Day 9
Saturday December 23, 2000
VP and dinner at Reserve. Blackjack at Bally's

I got a late start today. The valet at Paris didn’t help it any. I know it was a Saturday morning but 20 minutes is unacceptable. Today's plan is to go to the Reserve and earn 4X points, then use the comp to Tusks that I earned yesterday.

The first stop was Sparkle Laundromat to drop off my dirty clothes and then to Wal-Mart to pick up a few items.

When I got to the Reserve I started off playing NSUD on the triple play machines. Things were rough here. No deuces were coming up at all. I lost $200 pretty quickly here. I moved over to $1 machines instead. I was playing bonus poker. On this machine I could do no wrong. I was hitting quads left and right. Eventually I hit the aces for $400. After about 3 hours Anne showed up and we went to dinner at Tusks. I cashed out of the machine with a $325 profit for the day so far.

Dinner at Tusks was good as usual. I had my standard 10oz filet. Anne had the NY strip. The food and service were both good tonight. After dinner I tried some blackjack. The $300 that took 3 hours to win before disappeared in less than 15 minutes. I moved over to the dollar VP again and lost another $100 in just a few minutes. Anne was much luckier at blackjack and VP than I was after we ate. Seems like everything that I lost she won. Anne left and I headed back to Paris. After a quick stop in the room I walked over to the new Aladdin.

I entered through the Desert Passage. Big deal. It's a mall. What else can I say about it? OK, one more thing. It's yet another property with the simulated sky ceiling. When are these places going to stop using that? It's not original anymore. Get a new idea!

The casino wasn't anything special as far as I could see. I didn't spend much time there but I didn't see much reason to stay too long. It's a typical strip megaresort as far as I could see. I walked upstairs to the London Club too. I didn't go in though since it looked kind of snooty. All it really looked like was a giant high limit area anyway. So as you can see my thoughts of the Aladdin: No big deal.

After checking out Aladdin I walked back over to Paris. I was going to try some blackjack but I couldn't find anything other than shoe games so I went over to Bally's. They had a double deck game. I started playing at $50 a hand. Things went up and down here. The dealer would get hot, then the players would. It was a tough battle. Of course on my last hand before losing my buy in I got a double down hand. I bought in for another $300 and won the hand. After 3 hours of fighting the blackjack battle I ended up losing everything. I was going to quit when I got even. I was up to $775 and thought I was almost there. Well almost doesn't quite cut it. I ended up losing the whole $800 trying to win an extra $25. This was not too bright on my part.

After losing and being a little pissed off at myself I went back up to the room. Now here I am typing this and it's now time for bed at 2am. Tomorrow I have to pack everything up again and make my last move of the trip to Sam's Town.

Total win/loss for the day -$850
Total comps for the day $165