Return of the Hot Shooter

I returned to the Bubble Craps machine after a several month break to focus on Video & Table Black Jack. I had one losing night on BJ and I'm rethinking what to do with my mini-bankroll. It's either take long trips to play more video black jack or play nearby at the bubble craps machine. I tried the roulette machine for a couple hours and lost a couple sessions because the 9 in a row I was betting on went against me a few times. So I was back to betting $3 on the PL and $3, $4, $5 odds and adding a similar Come bet when my balance got above my buy-in of $135. I ran it up to $200 over 2 hours but some newby sat down and disturbed my flow with the dice and I quickly lost all I had won. Then I thought about something a little more aggressive. Use a progression on the PL and have one PB 6 or 8. So my $9 bets on each got the progression treatment that pays off at least 10X my base bet after 6 wins and 20X times my base bet for 9 wins in a row before the 7-out or a PL loss. A couple times I got up to my top bet but lost. Then on one of my Hot Shooter hands, I had won one of my 6 in a row progressions and was close on the other. After I get my balance above $225, I added a 2nd PB 6/8 bet which can become an odds bet if the point is 6 or 8 so I get paid more. I had another good turn and cashed-out above $300. Ideally, my buy-in for this would be $360, so I'm still trying to win up to my normal buy-in. That will have to wait for another winning night. But when I first sat down to play, I had 3 Hot Shooter (20+ rolls) turns in a row and the guy next to me turned his $200 into nearly $2,000, but he was betting $50+ on the inside numbers.

Tropical Storm Beryl headed my way yesterday and I started getting tornado warnings on my phone around 2:30 pm. I turned on The Weather Channel but they just went to commercial, so I turned on my local TV station which I never do and found them in continuous storm coverage mode. There were 2 or 3 tornadoes they were following and one was about 20 miles southwest of me going northeast and headed to my city. So I got dressed and headed out to the casino trying to beat this rain. I took a different route because the storm was going to beat me to the casino and on the different route I'd only be in the storm for a little bit instead of a lot. There was strong lightning ahead of me the whole way but barely a drop on my windshield for several miles. It was 92 degrees even with the extreme cloud cover overtaking the sky. Then I turned North for the last leg of my trip which was probably around 5 miles. It started getting colder and dropping through the 80's, then it started raining. When I got to the last few lights before the casino, the last mile, there was a lot of truck traffic, and the rain and wind came pouring down hard. The traffic lights were swaying sideways at 45 degrees then the power went out on them. There weren't any big trees in this section of the road so I wasn't worried about trees falling on me. But just going the last half mile, the rain picked up so much it was a whiteout condition and the traffic slowed to 20 mph and were using their flashers. The traffic light going into the casino went out but that turn was easy for me. I quickly got into the parking garage. When I tried to enter the casino, they had some metal storm doors partially the way down, these were glass doors so they're thinking of the doors. But they were only partway down so somebody who was well over 6 foot might have to duck to get in or out. When I got in, the slots were still working, but the soda machines were not, I tried all of them. The chandeliers from the ceiling were out. The TV's for Draft King were disconnected from their satellite feed with an error message to reconnect the cable. The restaurants were all closed. I walked around and got to the outdoor slots room and it was warmer and muggier and raining outside, and smoky from smokers. I went back inside thinking the air conditioning is probably not working and in awhile it's going to get stuffy. There were several hundred people there. It was quite full for a Wednesday afternoon. I checked my phone because it was getting tornado alerts. There was one associated with the gust front that I just drove through a few miles away, not many miles away at all. There were tornado alerts for different areas of upstate NY so I screenshotted them for later reference. It was 77 degrees and raining.

So I sat down at the bubble craps machine, there was one other guy there. I didn't bet the PL right away because I hate losing on the PL so made a PB and this guy rolled 10 wins in a row on the PL including points! I missed the bus! I would have been up $200+ right from that, instead he hit my PB twice. I was hitting point 7-outs most of the time but at least my first turn I hit for +$60. Then this guy was hitting point 7-outs every time. After 2.5 hours I was back to even and starting to bet against this guy, he sensed that and quit. I was free to bet the DP by myself and it went against me and I was down $40.

