We left the mist of Niagara Falls behind, and headed north to Casino Rama in Orillia, Ontario. It’s about ninety minutes north of Toronto, and owned by the Chippewa’s of Rama First Nation, while being operated by Carnival Casinos (of cruise ship fame).
The drive took a little over 2.5 hours. There was very little traffic, which in and of itself is unusual because it seems that each one of Toronto’s 3.4 million residents are always out on the road.
Radar-detectors are illegal in Ontario, and traffic moves along at about 75 mph. This isn’t a race or a time-trial so we cruised at a comfortable speed.
We arrived in the middle of the night, and the casino was reasonably quiet. Two of their tables were open, and both had $5 minimums. I’ve got to admit that I like the tables here quite a bit. They are of medium-length, but the rolling surface is just about perfect. I get very consistent and manageable bounce off of the felt. The table crews and Pit Posse are almost always in a good mood. In the winter, they seem to get a lot of regulars, without the overwhelming onslaught of cottage-country tourists who increase the population by thirty-fold in the summer. The down-side is that the mid-winter tokes for the crew is usually fairly low, and they fall all over themselves to service a tipper.
I managed to string together some decent hands. Considering that I had been away from the tables for almost a month-and-a-half, the rust wasn’t as thick or un-removable as I thought it might be.
After a short but intense session, we headed out to our cottage, which is located reasonably nearby on Lake Joseph.
The following day, we had a very unmemorable breakfast at the Couchiching Court Buffet. Actually it was memorable as being mediocre at best. I usually make a mental note to avoid this one, but the alternative breakfast choices here are minimal.
The tables don’t start to fill up until the first wave of buses from Toronto start to arrive. That affords a few shooting opportunities, but the downside is that they only open additional tables when the crowds flock in. This isn’t a problem that is unique to this house, of course.
We had a couple of profitable early sessions, followed by a couple of fairly long ones that were spectacularly unproductive. Like I said, once the tables fill up, the dice circulate around the table at a slow pace.
A total of 2.25 days were spent here. The food at all of their other restaurants was good to very-good. I was pleased with the exceptionally great attitude of every worker that we encountered.
An interesting observation about my shooting. I was having great difficulty getting my roll-average above 15-per-hand. In fact, if I hadn’t had a couple of very long hands, my average would have been at an SRR of 11:1. I wasn’t despairing because of three things.
- First, I was hitting my Place numbers with a lot of regularity, and that was locking-in some early profit.
- Second, I was hitting a lot of back-to-back Point-then-Winner type of rolls. This was extremely pleasing to me, and most of the other players who were content to have their Pass Line bet with full Odds, and no other bets out on the table.
- Third, the Points that I was establishing and then coming right back with a winner were mostly 4’s and 10’s. This surprised me the most, because those are not high on my Signature Number hit list. Regardless, I followed the trend that my throws were indicating.
The lesson here for me, is that sometimes your rolls will take on an individual character all of their own. In that case, it is up to me or you to bet according to the numbers that are being thrown, and not the numbers that you hope are going to roll.
One small aside about my rolls here is that in the total number of rolls that I had, I threw exactly one craps number, and it was a 2. Talk about being outside of the normal distribution of random-numbers, eh? I threw that “eh” in there to make all of the Canadian readers feel at home.
Oh, one more thing that I should mention. In conversations with other players, I asked if there were any craps-related web-sites that they knew of. Not ONE of them knew of ANY! Hmmm, I think that the percentage of web-savvy craps players is very low. Of course that is a very unscientific sampling, but I know that Ontario is equal to California in the percentage of internet-households, and my sense of it, is that the number of players-to-actual-crapsite-regulars is infinitesimally low.
My Casino Rama results were as follows:
- Sessions: 7
- Total Playing Time: 9.0 hours
- My hands: 30
- My Rolls: ranged from a low of 4 to a high of 37
- Sevens-Rolls-Ratio: 12.3:1
- Total profit: $945
- Profit-per-Hour $105.00
We now depart for the Province of Quebec where three large casinos await. Get in, and sit back to enjoy the ride and the tunes. It’ll be about five hours until we get there.
Good Luck & Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.
The Mad Professor
