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Irishsetter's Precision Shooter Newsletter
Crapsfest is Back! October is just around the corner! Don't miss this opportunity to improve your skills with Heavy, Dicecoach, Michael Vernon and myself. Team up with us for another exciting weekend of seminars, one-on-one coaching, and live casino sessions in fabulous Las Vegas. It's THE craps event of 2005. Here's what folks had to say about previous Crapsfest events! "The best time ever! I WILL be back.""My hats off to ya’ll for putting on, yet again, a great event." "Thanks to some fine shooting by Irish, Heavy, Dice Coach and a few others, I walked away with one of my largest wins yet." Enrollment is extremely limited to insure plenty of one-on-one time, so register early! Click here or the banner above for more information.
The Re-Write Your Own History Contest! After viewing the fiction that was presented as "fact" on the History Channel's Breaking Vegas series, I was inspired to hold a "Re-write Your Own History Contest" on the message board. I figured if a dice control "expert" could re-write his story, why not give my forum members the same opportunity? The winner of the contest was Nicklemidnight, who donated his prize to charity, with the following submission: Congrats! Nicklemidnight's Dice History It all
started more than 50 years ago one December morning when I was a child of 7 or 8. An aunt
had given me a child's board game that included two dice. The day after the Christmas gift
was opened, my Dad was playing the game with me. To view the other submissions to the Re-write Your Own History Contest, click here!
Mindful Living, Mindful Shooting - Part III of a series Zen
bones, Zen muscles, Zen Mind As
we continue our inquiry into mindfulness in dice influencing, regard for the ageless
traditions of the East seems inevitable. Eastern
philosophy is deeply rooted in discipline in both mind and action, and in both person and
community. If dice influencers feel an
affinity, it could derive, in part, from this. A
popular misunderstanding, however, is that Eastern philosophy, and Zen in particular,
involve the invocation of some kind of trance-like state of consciousness. To the best of my understanding, getting into a
trance is neither the object nor result of living (or shooting) mindfully, nor is it the
object of the most common forms of meditation practice, the martial arts, Zen study, or
the “Eastern ways.” If anything,
the point is often made that the only trance to be concerned with may be the one we suffer
because of our over-thinking minds; a trance from which we may awaken. Ultimately,
this may simply involve seeing more deeply and more consciously, without strain. There
would appear to be utility in this for dice influencers, not as a ticket to some
mystifying trance-like shooting zone, but as a context for our efforts to achieve a
consistent, well-grounded, mindful attitude toward our dice-influencing pursuits. I
had not contemplated we head to our local Zen center for sitting meditation and Dharma
talks, or that we visit ascetic monks in Tibet, or even that we take up Yoga,
Transcendental Meditation, T’ai Chi, Aikido or any other particular discipline as an
adjunct to our dice-influencing efforts. Our
focus is going to stay right where it belongs—on
our work with the dice. As we become more
deeply involved, opportunities for enriching our mind-set will abound. The
muscle-memory mystery Last
time, we began investigating the topic of intensity, anticipating an “effortless
calm” at its core. We’ll return to
the interplay between intensity and calm, in due course. First,
it should be helpful to reacquaint ourselves with our old friend, “muscle
memory.” We’ll more easily discover
calm skies if we stop floundering in the tricky currents of a muscle-memory mental storm
impeding the view. From
what I can discern, the term muscle memory first
entered the popular vernacular in the context of weight training and muscle building. Some of you probably have first-hand experience
with this. After a layoff, weight lifters are
usually more efficient at rebuilding muscle mass and re-sculpting their shape in
subsequent efforts. Of
course, it’s the familiar movements and progressive resistance levels, careful
monitoring of “muscle burn,” and even diet and nutrition, that a body builder
uses to bring his muscles back into condition. Weight
lifters must understand this, but that apparently hasn’t stopped the idea from taking
root in popular thinking that muscles themselves are capable of memory, which of course
they are not, nor need they be. Whether
everyone really knows that muscles don’t have a memory, I’m not sure. In
any event, labels (such as “muscle memory”) are powerful agents in determining
how we think, and, uh . . . how we THINK has a lot to do with how we SHOOT. Remember? Just
what are we thinking when we think about
muscle memory in dice? And, by the way, has
