Everyone's already very nice

Done, if I win the Powerball top top.

There's something very compelling about turning a toothpick into a lumberyard. Moneymaker turning a $40 satty entry into a Main Event win, spurring a massive poker craze, is a prime example.

Even better! $1.9 billion next time for SJ!

Today I found a play on a slot called Cashman Bingo. There's a fair amount of chatter on the Internet about a +EV strategy for the game, but it all boils down to: "It's bingo, man, you'll know a good play when you see it."

You'll want to find a board that's one ball away from one or more bingos, or two balls away from several bingos, and with spots that have a high enough cumulative coin value to make it worth the grind. Unlike regular bingo, the ball hits spots that are already filled out...many times. Multiple hits increase the coin value of the already-filled spots, which is good, because it can take a long time to hit that last unfilled spot.

Why would people leave a board that's just about to hit? Well, they run out of money. The game can cost as much as $7.50 a spin. In my early rounds, I saw a lady camped out for 45 minutes at one game with a nearly full board; not playing, and I knew that she was waiting for a friend or a significant other to show up with the funds to finish the game off.

There are 8 Cashman Bingo machines in 2 circular banks of 4 machines each. On one bank, the machines have a mini display that shows how complete the boards are in each denomination of play; on the other bank, you have to deposit money into each machine to check the various boards. I found a very good board on the latter bank and cashed out +$55.65 in 4 minutes.

Moving on to the poker room, I found that they hadn't removed the Ultimate X Poker machine; rather, they'd left that one and installed two more of them. Nice. The strat for Ultimate X Poker is fairly strange: you only play one hand. That one hand always removes the +EV state of the machine, but that hand itself is nicely +EV.

When someone plays 10 coins per hand, they take a little knock in the payout in return for building up multipliers for the next hand, ranging from x2 up to x10, as below.


Pic credit: advantageslots.com

You come in and play a 5 coin hand, not paying the 10 coin premium of reduced payouts, but still reaping all the x multipliers on all the tagged hands. The game then resets all the multipliers down to 0 after that one 5 coin hand.

There are multiple game possibilities: double bonus, triple bonus, deuces wild, jacks or better, and more across multiple denominations: 5c, 10c, 25c, 50c, $1, so if anyone's played any of those for 10 coins/hand, that iteration has multipliers waiting to be reaped at 5 coins. You could play for just 1 coin and get almost the same EV%, but I would not be happy if I hit the royal on 1 coin, as that gives a greatly reduced payout in most games, so 5 coins is where I live.

So I'll need to learn basic strategy for deuces wild, triple bonus and some other variants. I have a Game King video poker emulator on my phone and the Wizard of Odds strat tables dialed in.

8 minutes of play on two Ultimate X machines netted $39.50.

I got to the poker room late and did not get a seat until the end of the first quarter of the football game, but no one had scored yet, so I didn't miss any promo payouts. Soon after I sat down, my table won on two field goals @$50 per field goal per player. Still running good.

The table was a rare (for MGM Springfield) tight passive configuration, like everyone was just there for the promo. It's tough to chisel nickels out of a tight $1/$2 table, but it can be done. Open more, pound limpers wider, and 3 bet wider, and pick up small, uncontested pots. Don't expect to make a fortune, but enjoy the lower variance.

On the way home, my (automatic) transmission started going out in my old Jeep. I lost top gear, then I lost all the gears for awhile. Thankfully, some gears came back, at least intermittently. I have AAA coverage for a free tow, but I'd had a couple of drinks at the casino, and I did not want my roadside wait to include a visit from the cops. I was easily within the legal limit, but why court unnecessary trouble? So I limped the Jeep into the local garage around 7pm--didn't have a damn pen to leave them a note, I almost always have one in the car--and I hoofed it a mile and a half to home.

Looks like my carefully building bankroll below is going to take a hit for maintenance costs.

Springfield MGM $1/$2 poker: 2.5 hours
+$245.00

Running Poker Total: 89 hours, +$4554.00

Springfield MGM Slots: 0.2 hours
+$95.15

Running Slot Total: 0.2 hours, +95.15

Grand Total: 89.2 hours, +$4649.15

Don't drink and drive SJ. You're better than that.

When I wrote that I had a couple of drinks, I didn't mean a Drinker's Couple, I meant exactly two, on a full stomach, over the course of four hours. If that's not a reasonable amount for a 120kg man, then there's little cheer to be had in this world.

$100 hr milking a tight -passive 1/2 game is a good hit.

Money is not the end all of existence.

