AC Report

Had a fabulous time this trip as things were looking good right from the start. You know you're in for a good time when you open up a fortune cookie on the ride there and the fortune says, "You're headed in the right direction." In the end, I ended up tripling my trip bankroll! Would have been quadruple had I not hit every card counter's worst nightmare. (When you have an 8 deck shoe with your max bet out starting 1/2 way through the shoe and you lose every hand practically the rest of the shoe and just when you think the faces and aces are about to come out, shuffle!!!)

Hilton has a special promotion going on for all Greyhound riders where they will give you a free buffet in addition to the slot dollars. They're going to be history though if they don't make their games better. 8 decks H17 70% pen

It was disappointing though that all of the joints I went to, I could not find better than 80% pen. I had to resort to using other AP methods more aggressively. The Borgata still has a few 6 deck games that can be played for $25 but most of all the tables now are 8 deckers. They moved the $5 table to where the money wheel table game is. The vast majority of the games I saw there were 70-75% pen. They are getting pretty sweaty. I saw them watching this guy like a hawk just because he was betting 10x the min bet even in negative counts. It was quite apparent to me that he wasn't counting and while his bs while good, it wasn't perfect.

Resorts is trying hard to make a comeback. They are really having some good promotions now however they only have 1 $25 and 1 $50 6 deck game which fortunately are S17

There must be no shortage of fools because the $1 /.25 ante game at WWW was full of people playing it. Penetration at all the Harrah's properties I went to was about 75% I didn't get to make it to the Trump properties but somehow I doubt things were better there.

This was on a weekday?

si senor

Can you PM anything about promos? I promise I won't show up and play table max for 6 days in a row

Only table game promos I've experienced in AC are entries into random drawings and tournaments. One time, at Plaza, they were calling names on the PA system every hour and you had 5 mins to show up at the cage to get your $1K. Only promo I've ever won!

In a sense, the best promo' that I ever saw was last year in a small Mississippi casino.

It was so dead that there was only mois at the tables so they gave me all of the promo drawings.

I got a pile of buffet comps, $50 cash, $50 match play coupon, etc.

100% probability of winning is not to be laughed at.

Now stop laughing.

:laugh:

By the way I think that there are still a couple of Las Vegas Valley Casino Bingo Parlors
with sizable guaranteed aggregate payouts, that are hugely profitable in the rare
cases of severely inclement weather flooding the streets, keeping the retirees at home.

Yeah, I wasn't imagining anything crazy. Just maybe double points day, or drawings or something. I realize AC isn't going to run a 9-2 on BJ's promo

Some of the machine-based promos have been getting better. The nice thing about machine promos is the more you play, the higher you rate with the marketing department and the better mailers you get, which allows you to play more, and so on.

Sadly current NJ law doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility at the tables, but with the current rearrangement of the gaming authority that may change.

I wasn't trying to imply that Resorts was offering promos that affected the house edge in the games. Aside from cash drawings and the like, Resorts recently has been offering free tickets to shows, Mp's, free buffets, shirts, house hold items, etc. It's been a while since I've seen any casino in AC doing this on a regular basis.

SInce ICNT hasn't corrected you, I will - that would be moi :grin:

Back in the "good ol' days"

There was another post that I was going to post something on bringing up that "back in the day" factor. AC (and just about anywhere else for that matter) is sort of tight, sort of lame on their promotional stuff these days. They have also done all they can to increase HA on everything they possibly can over the years, so any promotion easing HA is out of the question.

Flash mentioned the 2 to 1 payout on blackjack promotion and that is UNHEARD of these days but many years ago when I first started playing blackjack, this was common! I used to enjoy playing at Bob Stupak's Vegasworld and on certain days all blackjacks paid 2to1 as a promotional thing. Pen was as far back as it could go, blackjack paid 2to1 and the casino still made a ton of profit from the game overall because of your typical recreational gamblers. I chopped and chiseled away steadily and it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Vegasworld was the very beginnings of using the "Tarzan count" (a DHME style count) that I had been working on and I was stunned at my success and how much money was stacking up. It was way beyond anything I had expected to say the least. I was quite young and was pulling down more money than anyone I knew at the time, so was staying quiet and stashing away.