anybody ever established that it’s really helpful
to be thinking in terms of muscle memory? Maybe
the ideas we hold dear about it make it harder to
hone our skills, not easier. I’m
not making a case for black or for white in this, at least not just yet. I pose the matter because there really is a lot we
don’t understand in this area. We rely
on an idea of muscle memory without really
knowing what we’ve gotten ourselves into. If
it’s not in our muscles, where is it? The
neurological process most responsible for what we call muscle memory is proprioception. It’s
a catch-all term that includes a number of different central nervous system pathways that
control our muscles (including even the muscles attached to our eyes) and monitor our
physical orientation and movements, as well as providing equilibrium, a sense of gravity,
and as we’ll see, much more. Proprioception
is considered the real “sixth sense”
by the guys in the lab coats, after touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. It’s a profoundly complex, multi-layered and
inter-connected system of conscious and unconscious mental and physical processes and
properties. Memory
itself, even apart from its role in proprioception, is also complex, of course. It has captivated philosophers, scientists,
artists, poets, and probably anyone who has
given it a moment’s thought. It’s
now known that memory involves changes in neurological connections in the brain in a
yet-to-be-completely-understood chemically and electrically driven process called neural plasticity. The
processes of our “sixth sense,” proprioception, combined with neural plasticity
in the brain; this may be the best explanation we’ve got for the time being for how
muscle memory works, or at least where it works. So
the idea that muscles themselves have memory is simply beguiling. Muscles don’t have the capacity for memory
any more than our brains can do curls. Ideas
about muscle memory in dice influencing In
the precision-shooting context, muscle memory is usually mentioned as something we
“lock in” during practice in order to “groove in” later; with lots of
variations on this theme that we’re all familiar with. In
the glossary here on Irish’s site, muscle memory is defined as “the process of
training your body to repeat your precision shooting throwing mechanics by rote
memory.” MP
adds: “Once we narrow down the elements
of the Precision-Shooting toss that works best and most consistently for US, then we can
turn our focus towards building muscle-memory. Muscle-memory
is how we train our bodies to do things almost automatically…we train our bodies to
do something so repetitively, that it becomes like second-nature to us, and our actions
become virtually automatic.” (More Gain & Less
Pain, Part 3, Tip 23) Yet,
in his book, “Dice Control for Casino Craps,” Yuri doesn’t mention muscle
memory at all; instead, he talks about “paying attention” to our toss, and about
coordinating our body movements. Stanford
Wong, in his book, “Wong on Dice,” makes no mention of muscle memory, either. He does warn we need to “monitor our skill
constantly.” Sharpshooter,
on the other hand, talks quite a bit about muscle memory.
In “Get the Edge at Craps,” he includes an entire section called
“Creating Muscle Memory in Three Weeks,” and provides his thumbnail explanation
about how he believes it works in a section he calls “Delivery Style.” Surprisingly,
even with all these references, and many more throughout the DI literature, my obsessive
need to understand muscle memory was not satisfied. If
I’m not satisfied, even with Mad Professor’s direction, I really begin to worry. I found myself desperately seeking clarity on the
subject. After looking into it a little
further, hopefully with an open mind, I have come to believe that some of the ways we
might be thinking (or not thinking) about muscle memory may be about as useful for skilled
shooting as the hardways set is for seven-avoidance. Let
me tell you what I’ve come up with, and maybe you’ll be re-evaluating the way
you think about muscle memory a little bit, too. What
else are the guys in lab coats saying? The
terms used in psychology for muscle memory include among others, procedural memory, skill memory, and implicit motor learning. It’s beyond the scope of this article to run
it all down, of course. But psychologists
seem to like it that skills can be acquired through physical practice without our even
knowing it. The learning is considered implicit, or unconscious. Prime examples are learning to walk or to ride a
bicycle. We don’t really know how it happens, while it happens, it just does, and
that’s that. Implicit motor learning. Mysterious, almost magical. Psychologists love it. For
dice influencing, however, a more useful concept of muscle memory than the
unconscious-learning model psychologists favor, comes from the field of kinesiology. Kinesiology is the study of the interrelationship
of human physiology and anatomy with respect to movement.
