The Lucky Donut

This is a "Silver Strike" gaming token, from the slot machine of the same name.

In fact, this is just one of series of gambling-themed token designs at Sam’s Town.

In a recent visit, Claire and I joined forces and managed to walk away with a handful of shiny coins. Thanks to this win, we also left with a little profit.

Seven – Seven – Double.  Three sevens is 160 quarters, doubled makes it 320 quarters, and divided by 4 gives $80.

It’s not huge, but the only possible bigger wins on this machine are Seven – Double – Double ($160) or Double – Double – Double ($500 jackpot).

Usually it’s a slow (losing) grind until you hit the "Silver Strike" symbol on wheel 3, when things start spinning and a shiny coin pops out.

There may still time to complete this particular collection, but invariably there’s one design that is ten times more common than the rest so you actually have to win dozens of tokens before you’re close to getting one of each.

In the case of these tokens depicting gambling games, we cashed in a handful of Roulette tokens and another Blackjack one, and we still need Keno, Poker, Craps and Slots.  It’s going to be quite hard work.

Another machine was giving out another set of tokens, this one themed after Mystic Falls Park – the atrium at Sam’s Town that looks a bit like a wood with dodgy animatronic animals and an occasional fountain show that’s just like at the Bellagio, except there’s only half a dozen jets.  To compensate, they add a laser show at night.

It’s actually quite a cool place, and it’s a perfect escape from gambling right in the middle of the casino.  Natural light, water, plant life and a stuffed bear that turns its head erratically now and again to a looped "roar" tape.  You’ll soon forget how much money you just lost.

Unfortunately, it seems that "Silver Strike" has become a misnoma, because the majority of these tokens are no longer made from silver – they’re silver-plated brass.  It took a while to notice this well-disguised sticker on the machine but the confession is there.

In the picture above, only the wolf (top left) is an actual silver Silver Strike.  It’s very difficult to tell just by looking (although the light certainly reflects differently in that photo) but while that one does say ".999 fine silver", the others are simply stamped with the letter "S".

There used to be at least one Silver Strike machine in just about every casino, each with their own collectable token or a range of tokens.  You don’t play this particular slot game to win money, you play it to collect a piece of memorabilia from the casino and in theory it’s a big winner for the casino because every $10 payout should cost them less than $10 – and that’s in addition to their edge on the machine.

However this is actually one of the very few slot games that can be considered a winning game for the player.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but for a collector who values the tokens at more than $10 each, or for a shrewd player who seeks out the rarer tokens that he can sell at an inflated price, you can overcome the house edge on the game.

Back at home, we have a bag of Silver Strikes from dozens of different casinos.  It weighs a ton.  I dread to think how much it’s cost, and you can be sure that over the long term each one has cost more than the ten dollar face value but it’s a pretty cool collection.

It’s a bit of a shame we haven’t come up with a way of displaying them and they are, literally, kept in a bag.

Silver Strikes are, sadly, a dying breed. The rising cost of silver has been blamed, with the cost of manufacturing the ten dollar gaming tokens becoming prohibitive.

A quick search on eBay will show lots of tokens from the casinos all over Las Vegas, including most of the big name Strip resorts.  However, right now, as far as I know the only casinos in town that still have a Silver Strike machine are Sam’s Town, Palms, Four Queens and Planet Hollywood.  Two locals’ joints, one Downtown casino and one Strip resort.

For a while, the Fremont casinos offered a slightly larger token with face value of $40, which briefly looked like it might be a resurrection of the game but it didn’t last long.  Maybe these cheaper, silver-plated tokens are what’s needed to get Silver Strikes back into every casino.

While I’m glad to see that at least a few casinos are still producing new collections of Silver Strikes and optimistic that they might be coming back into style, it’s a little disappointing that they’re no longer actually made from a precious metal.

Bronze Plated Strikes just doesn’t sound the same, does it? 

The first time I saw this screen as part of the "Employee of the Month" awards on the Bally’s sign I did a double take.

The second time I managed to take a picture to make sure.  Hey, it’s the best I could get while driving…

Yes, it really does say "Buger Brasserie".  Which is one unfortunate letter away from the actual name of a restaurant in Paris Las Vegas.