-Zeno, Master of the Universe

Good luck with the Jeep . Losing TopGear made me sad too.

This is a poker site. Please reserve you blasphemy for elsewhere.

RIP TopGear

I bought the $2 dream again, now I have a few hours to get in some quality daydreaming.

Let's start with the 1987 Buick Regal GNX: a handsome car with a near-legendary performance record, for its time.



I'll also be looking for a late model everyday driver: decent gas mileage, doesn't handle like a smallmouth bass in the snow, high quality build and some luxury accommodations for long trips. Can't be a Tesla for reasons.

$100 of that was promo money. But yeah, even $50/hr is unsustainable at any $1/$2 game. I'm enjoying the rungood while it lasts.

Money is a way of keeping score. If one is playing a game with it--poker for instance--it can be fun to accumulate winnings.

Life, however, is not a game, and racking up zeros just for the sake of having some sort of high score is a fools errand.

TY golddog. I will throw money at the problem, and hopefully the problem will go away, and the vehicle remain.

For your everyday, I really like my Outback. Goes well in bad weather, has a little sportiness. Not a performance car by any means.

May not qualify on the quality build and luxury that you desire. I think they're supposed to be quite reliable. May be higher-end packages too--I got mine straight off the truck.

I've known a lot of Subaru owners over the years, and they've all sworn by the brand. But we're daydreaming of extreme wealth here. What cars do the nannies in the Hampton's use with their charges? Probably gas guzzling Escalades and Yukon Denalis, I would think.

Oh, oops. I thought this was a different talk, because of the Jeep's issues.

Why not two then? Something nice for cruising in the good weather, and a beast for the bad?

I have a graph that states otherwise : 8 years of averaging just over 50$ an hour in a 1-2 game. Disclaimer though : it was the biggest game offered in the casino (hence making it the action game), I did not have other alternatives for live and was thus playing lower that I would of if I had access to a 2-5 or 5-10 game. But regardless : MASSIVE WRs are offered to the biggest crushers, if they prefer the low variance route of small/midstakes, as opposed to moving up like their WR would naturally dictate them to do so...

I'm guessing your lil 1/2 had a buyin a tad bigger than $200?

Nope. It was $200. They just switched it this last year to $300. But I haven't grinded that game seriously in 5-6 years... It is a 1-2-25 or even at times 1-50$-all-in pre kind of thing.

Where was it?

Dubnjoy000 has a poker blog. You can check on his bona fides over there.

As for me, we'll look at my WR around hour 350, and make extrapolations from there.

But how much would your favorite mods get?

The mods will need a tenfold pay increase.

50/hr in a $200 cap game is insanely impressive!

For sure. But the specific circumstances of this game would hard to reproduce though, in the sense that the nearest casino happened to be a mere 2255kms away, I was the lone pro in the game (or in a radius of 500kms for that matter) and folks were wanting to play bigger than a 1-2 normally permits, but had no other choices!!! End of derail Suited, I promise

In Yukon probably.

You would have qualified for the Gentle Reader Main Event Sweepstakes, in any case. Unfortunately, someone in California won the $2B.

Wildest table I was at thus far was at the Flamingo a few years back, stirred up by a trio of Albertans from the wilds north of Edmonton. It started out as a standard promo nit slog, but then these guys came on, one at a time.

To this day, I don't know if they were 4-D chess colluding or not, but each of the three was more of a maniac than the last. Drove the table stone crazy: from a promo-nitfest to 4-way 450bb all-ins every other hand. I lost $750 or thereabouts in less than an hour.

That day is back in the thread, somewhere.

Edit: The more I think about it, the closer the loss comes to settling down in the $500-$600 range. It felt like a $750 loss, with so much crazy money splashing around the table.

So much to catch up on. Bummer about the transmission. After my parents having so many issues with there late 80s early 90s Ford automatic transmissions I’ve sworn off automatics and try to only buy manuals. This gets more difficult every year. Ford only has two cars left with a manual transmission option the Mustang and Bronco. Can’t even get a manual truck, what has the world come to. I remember in in my Quality Control statistics course they would show the normal distribution on Chrysler automatic transmissions parts. That was one flat curve. Im sure it’s better now but still don’t trust them.

Buick GNX is definitely on my win the lottery car list. I believed first US car with a turbocharge engine. My parents had one of those G body Regals but not a GNX, love that body. Nothing was more white trash than like an 88 white Monte Carlo SS, same as the GNX body, sign me up. Only issue with GNX, no manual transmission.