In kinesiology, muscle memory is said to involve “a finely tuned sense of our physical orientation,
leaving us free to concentrate (on other things).” Wow! I think we may be getting somewhere! From
this standpoint, “muscle memory” is not as concerned with recording memory as it
is with sensing what we’re doing. It involves our maintaining awareness rather than
depending on something to be locked mysteriously away. In
my view, thinking about a process of continually monitoring ourselves provides a more
dynamic framework for maintaining and improving our skill than thinking about a mere
background function somehow recording our efforts for later automatic play-back from the
recesses of our unconscious. We’re
actively engaged whenever we play, rather than passively hoping muscle memory will kick in
and do the job for us. Let
me put it this way: Our muscle
memory is only as good as our active proprioceptive skills will allow. Viewed
this way, if we do well we can congratulate ourselves for our achievement, and if we
don’t do so well we know we’re responsible for the results in the present. We’re confident we’ll quickly find a
way to fix the problem because that’s exactly what we’ve trained ourselves to do
through our finely tuned proprioceptive sense. What
we won’t have is the lame excuse in the
back of our mind that our muscle memory wasn’t locked in right. We won’t be guarding ourselves from taking
immediate responsibility for failure while scolding ourselves at the same time for
apparently ineffective practice habits. (With
this kind of thinking, maybe a shrink would be more helpful than more practice.) You’ve
heard it before: muscle memory can lock in bad habits.
But the worst consequence is not so much the inconsistent shooting that rote
practice can bring; it’s our habit of thinking in terms of an unconscious, automatic
process taking place beyond our apprehension, over which we have no apparent present-tense
control. By giving in to this thinking, we
dilute our skill rather than support it because we’re sacrificing the depth and full
integration of our conscious and unconscious motivations and single-minded involvement
every time we pick up the dice. Now,
add to that, the proprioceptive tract that monitors and directs our movements also
contains neural circuitry that detects and expresses our emotions, including our feelings and attitude about
ourselves—even
our passion for the game. These systems
actively share information, so that our emotions continuously affect our body, and our
body continuously affects our emotions. Insufficient
attention to our proprioceptive awareness can thus wreak havoc not only with our physical
skills directly, but it also opens the door for inattention to the all-important emotional
frame of our efforts. So how we think about
muscle memory affects not only how we throw the dice, but also how we feel about ourselves
as we practice and shoot. The potential for a
vicious cycle of flagging passion and fading skill should be obvious. We
might be in for a difficult struggle moving our skill forward relying on any process we
think of as “implicit” and therefore so veiled from our present awareness that
we may feel virtually helpless to affect any current control over its unfolding. Whenever I hear about “grooving in muscle
memory,” I think of a mind that may be getting progressively more insulated from the
active role required of it if we’re to maximize our present potential as skilled
shooters. Changing
our thinking about muscle memory We
need to be vigilant against letting the idea of muscle memory denude our toss of its
dynamic vitality. Let’s not disconnect
from the full spectrum of information in the moment-to-moment flow of our senses as we
shoot, based on loosely formulated, popular thinking about “muscle memory.” If,
instead of relying on the tenuous idea of implicitly acquired skills, we mindfully engage
our skill of applied proprioception to become
and to remain intimately familiar with our toss, to thoroughly understand its dynamics,
and to actively sculpt it in the present tense, I think we will have taken a big step in
the evolution of our DI consciousness. When
we bring that kind of intensity to the execution of each toss, we learn a deeper-reaching
awareness where conditions and processes we may have believed were inaccessible to us
begin to emerge to enrich our skill-set. Newly
acquired insights can begin to become more automatic as we learn them, sure, but without
sacrificing a moment’s opportunity for continued new insight and without risk of
slipping backward from having let our proprioceptive guard-dogs go on break. As I said before, our muscle memory will only be
as useful to us as our active proprioceptive skills will allow. Okay,
so we’re paying attention . . . to what again? Our