Is appetising, non? 

According to the in-room "Poker TV" channel, Harrah’s casinos are still offering satellites to the World Series of Poker main event.

I know it’s almost all finished this year, except for making the last nine players wait a few more months before being able to finish their game.  But they don’t mean this year’s WSOP.

Apparently you can still qualify for last year’s…

And I thought the sign in the Flamingo Poker Room advertising their "Poker Souvenir’s" [sic] was embarassing.  I’m not the only pedant to care about stuff like this you know…

Now I know where the pattern on my new Flamingo socks came from – it’s the same as the wallpaper in their "Go Rooms".

It was my third hand, and the first I’d decided to play.  I had a pair of red fours in the small blind.

I don’t even know why that detail is significant.  The colour of the cards has nothing to do with how I played them, or how I tell the tale.  It bugs me enough when people begin a story with "I had red aces", as if the suits matters pre-flop, and like they’re not going to point of they have a flush draw the tiny number of times it actually becomes relevant later in the hand.

In this hand, there was no flush draw, and even if there was one four wasn’t going to make much of a difference to me.  But for some reason I can’t explain, I looked down and thought exactly that: two red fours.

There were a couple of limpers and the button raised to $12.  He had a little more than a full stack ($100) so my call was fairly loose with bad position and three other players still to act.  I was hoping at least one of them would come along for the ride as well.

What I didn’t want was what happened: the big blind raised, but it was barely more than the minimum, making it $25.

I hadn’t been here long enough to know if that meant anything, but pre-flop re-raises at $1/$2 are unusual without a big hand and small re-raises scream of a monster pair.

I don’t like paying $25 on a small pair, but I was getting fabulous odds after the limpers fled the scene and the original raiser made the call.  $13 more to me, $66 in the pot and a hand that will either crack those pocket aces which the big blind had already told everyone about or cost me no more money. 

Flop: ten, nine, four.  All different suits.  Seriously loving my set of fours.

I check and the monster pair obligingly moves all in for about $70.

The button also moves all in for slightly more.

Am I still happy?  Slightly less so than I was, but I’m never folding here.  Pocket jacks and queens are all over this flop, and on balance of cards alone they are twice as likely as any hand that beats mine.

I don’t even ask for a count (I have both players covered) and we all jump head first into a three-way bloodbath.

Pocket aces we already pretty much knew about, but I have to confess when the last four popped up on the turn to crack the other guy’s pocket nines (for a bigger flopped set that left me with one card left in the deck to win) I did let out a little yelp, for which I quickly apologised.

The result of the carnage was a net win of about $200 for me – but as this was at the Excalibur two players got to spin the wheel – one for the four-of-a-kind and another for the cracked aces.

However, the player with the best hand on the flop by far got diddly squat, and had to watch as I got paid another $25 for sucking out on him.

But wait, there’s more.  We already know these huge hands come in pairs.  At Christmas, I thought I’d missed a jackpot and then made quads again shortly afterwards to confirm that there was no high hand prize at the time.  My last quads in Vegas before that was also two in the same session.

If I hadn’t already hit quads this trip (9s at Bally’s with a $100 jackpot) I’d swear it was always the case. 

Two hands later, while the jackpot wheel was still spinning (those things have a lot of momentum!) I picked up a massive ten-eight offsuit and limped in.  As the wheel settled the floorman had me sign the necessary paperwork to get my bonus chips so I wasn’t really paying attention to the game.

"Hurry up quad fours!", came the shout from the other side of the table.

I look back to see a flop with two tens, verbally checked, and then struggled to keep one eye on the game while dealing with the bureaucracy so I could try to work out how to make some money from my hand.

I still don’t really know how it happened.  The fourth ten came on the turn and I checked again because I didn’t think anybody had much yet, and I was really hoping for a river ace or king to generate some action.

It was a 5, but apparently that was enough.  I was just completing the formalities when the action got to me (two signatures for a $25 win – this is Vegas, right?) and threw out a $10 bet.

But I’d missed something.  Another player fancied his hand, and now decided that he wanted that pot of $8 that had been sitting in the middle of the table without anyone taking a stab at it so far.  He’d made a $30 bet at it and the dealer kindly let me have a do-over.

