Where I play

One of the questions that sometimes pops up in emails or the comments is where I play most frequently. So as I was entering some data in my spreadsheets just now, I thought I'd check the records and see.

The place where I have played the most turns out still to be the Hilton, even though it closed its poker room over a year ago. Moreover, my total number of sessions there dwarfs the nearest competitor by a factor of five! That gives you some idea of how concentrated my play was there prior to its closing, and why it felt like a home away from home. Because my play is now so much more spread out over the city's 50+ rooms, it will probably be two or three years before any other place catches up to the total number of Hilton sessions.

Second place is a tie between the Venetian and the Palms. Third place is the Golden Nugget (though the bulk of my sessions there were early on in my Vegas life; I'm there less often now). Fourth place is a tie between the Orleans and the Rio. Fifth place is a tie between Planet Hollywood and Caesars Palace.

Following those, we have, in descending order:

Binion's
Bill's, Mandalay Bay, and Treasure Island (three-way tie)
Excalibur, Flamingo, and Stratosphere (another three-way tie)
Suncoast
Sahara
Harrah's, Hard Rock, and Luxor (tie)
Riviera

There are a bunch more, of course, but the rest are all fewer than ten sessions each, so I didn't bother putting them into the order here.

So there you have it.

A related question, while I'm looking at the spreadsheet, is which places have been most profitable for me? That depends on how you do the accounting. In total dollars won, Hilton is first. But that's not a very useful figure, given its huge lead in number of hours and sessions. The purest read would be in dollars per hour, but, though this may seem strange, I actually don't keep track of that separately for each casino. Figuring it out would mean going through every session I have put in at a given casino and then going back through another spreadsheet to look up how many hours I put in there that day, and add them all up. Way too much work. I do, however, keep track of average profit or loss per session, so let's check that.

In order to eliminate outliers, I'm limiting this to places I've played at least five times. If I didn't, then Boulder Station would be in the lead, with an average per-session gain of $320--but since I have played there only once, that's not a fair representation. So with that limitation in mind, here's my top ten list (giving you the order only, and keeping the actual figures private):

1: Tuscany
2: Sahara
3: Suncoast
4: Bill's
5: Planet Hollywood
6: Binion's
7: Caesars Palace
8: Palms
9: Venetian
10: Imperial Palace

Kind of an odd assortment, eh? There is no logical overall explanation for the ordering, as far as I can tell. I mean, Bill's and Tuscany and Sahara definitely have among the worst players in town. But I'd put Imperial Palace right alongside Tuscany and Sahara in that regard, yet it's several notches down the profitability list. That may be because I haven't had many sessions there, and its average is therefore pulled down by a couple of times when I've played the I.P. mixed game and been a net loser (as I expected to be going in).

Players at Suncoast are not, on average, terrible. Its place on the list might be kind of a quirk, skewed by a few really enormous sessions there where I either got completely run over by the deck or had a maniac at the table just giving away his chips, or both. For example, one memorable day there I made $903 in an hour and a half--just completely off the charts in dollars per hour. I was winning an absolutely absurd percentages of the pots with a string of big hands that should have alerted security to check for collusion between me and the dealers, including quad 8s that busted two other players and got me a high-hand jackpot to boot. The other players that day might have been tempted to go with Worm's line from "Rounders": "F--- you and your never-ending string of boats!"

The typical quality of play at Binion's, Caesars, Palms, and Venetian is unquestionably higher than that at the names toward the top of this list, so it's not surprising that they average less profit per session. On the other hand, I can't explain why they have been more profitable for me than many of the ones that didn't make my top ten, such as Harrah's, Orleans, or Stratosphere, where the average opponent is clearly inferior to the Binion's/Caesars/Palms/Venetian level. It's mostly a mystery to me.