focus here has been on developing a greater awareness of how it feels as we shoot, so that we can most skillfully
repeat a successful toss or implement the very subtle changes that become necessary to
correct mistakes or dial in. It’s one
thing observing the dice in the air and as they land, but it’s quite another to feel
our toss mechanics internally through our proprioceptive sense. In precision shooting, we need to be noticing not
only what the dice to after we toss them; we also need to tune it to what we’re doing to get the dice to do what they’re doing. If
we really don’t know exactly how each toss feels from our feet to our fingertips, we
may be unwittingly squandering the benefits we should derive from carefully observing the
reactions of the dice. Without a high degree
of self-awareness, we’ll be less able to sense and then execute the subtle, precision
modifications of our base toss suggested by the reactions of the dice in order to dial in
a table, take advantage of our current skill, and continue rolling the dice. Having
said that, it’s important to realize that enhancing our proprioceptive sense also
primes the cerebral pump for our skill of observing the reactions of the dice. By the concentration we’ve already achieved
paying close attention as we toss, we’re better attuned to the reactions of the dice
as well. All that information, first from the
feel of our toss, and then from the reactions of the dice, combines into a comprehensive
and integrated whole, resulting in a more immediate experience of clarity as we prepare
for each successive shot. The
progressive acquisition of increasingly enhanced awareness, especially during a
successful, longer sequence of rolls, is worth investigating as a likely source of what
some skilled shooters refer to as “getting in the zone.” I’m looking forward to devoting attention to
this interesting area later on in this series of articles. In later installments, we’ll also discuss some things we can do to deepen our proprioceptive awareness and raise the level of our concentration. We’ll look into how we can enlist our emotions as allies rather than possible enemies as we develop our skill. And there will be opportunities to further investigate the whereabouts of those calm mental seas we’re hoping to discover as we continue our efforts to find a consistent dice-influencing mind-set, hopefully free at last of any unsettled feelings we might have had about our old friend “muscle memory.” Heavy's Axis Power Craps Seminar.... On DVD!
As
a border city from across Detroit, Michigan, you would think that the Big Three
from Motown (no, not Ford, GM and Chrysler…but rather, MGM Grand, Greektown and Motor
City Casino) would easily overshadow their Canadian neighbor, Casino Windsor,
to the south-east; and to some extent it does. If
the sheer number of craps tables on the Michigan side of the border is the determining
factor, then obviously the three American casinos tower over Casino Windsor by a huge
margin. However, for me, the true measure of
a casino is whether or not the conditions are right for an advantage player to make
substantial amounts of money within a reasonably short period of time…without wearing
out his welcome (or that of future dice-influencing players)…all the while remaining
completely under the advantage-player radar. Under
that gauge, Casino Windsor gets my unreserved endorsement as an outstanding place to
play…and profit. Casino
Windsor Table Conditions
When
you appraise and quantify playing conditions, table-felt conditions, game-pace and tempo,
other D-I player skill-levels, casino win-tolerance and overall atmosphere; Casino Windsor
comes across as a nice, relaxed place to churn out relatively steady Precision-Shooting
revenue. The
craps tables at Casino Windsor are amongst the best neutral-rolling,
low-backwall-rebounding tables that I’ve run across…and they have remained that
way for almost four full years now. To wit,
regardless of how often they wet-vac the tables or how frequently they change the
felt…the layouts continue to react exactly the same way…year after year. When
you consider how often you run into a table where it seems your shooting can do no
wrong…and the next time you visit it’s a wonder if your dice stay on-axis even
once; then you’ll appreciate the dependable landing-dynamics and reliable backwall
rebounds that these tables continue to offer. With
that type of layout-to-layout reliability, I figured this would be a perfect spot to
broaden my Darkside-shooting betting strategies. A
Short Geographic Note
The
Great White North city of Windsor, Ontario is located SOUTH of Detroit,
Milwaukee, Green Bay, umm, make that south of the entire states of
Wisconsin…and Minnesota…and North Dakota…and South Dakota…and
Montana…and Idaho…and Washington…and Oregon.
