soboba & san manuel update

i checked out both joints this weekend, and played neither!

both joints on weekend nights are $10 table min.

first the bad & ugly. San Manuel is roughly 70% CSM. all non-csm games were 6D with mins from $10-$50 on the main floor and in the "high-roller" pit $50-$200 mins. there was even a CSM in the high roller pit. H17 DS LS with iffy pen. few dealers i checked out were 1.4 cuttoff or worse. of all the casinos i've ever played at, the players here were the worst. e.g. girl had a pair of 4's out against a dealer 4 with roughly a $50 bet riding. she doubled down! to get a 2! it was incredible. other bad plays, standing on soft 16. didn't see biggyjames here... maybe i didn't notice him in the (empty) high roller pit.

worst casino layout and parking ever. you had to drive about 0.7 miles past the casino up a huge hill into lots and be shuttled back down to the casino. the shuttles were very prompt, no waiting around, but it was really damn annoying.

weekend night: soboba as indicated by ihate17 is all h17. i thought about playing their SD game, $15 min, but they were dealing less than RO7, unless my RO7 calc is off. 2 players got 4 rounds. their DD is unplayable in my opinion, with a house edge of 0.74. oh and they deal from a shoe, yet the cards are dealt face down, like a pitch game. all around a skitzo game. their 6D game had playable rules, $10 mins, a nice non-smoking pit with 5-6 tables (a few of each game). from two dealers i saw one cutoff roughly 1.3 decks, the second 1.8ish.

total junk games IMHO so save yourself the trip.

R06 is very workable in a single deck game if you're heads up or if there's only two players total.

The face-down shoe DD game is also used at Viejas and Sycuan. It's like some weird craze sweeping Indian country. And yet these are still places with 6:5 games that are dealer regular pitch style!

Double deck from a shoe

A couple of reasons:
Easier to protect the game from a shoe.
Many Indian Casinos have dealers that never were trained in pitch games, so dealing from a shoe is more comfortable.

ihate17

How crowded was Soboba?

San Manuel will continue to make money because of it's location and it is a good bet to say they will never offer a game that gives the player a chance.

Soboba used to pride itself on decent rules, even though their double deck game was not very good even when it was S-17 and now is just horrible. But often Soboba was crowded and as a casino with nothing to offer but gambling, it would make me feel good to hear they are experiencing a decline after killing their game.

ihate17

the casino was pretty crowded, not packed though. table games: most $10 BJ tables were full. any table above that limit was roughly 1/3 full (i.e. 2 players). in the no smoking pit there were roughly 11 players total for 5 tables at midnight. you could wong around there a lot at peak time, so that means they aint doing so hot. lots of empty tables at both places, because every single table was manned. it was a wonger's paradise, but other than that a complete waste of time.

i kept repeating to my travel pal "this is a blackjack travesty."

so to confirm, is my ROX calculation correct?

# of players (not including dealer) + # of rounds dealt = ROX
e.g. 3 players (+ dealer) + 4 rounds = RO7.

Thanks for the reports Mim, sheesh, and we thought Pauma was bad? Ha. These paranoid casinos better shape up their act.