Foxwoods

I just got back from a trip to Destin Florida with my family. Destin has always been our family vacation spot and has great beaches if you ever get the chance. Last Saturday I had a flight out of Hartford leaving at 6AM. I flew out of Hartford because it was about $200 cheaper than Albany. That Friday before I left I was debating if I should drive up to Connecticut Friday night and get a hotel. The cheapest hotel I could find was $70 and considering I would only be there a matter of hours because I would need to be at the airport be 5AM I was struggling with dropping that much money. Driving up that morning/middle-of-the-night was also an option but that didn’t sound like much fun.

At about 4:30 that Friday an angel whose face I still have not seen walked into the my coworkers office across the hall. He suggested making a weekend trip to Foxwoods. For those of you who don’t know Foxwoods is the biggest casino in North America. I made up my mind if Gmap claimed it was less than an hour out of the way I would pull the trigger. ETA=57 mins. Bingo. I was no longer thinking pessimistically about the night.

I get to Foxwoods and it is incredible. Absolutely huge. I park in the parking garage and make a bee line to the casino. Over the course of the next couple of hours I so a handful of things that made me depressed that certain people find their ways into a casino. To me gambling is not necessarily a bad thing if you are doing it with dispensable income and if you give yourself a fighting chance by having a clue at the table. I make my way to the blackjack table to get started just like I always do. The cheapest blackjack table it $25. That’s a pretty rough minimum but I decide to give it a shot. Three hands, two losses and one win, and I decide I can’t stomach $25 hands of blackjack so I get up. During those three hands I saw the one things that frustrates me more than any other move in blackjack.

I’ll try not to get too deep into the rules of the game but idea is you try and get as close to 21 without going over. The dealer has to hit until 17 even if they have 16 and you have 12. As a result the dealer can have 6 results: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, or bust. If you are going to stay with something below 17 you are basically throwing your cards away and betting that the dealer is going to bust which a lot of times is the right play.

Here is the situation, the dealer is showing a 10 and the guy next to me has a soft 16 (ace and a five). He decides to stay and tries to convince me that he likes to play conservatively. That wasn’t conservative that was just stupid. You see, with a 10 showing there is an 8/13 chance that the dealer already has 17-21. But even if that weren’t the case there is no harm in hitting a soft 16 because it is IMPOSSIBLE to bust. Absolute worst case scenario you hit and get a 6 and you have 12. Staying on 12 is the same as staying on 16 because they both mean you are throwing your hand away and betting the dealer busts. Stupidest play in blackjack and I wanted to tell him he deserved to lose his money but I didn’t.

After my three hands of blackjack I spent the rest of the night at the Craps and Roulette tables. While playing Roulette I saw two of the most stupid plays I have seen in that game. A guy rolls up to the table trying to look cool in his baggy jean shorts, sleeveless shirt, tattoed biceps, crooked designer hat, and sun glasses. He spreads $900 in twenty dollar bills and proceeds to put the better half on black and plays the rest aimlessly on random single numbers. Of course it hits a red number that he definetely is not betting on. Same thing, buys back in for $900 in twenties making a huge scene. Same betting strategy, same result. He sulks away and disappears into the crowd and I don’t feel a bit sorry for him. He showed up trying to look cool, bet like a fool, and walked away a loser.

The next guy buys in for big but opts to get $1 chips. He spreads out his bets covering every single number including the 0 and 00. Let me explain this. There are 36 numbers 1-36, half red and half black. There is also a 0 and 00. That totals 38 possible results of the wheel each of which pay 35:1 (read this is the house advantage). This guy puts bets on 38 numbers and yea he wins every time but he comes away with less money every time as well. You could buy 25,827,165 Texas lottery tickets and gaurantee a win but if the pay off is $4 million you are a sucker. That guy really thought he had the game figured out and I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him.

“A man’s gotta make atleast one bet a day, else he could be walking around lucky and never know it”

-hj