Corporate greed has brought down any promotional things to an absolute bare minimum. They would rather gouge a higher percentage on a smaller customer base, rather than take a smaller percentage on a much larger volume to be competitive and thereby make more money. Casinos are not exactly following a "Walmart style" strategy... they do what every other casino is doing and lack innovative skills when it comes to marketing. Harrah's has pushed to have a higher volume by sheer size and numbers of casinos but wants the same "gouge"--- That is to say that "We are bigger but sure as hell not any better", which is a flawed marketing strategy.

Casinos that are concerned about AP's? They are out of their gourds! As a matter of fact they are quite content to spend or lose 10 times the money that they could possibly drop from the small percentage of counters out there. Counters do not exactly make any serious money to the point of it having any effect on the casinos bottom line and there is more hype to it than anything else pushing casinos to use elaborate (and costly) countermeasures over the years. A mentality of "I am willing to spend a million to prevent someone from winning a thousand" is not exactly cost-effective. The amount of money I took out of Stupak's Vegasworld and a few others years ago seemed like a lot to me but it was a drop in the (very large) bucket to the casinos, who had a thriving business. A "loss leader" as it is referred to was a common sense business practice back then that contributed to an overall gain in volume of business and promoted repeat business.

Greed causes people to act irrationally... it's human nature and proves itself time and time again. This is the very principle by which the recreational gambler operates under, the "gambler's fallacy" which is the means by which a casino pilfers it's clientele. With this being the case, you would think that casinos would have a little common sense and disallow flawed thinking from disrupting longterm success. Corporate greed at it's finest chopping back promotional incentives and increasing HA to maximum might not be the most brilliant strategy and qualifies as it's own brand of "Corporate greed fallacy" that is more likely to produce an overall detrimental effect in the longrun and increase profits in the very short-term but be catastrophic in the financial longhaul. Gamblers seeing futility will give up, only a matter of time and gamblers that at least THINK they have a better than an ice cube's chance in hell will be customers for a long time to come.

I miss those golden days long gone and know that I will never see the sort of blackjack game I used to play ever again. Vegasworld is no more and has been replaced by corporate greed that thinks irrationally and is happy to lose business and longterm solvency through stupidity.

Also note that Basic Strategy is more widely known today than in the "good old days" making good promotions more expensive for casinos to offer.

Basically without strategy

Blue, even though you are out in the "tundra" someplace I would bet that you'd had your share of time at the tables. With that being the case, just how many people do you see at the tables using perfect basic strategy? I'm not sure how relevant a factor that is because although the information may be out there, few seem to bother with it to include people that have been playing blackjack for as long as I have... which is a very long time.

Tarzan,
In defense of Blue, on my last trip to AC, I personally witnessed 2 people at the tables I went to who knew perfect basic strategy at least from what I saw. I'm pretty sure they did because I watched them double their soft 18s and saw one of them split 6's against a dealer 2 which I never see from ploppies. There were also a few people I saw who knew probably 90+% of the bs chart so I don't think it's far off to say that the general public has become much more knowledgeable about the games thanks to the internet. However, the casinos have gotten far greedier as you've said. They seem to have forgotten that what made blackjack so popular to begin with was the idea that it was beatable and many people did go home winners. Now, I would estimate that 90% of the people I see at the tables I play at, leave as losers.

AC blackjack players are very, very tough. They usually hit their stiffs out vs. big upcards, they double down when they should, and they split against low cards. Some of the Midwest casinos have decent players.

The blackjack players in the UP in Michigan were some of the worst I've ever seen. The ploppies at the MGM Grand in Detroit are far and away the most aggressive I've ever seen with their ploppy logic.

And low level Vegas players can be quite bad.

I hardly see anyone playing perfect BS in AC. A high estimate would be maybe 1 player out of 10 playing perfect BS on average (probably not even that high).

Then again I tend to play the cheap seats $10-$15.

Well, no one ANYWHERE plays perfect BS that isn't a counter. How many people do you know that know when to split 9's? I don't know a single one that isn't a counter.

It is extremely rare that I see people split 9's against a dealer 8 or 9. The fact is, most ploppies think 18 is a winning hand.