Okay, here's the deal guys. I was getting cabin fever after being housebound for tow weeks. Verna and I pulled a couple of strings at AmeriStar and got a room at the fully booked hotel (Tony Bennet was performing and it was sold out!) This wasn't one of those trips where we predetermined to go in to break the bank.....each of us just took $200....Verna for the slots where she usually does pretty well, and of course, I was headed for Blackjack.
My objective was to hit the tables, breaking my own rules and trying out a conservative Progression...Dahl's was the progression I chose...in dollars 5 5, 7 7, 10 10, 15 15, 25 25, 35 35, 50 50, etc.
But to work a positive progression, you have to win a hand or two! That wasn't happening for me <LOL> I moved from table to table as I met my threshold for loss and Friday night alone, I played 4 tables ending up the night down $75. I think I got to the $10 step a couple of times but mostly, it was like playing a flat bet game since it was so choppy.
Saturday morning.....same thing. After 6 hours of play, I was down $200. Not because of losing larger bets in the progression...hell, I never won often enough to make it to the larger steps in the progression! With another 4 hours to go before leaving for the 3 hour drive back to Wichita, I called my wife and confessed my "ruin" and told her I was hitting the ATM for another $100 to use to kill time with. She wasn't doing any better than I so I doubled the hit on the ATM. I even lost on the ATM because they withhold $3 for a transaction so I guess the ATM carries a 1.5% house edge!
I gave up on the progression and sat down a a $3 table. In fact, I moved around to three different $3 tables over the course of the next 4 hours. Just nothing good happening. At the end of the 4 hours session, I had maybe $30 left of that final $100 I pulled from the ATM. We were ready to leave and I had a stack of probably 18 or 20 white chips. I just pushed them out in the circle. And Won! I pushed half of them out and won that hand. This went on for 5 hands in a row I guess and when I colored up, I had slightly over $100 in chips.
<<edited>> That didn't make a lot of sense with out this comment: The dealer was coloring my payoffs with red chips so my bets were always my original plus whatever odd whites were part of the payoff.
Just a bad luck run at the casino....a run that would have scarred me sensless had I been betting a negative progression because of the dealer win runs experienced! In a game where you are likely to see a dealer win streak of 7 or 8 hands maybe ONCE, I recall at least three of them during the time I played!
One thing I didn't mention. AmeriStar uses Shuffle Master. On that last shoe (6-deck game) the dealer, an older guy, had trouble stuffing the cards into the shuffling machine and they spilled out on the table. Pit Boss told him to spread the cards to make sure they were all face down, count them and then hand shuffle them. It was the hand shuffled deck that turned the tables for me. Don't know if that was just coincidental or if it was indicative of hand shuffled versus machine shuffled decks. I know I seem to have better luck with hand shuffling.