It’s also south of New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Rhode Island and of course, Connecticut. Heck,
if it was any further south, Windsor residents would probably start storing old
washing-machines and refrigerators on their front porches and asking, “Y’all
wanna caribou Timbit with that there coffee?”
As it is though, until global-warming brings that corn-pone nirvana closer to
reality; they’ll simply have to settle for rusted-out Mercury Montcalm’s and
Pontiac Laurentian’s in their side yard and continue to insist that all beer under 6%
alcohol is strictly for children, the elderly, or the feeble-minded. Time
For a Little Explorative Betting I
had been fooling around with various Darkside betting-strategies based on my average
hand-duration (how many rolls it takes to intentionally 7-Out), as well as tracking my
primary-face hit-rate for both the Come-Out and the Point-cycle. I knew my shooting was up to par and I had
narrowed my chosen methods down to a few. For
the Come-Out, I decided to stick with my normal “Game Within a Game”
strategy. It had been delivering up a steady
flow of high-dollar cash over the last couple of months, and although there was certainly
room for improvement in both the shooting aspect of the C-O as well as the betting
efficiency, I felt that there was much more upside potential that could be rung out of the
point-cycle itself. Delving
Into New Betting-Methods
Without
reservation, I can say that the betting strategy that I’m about to discuss was not
originated by me. My strength is in taking
the best betting-methods and ideas that others have come up and tweaking them to suit my
own game-approach and bet-level. The
following is a prime example… Maddog’s
No-Box Play The
idea of lay-betting all the box-numbers (4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10), and then intentionally
setting for a 7-Out is one that has intrigued me for some time now. I
will admit that I’ve done similar plays over the years, but never in a concerted and
sustained experimental way to see just how effective and productive a method like this
would be in real-world casino-combat. I had
also done a lot of previous experimentation with Laying the 5 and/or 9 and using it either
as a Come-Out money-maker, or as a Point-cycle strategy when paired-up with the S-6
dice-set. Still
though, Maddog’s NO-BOX lay-action play was a substantial step up in terms of total
bet-commitment (not to mention that it required avoidance against a total of six numbers)
as compared to when you are just avoiding one number (when you have a single DP-wager with
full-Odds) or even against a couple of numbers as in the No-5 and/or No-9 play. What
finally convinced me to use his bet-strategy was the chart that he created which shows Expected
Win-Rates when using various dice-sets in combination with variable on-axis
proficiencies…all while matched up to a couple of different Lay-bet strategies. In
Maddog’s words: “These
numbers assume that the bet is setup the same way for each of the 36 rolls and includes
the probability of “no-decision” rolls (i.e. 2, 3, 11, 12) when laying all the
box-numbers. I
ran the simulation two ways; first, where all lay-bets were immediately replaced when
knocked off, and second where all lay-bets were reset only on the Come-out roll, but left
up until replaced (never taken down). There was only a small percentage difference (7.99%
vs 8.04%) between the two strategies."