That $30 was pretty much $30 more than I expected to win, and I had no idea how what he could possibly call with but I had to raise, so I made it $70 and sure enough I got paid off by eight-five for a ridiculously weak full house (given the cards on board).

I should have won $8 on the hand, but I actually got another $70.

And even if the other guy couldn’t bring himself to fold a full house, all he had to do was point out that I’d already made my action by throwing out fewer chips than his bet amount because I wasn’t paying attention and I wouldn’t be allowed to raise, only call.

The dealer made me an extra $40 on this hand.

I also had an awesome second spin of the wheel, hitting "triple" and then $30 for another $90. 

My action dried up after that.  Nobody wanted to play with me because I was "great at flops" so I had to move on.

With all their money in my pocket 🙂

Coast Casinos have recently started adding PIN numbers to players club accounts.

This is a great idea as it means they’ve been able to put in a bunch of self-service terminals where you check your offers and print off coupons without having to stand in line for the players club.

Hopefully it also means paying with points in person will be quicker too as they won’t have to check ID.  When you hand your card to a person, you’ll have to enter your PIN on a keypad like this one.

The size of the keys and the bright primary colours… it looks like they got a job lot from the Early Learning Centre.

But what I want to know is… why do these beasts need a "num lock"? 

Just to get it off my chest, this is my other whinge from Thursday night.

I finally got to play poker at Bellagio for the first time. 

On two previous attempts I got fed up of waiting for someone to even acknowledge that I was standing right in front of them.  "Quick, look busy!", has been their attitude when I showed up on two other occasions.  In between finding things to do, they’d look around me or through me, but never make eye contact.

And so it began today.  There were many more important things for the man with the clipboard to do before he would be able to write my name on a list.

That was even before I’d asked to play $1/$2 no-limit, a game that the Bellagio used to be too good for.  The floor staff apparently still think that they are, and can spot the pond life that come to play it from 20 paces.

To be honest, I guess my orange Hawaiian shirt didn’t help. 

When he couldn’t ignore me any longer, I was apparently first up so I waited right at the podium.  I didn’t realise how naive this strategy was. 

Clipboard Guy had a wireless microphone, and he was going to use it.  He brushed past me, out of the poker room and a few seconds later, after some cunning misdirection and presumably using a trap door, re-appeared back inside, but way over the other side of the room.

I’d spotted him, but there was no way I could hear him.  "Mnmnph mmnnnm rrrmph rummit holdem" was about all I could make out.

Was that my name?  Was that my game and he’d bumped someone ahead of me?  Some players must have been waiting within earshot of whichever speaker he’d hooked up to, so was I meant to have been waiting over there?  It should never be this hard to play cards.

It’s usually about now that I’d walk but, today, I’d decided I wasn’t giving up.  I knew he would have to return to the podium eventually and prepared myself for a confrontation.

Sadly, the colourful line of enquiry I’d been rehearsing was not needed because a few minutes later someone else called my name, looked at me like "seriously, that’s you?" when I stepped forward and reluctantly showed me to a table.

I’m almost positive I’d been bumped down the list, and I’m not even sure if the other floorman calling my name was a mistake after he’d picked up the wrong clipboard.

Anyway, I got to play.  I stayed less than an hour, hating it.  The beer count at the table was zero, which is never a good sign, and although the iPod count was only 2 the dick count was a perfect 9.  Makes sense – anyone who looked like they might be playing for fun would have had a hard time getting this far.

As I grabbed a rack to gather my chips, the dealer flung a "reserved" button into my spot before I’d even picked up the first stack.  I guess he didn’t want me there either.

Inevitably, one day I’ll be a big name high stakes player.  I can’t wait to stick two fingers up at the Bellagio and have somebody actually notice.

I may have mentioned before now my tendency to stock up on small bars of soap and tiny bottles of shampoo whenever I stay in a hotel.

The usual routine, working on the assumption that things that are partially used or missing when the maid comes the next morning will probably be replaced, is to leave out anything half used and hide anything I haven’t touched at all.  One of the drawers in the dresser usually does the job.

