Day 4
December 16, 1999
Up early and down to the progressive deuces wild machines. Played for about 5 hours and lost $80. Not bad for 5 hours of play. Didn’t hit deuces this time. Went up to the room for a quick snack and then decided to head out to the Silverton for some video poker. Silverton is offering 12X comp points for the month of December. I had never been here before and didn’t really know what to expect. I was told it was a nice place and I was about to find out for myself. It really is a nice place. The first thing I did was to get a slot card. This went smooth and they also gave me coupons that were good for $5 in cash, a $50 for $40 buy-in on tables and a coupon good for a 100 coin bonus for hitting 4 natural 7’s. There were coupons good for this week and next week. You earn one point for every 1-dollar played here. 650 points are good for $1 cash back and 50 cents in comps. That works out to be about .15% cash back and about .075% in comps. I find it kind of unusual that the comps were less than the cash back. But with the 12X-comp points they are offering it brings the comps up to .9%. So with cash back and comps the slot club was worth more than 1% extra and they offer a good amount of full pay video poker here as well. Be careful though. There is a large amount of crap blended in with the good games. I found a full pay deuces wild machine to get started on. It had the annoying double up feature on it so I decided to move. I found another machine and started playing. This is when I found out there was a bunch of lower paying games mixed in. I hit a 5 of a kind and was only paid 60 coins. I quickly moved again. Played for about an hour and lost $40. Made a quick $100 over on blackjack and went over to a nickel 10 play machine. They were short pay but were still a lot of fun to play. Lost a few dollars playing here and decided to try my luck with the $50 for $40 coupon on the tables. Played more blackjack. Had a good start with these chips but lost them. Bought in for $200 more and played for another 2 hours. Cashed out up about $50. Asked for and was given a comp to the coffee shop. It was good for $15, which was more than enough. I had the prime rib and it wasn’t very good. It was dry and kind of tough. Regular menu price for this was $10.95. I thought it had the quality of a late night special that runs for $3.99. The service sucked as well. I ordered my drink which, never showed up. I told the waiter and he said he’d be right back with it. Well he brought my salad but still no drink. Another 10 minutes went by and he walked by again. Said he’d go get it. Finally my soda arrived. The next problem was they had no dinner rolls. This isn’t that big of a deal but my waiter made no offer of a substitute like a slice of bread. I only bring this up because I heard another waiter offer his tables that option. For dessert I had the strawberry tall cake. For $1 this is probably the best deal on the menu. It’s a huge chunk of sponge cake covered with strawberries and whipped cream. According to the menu it’s what made the Silverton famous.
After dinner I tried my luck on $1 bonus poker in hopes of hitting those 7’s for a 100 coin bonus. No luck at all as I lost the $100 in just a few minutes. Moved over to a $1 deuces wild machine. It was short pay on the wild royal and five of a kind. Lost another $100 in short time and decided I’d try one more before giving up. Ran the credit meter up to over 300 but then things got really bad. Very few deuces were coming up and when they did they weren’t of much help. Credits were down to 95 and things weren’t looking good at this point. I got dealt another shit hand with one deuce. Of course I held the deuce and dumped the rest and to my amazement I saw 3 more deuces pop up for a $1000 win. One thing that was unusual was that this would normally be a hand pay since it was over 400 coins on a dollar machine. But it wasn’t. It racked up on the credit meter. Not wanting to take a chance at losing it I hit the cash out button and did get hand paid for the $1095 that was on the meter. They even asked if they could announce my win over the PA and I said they could. I never did hear it if they did though.
Went back over to the nickel 10 plays again. Played a short pay version of deuces and in a few minutes hit quad deuces. Tried another game that I’m sure is a terrible play. It was Triple Double bonus. It had big payoffs on low quads with kickers and 4 aces with a kicker paid the same as a royal. Well on about the 3rd hand I hit 4 3’s with a deuce for 2000 nickels and about 10 minutes later hit 4 4’s with a 3 for another 2000 coins. I had the credit meter up to 5,000 coins. Played for a little bit longer and cashed out. Of course it was another hand pay. It was now after midnight and I had been out at Silverton for over 8 hours so it was time to head back down to the Strip to the New Frontier. I did end up playing over $7,000 through the machines at the Silverton and also a few hours of $25/ hand blackjack. I’ll see what kind of offers this generates even though I’m not sure I’d want to stay all of the way out there. I guess it’s no farther away than Sam’s Town or The Reserve though so I might if given the opportunity.
Total win/loss for the day $ 900
Total comps for the day $89