Day 12 Wednesday December 25, 2002

Merry Christmas

I slept late today since I was up almost all night. Today is my birthday and I’m hoping for a great day in the casino. When I finally got down to the casino I started off with 8/5-bonus poker. This was another machine from hell. I played for about an hour but was never ahead and the whole time only hit 1 quad.

I walked around for a while and stopped at a $1 machine hoping to hit a few hands and get some of the loss back. This didn’t happen either. I dropped 50 without hitting 1 winning hand.

The next move was deuces wild and yes, it was another machine from hell. I only hit 5 quads and dropped another $50 here.

I was down $200 or the day already and had only played for a little over an hour. I thought I’d try out some craps and hoped to play for a while. Well keeping with the theme today I dropped yet another $100 in near record time. Aggravated that nothing seemed to be working today I came up to the room to take a break. It seems my luck at the Suncoast has always been bad other than a royal earlier this year and a few smaller hits on other trips I’ve never had great luck here. With that in mind for the most part I’m done playing here this trip, and possibly on future trips. My host treats me well here but it’s not worth the large amounts of money I lose up here.

After a break I thought I’d go down to the Hard Rock to play. They only had one table and it was packed. I don’t like cramming into a game so I left and went over to the Palms.

They had plenty of tables and I started playing. I got to shoot right away and had one of those tremendous rolls. I was up quite a bit after the roll and got cheered after I finally sevened out. I could do without the cheers and would rather have people throw money! Shortly after my roll some grubby looking guy walks up to the table and throws $100 on don’t. The number was 6 and he took $600 in odds. 2 rolls later the shooter went out and the grubby guy won. It’s a good thing I wasn’t shooting when he did that. Even though I was up quite a bit I kept playing. This wasn’t a good move but greed got the best of me and I lost all I was up plus my buy in. After I busted out I got a comp to the coffee shop and had dinner. I ordered a potato skin appetizer, meatloaf dinner and got a piece of cake to go. The service really sucked here like it always does.

After dinner I came back up here to the Suncoast and took one more shot at video poker. I went over to the bank of deuces machines by Terrible Mike’s and on the 5th hand I was dealt 3 deuces. I actually pulled the 4th for the 1,000 coin mini-jackpot. I also remembered to use the 20 coin bonus coupon for any win over 500 coins that I had. I quit here up $200 and went to play some craps. This table was cold and I dropped a few bucks here. I had enough losing for the day so came up here to the room to wind down and go to bed.

I’d have to check my records but I don’t think I have ever had a winning day on my birthday/Christmas day.

Total win/loss for the day -$700
Total comps for the day $95