This week, my five night unnecessary reservation at Paris Las Vegas has gone largely unused.  I’d popped in a few times to make the room look stayed in to ensure they didn’t check me out after finding the room in perfect condition when it seemed likely I wouldn’t be staying, but I hadn’t actually spent a night there – until tonight.

While Claire decided to try to get maximum value form the 5x points day at Terribles, I played poker on the Strip.  She had the car and I had a place to crash.

I even got to play at Bellagio for the first time.  It’s also going to be the last time.  Clearly, I’m not welcome there.  But two big rants in one blog post is almost two too many, so I’ll save that one.

When I got back to Paris I was delighted to find two pens in the room.  Sometimes you only get one.  I pulled open the top drawer to deposit them with the rest of my haul from the past four days and…

… empty! 

Seriously?  The maid stole it all back?  How dare she!

I’m not even joking.  Since when did the cleaning staff start going through closed draws in hotel rooms – let alone playing a vigilante in the War on Soap?

Sure, my pilfering hadn’t been subtle. I’d also taken all the non-decaf coffee from the machine without leaving a single wrapper in the bin.  No used soap.  No half used shampoo.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out I’m on the take.

But for fuck’s sake… did she really go looking to see where I’d stashed this stuff, quite happy to rummage around in the drawer I usually use for dirty underwear, and swipe them right back?

Apparently so.

Is there some kind of "fair usage policy" on the amenities that I’m not aware of?  It’s "unlimited soap" on the surface, but if I need both bars replacing on four straight days, does it red flag my room and print out a search warrant?

Am I somehow wrong to assume that these disposable items, left for me daily to use as I see fit, are fair game?  I know I’m not alone.

If housekeeping feels that I am using too many of their valuable resources, the way to deal with this is to stop replenishing them.  Indeed, this happens.  At the Rio earlier in the trip, we dropped from 2 daily bars of soap to 1, and on some days the lotion didn’t get replaced at all.

That’s not a big deal.  If I genuinely needed more supplies than they left, I could call housekeeping and ask for more.  I didn’t need more, I’m just a hoarder. 

I don’t take the towels, the ice bucket or the bible.  OK, I’ll admit I did take an ice bucket once, but it was a long time ago and I know it was wrong.  There’s a big difference between the fixtures and fittings and consumables.

But the soap isn’t really the issue here (although, of course, I did want as much fake French "lotion pour le corpse" as possible, just because I wanted to believe they actually were little bottles of formaldehyde).  Searching the personal storage areas of an occupied hotel guest room is a gross invasion of privacy.

Not to mention that it kind of freaked me out when I got in late at night and realised someone had been through my stuff. 

What’s really interesting is that the welcome card from the maid – the one that says "Hi, My name is Rosario, please give me money" – and sometimes even comes with a handy envelope for your donation – had also been removed.

I guess you don’t think you’ll be getting a tip now.  You’re absolutely right.

If I wasn’t still milking every last cent of value out of my Harrah’s status I would have caused a hell of a fuss.  The circumstances are a little embarassing ("I know someone’s been messing with my things because I’d filled a draw with your toiletries and now they’re gone") but it’s a major worry to think hotel staff are going through the things you put away when you’re not around.

The problem is that I still have two fully comped reservations at Christmas which I really want to keep.  The last thing I need is to attract attention so they look me up and see that I haven’t gambled at a Harrah’s casino in Las Vegas for almost a year.  The upside (most likely nothing more than an apology) didn’t seem to be worth the risk of the downside.

Even though the opportunity to pursue a career in hat modelling has probably passed me by, I just had to strike a pose to show off this beautiful "peace hat", which I received courtesy of Binion’s.

That pose would be: just got back after a long poker session and need to go to sleep.  I think I pulled it off convincingly. 

As part of their participation in the Summer of ’69 theme throughout the whole of Downtown Las Vegas, you can win one of these beauties every time you hit quad 6s or 9s on video poker.

It’s actually even more awesome than the photo suggests, as the red stars are actually lights and they flash in sequence, moving from the bottom of the "V" to the top.

I have yet to see anyone wearing one of these in public.