Today was Wednesday and they had a U-Spin offer for seniors. Win 50 points and get $5 in free play. So after hours on this machine I was steadily racking up points and free plays. They had a limit of 11X $5 for the 55 and older club. I've been noticing I'm getting really lowballed between how many points the machine says I won and how much shows up as tier points at the kiosk. So the night before I was checking the website for the Rewards card. It said for the next card above me, you could get 1 point for every $5 spent on slots. I thought that odd, and it didn't mention that for my card, so it might be worse. I was used to getting 1 point on the machine for every $6 bet. So I was really surprised during this U-Spin promo that I was getting 1 point on the machine for every $3 spent! Later, I cashed out with over 500 points and checked the kiosk and my points there only went up by over 100, so 1/5th of the amount on the machine. 1 tier point for every $15 spent instead of $6, or $3 today. The Rewards Club also raised the minimum needed to get to the next card from 2K points to 4K points. I'm just figuring this out here but I'd have to have $60K in coin in to get 4K points, then maybe I can get $5/point after that? This casino attracts big bettors so maybe that's why they crack down on the points so hard. I later bought a double mushroom cheeseburger for $12.73 with points at the Smashburger.

Back to the bubble craps. I was about 6 free plays won, and starting to feel the losing side. I was alone at the machine. I accidently thought of adding some kind of odds to my PL instead of placing a PB. So I had $9 on the PL and $6, $8, $10 odds, and that won. So my next bets were $15 PL and $9, $12, $15 odds, and that won. Then I went to $24 PL with $15, $20, $25 odds, and that won. Then I downshifted to lock in an extra bit of win and did $18 PL with $12, $16, $20 odds, and that won. Then I did $30 PL with $15, $20, $25 odds, and that won, then repeat and that lost. I got up to $300 with an over $150 win on a 5 point Hot Shooter streak! I'll have to check my math on whether I should pursue this strategy much further, it just worked out this time for the Hot Shooter. I kept with this strategy for a few more turns and lost $55 back and quit.

Then I went over to the video poker machines and got my $55 free play and played 1 quarter at a time for 26 minutes. I hit quads once on Double Double Bonus VP. I switched games to Deuces Wild and started hitting natural quads a few times, but they don't pay as well. I really should have gotten a photo of the pay tables on these games and compared them to my Roku 3 games, I'm sure they are worse. I played Jokers Wild as the 3rd game and that had some weird pay table I wasn't used to. I finally got to 1 session point and cashed out at even, or +$55.00.

Took my two TITOs to the cage and cashed out 3 hundred dollar bills. I'll split that up as a won session and a rebuy later. The last time I got free play was 2 years ago and only for a month or two as an alien game at the kiosk. They would give me $40 free play and I'd play 1 coin VP for half an hour and I'd see if I could hit quads on Double Double Bonus Poker in that time. Many times I just walked away with $15-$20. This time I'm worried about losing my buy-in on the bubble craps and having to rebuy-in to collect all 11 of those $5 free plays. This time it worked out, but should I be chasing this promo or not? I bet when I get back there on another day it will still be $6/point on the machine on non-promo days instead of $3 on promo days, but the kiosk is still ripping me off on points. I hadn't thought they'd be going with $15 per point at the kiosk, and that's just an estimate since I wasn't betting odds until late in the game.

While I was playing bubble craps some alarm went off casino wide. Sharp spotlights were flashing and sirens were going off and an announcement was being made but the volume and quality of the announcement was so bad it was unintelligible and unhearable above the blaring sirens. This happened several different times and it threw me off and made me 7-out, lol. There were some other slots nearby and they made siren noises but that's a part of their game play like when a wolf blows down the piggies houses or something, and really I was starting to confuse those sirens with actual alerts. But the sirens that were blaring were so much louder than the slots I could hear. The power came back on at 5 pm on the dot as the chandeliers lit up, so the power was out for nearly 2 hours.

I just flipped on The Weather Channel and they said there were 42 tornado warnings in upstate NY yesterday, 18 from the Buffalo office, the most ever. The areas north of Syracuse to Vermont got 3" to 8"+ of rain. There were only 3 red dots for confirmed tornados and none were in my area, but then why all the tornado warnings with doppler indicated too? There were probably high wind damage spots on the map in my area. They said more red dots may be filled in later.

After seeing a tornado near Buffalo tear up the neighborhood, I don't think a casino is a safe shelter from a tornado with all the slot machines that could take flight and all the cars in the garage going into toy land. It's a safe space from hail damage and high wind damage, but not tornadoes. But it's hard to know which direction to drive away from the storm when they just pop up everywhere at once all afternoon.