didn't want to dirty up the microwave so in a moment of innovation, we decided that the pizza could be put in the microwave sitting on top of a coffee mug. Seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. We finished off the pizza but were still hungry. Again, with no utensils, eating the chinese food would be a challenge. So we threw the Chinese food into the same mugs that were used for the Pizza. We heated it up and began eating the noodles and such with our hands. We realized how backwards the whole thing was and we at least wanted to be civilized. There it was, sitting on the 2 single beds, several packs of breadsticks leftover from the Italian restaurant. Here we were. Sitting on 2 single beds in a Super 8, with 14k in our wallets, after losing 6k the previous 2 nights, eating leftover Chinese food out of a super 8 coffee mug, with tiny breadsticks for chopsticks. Yeah, we were ballin'. Straight Hustle was going to get unstuck.