In
my case I chose the S-6 set with the “No Across” bets for my point-cycle
shooting. Gentlemen…Choose
Your Weapon
I’m
continually amused by the scholarly scoffing about the dice-influencing concept of keeping
the dice on-axis. I’m told that using an
“ideal” starting point like supposing that the V-3 set could be kept on-axis
100% of the time is flawed thinking and therefore the goal of keeping them on-axis and the
associated betting-methods attached to perfect concepts like that are also flawed and
doomed to failure. If
you take a sober look at this chart, you’ll see that there actually IS merit
to keeping the dice on-axis and it doesn’t take anywhere near 100% O/A proficiency
for some sets to prove their worth. If
you take a look at the S-6 set for example, you’ll see that even rudimentary axial
control can yield substantial returns with Maddog’s No-Box Lay-bets. Further though, there are some dice-sets when
paired with certain bets that NEVER become profitable no matter how much they are kept on
axis…and in fact it clearly shows that random-rolling would actually offer a LOWER
loss-rate. When
it comes to making money from your current Precision-Shooting skills, you have to do your
homework. When you combine your on-axis
proficiencies and correlated off-axis dominants with various different dice-sets and a
variety of betting-methods; you’ll discover a variety of ways to directly convert
your skill into profit. Math
scholars may look at this approach as being seriously flawed and deceptive, but I look at
this chart and see “OPPORTUNITY” scrawled all over it in big ghetto-sized
letters. Where
they see flaws, I see profit. Morphing
Maddog’s No-Box Play Into My $290 All-Across-Lay Though
this method was, it appears, originally designed as a Come-Out strategy for a Rightsider
(looking for a 7-winner that would pay his flat PL-wager along with a boatload of cash
from an across-the-board Lay bet against all the box-numbers), I chose to apply it to my
point-cycle-shooting (after the PL-Point is established). To
complement the size of my Don’t Pass with full-Odds wager, I raised the sperm-count
of the Lay-bet up to the $290 All-Across level. Here’s
how I set it up to work with my Darkside shooting… Ø I
make my normal $25 Don’t Pass wager. Ø As
usual, I back my DP line-bet with full-Odds. In
normal casinos that offer 3x, 4x, 5x-Odds on PL-wagers, I’d be allowed to bet up to
six times my DP wager, regardless of the Point. However,
in Windsor they allow 10x-Odds on the Pass-line, so Darksiders are allowed to lay a
maximum of 12x-Odds on the DP, regardless of the Point. Ø I
then make lay-bets against all the open box-numbers.
Ø Since
my DP wager (with 12x-Odds) covers one of the box-numbers, I make wagers “against”
the remaining five. For
my $290 All-Across-Lay play, I use the following amounts… Ø Lay
$50 each against the 4 and 10. At 1:2, each
number pays $25 when you 7-Out. Ø Lay
$60 each against the 5 and 9. At 2:3, each
number pays $40 when you 7-Out.
Ø Lay
$60 each against the 6 and 8. At 5:6, each
number pays $50 when you 7-Out. To
cover all those numbers except your DP-Point, you’ll be looking at putting out either
$290 or $280 on the layout (depending on your Point) plus a vigorish (commission) of
approximately $9 to cover all the numbers. In
some jurisdictions, they only charge the vig if you win, while others will give you a
break as to how much they charge. In most
cases however, you can expect to pay at least $1 for every $20 that the bet can
potentially “win”. So on a $40
Lay-bet against the 10 (which at 1:2, would “win” $20), you should generally
expect to pay $1 for the privilege of making that bet.
Again, some places charge the commission upfront when you make the bet,
while others only charge it after the win and take it out of your paid winnings. Okay,
those are the basics; let’s get to what’s really important…how did it fare? Casino
Windsor 3-Day Trial
Here’s
a summary of how I did with this All-Across-Lay experiment:
A
Few Added Thoughts About the All-Across-Lay Method
This
is a bit of a good-news, bad news thing. When
your Darkside-shooting is really grooved in, the All-Across-Lay method is a
semi-efficient money-maker. Needless to say,
when your dice-throwing isn’t up to par; this approach can be frustrating and
downright excruciating when you repeatedly knock off your Lay-bets with mid-roll hits on
any of those box-numbers. In fact it can be
quite embarrassing if the whole knocking-off-your-own-bet thing really bothers you. Personally it doesn’t bother
me…it’s just part of the process of getting to the profit. As
with major grip changes or toss re-adjustments, it’s always best to experiment,
fine-tune and validate all of your new betting-scenarios at home before you try any of
them in a casino setting. Now
clearly this little All-Across-Lay trial at Casino Windsor was not a
clinically-controlled scientific experiment conducted by guys in lab-coats with
pocket-protectors and slide-rules. It
was done for my own benefit to validate some additional Darkside-betting rationale. It
was done with real money on real-world craps tables in a real-world casino, and though the
sampling size of forty-three hands was undoubtedly way too small to pass the eight-billion-rolls-required-to-prove-itself-mathematically-worthy
test; I was nonetheless quite pleased with the outcome…and I now deem it
worthy enough to add it to my bet-strategy arsenal.
Thanks Maddog! Foreign-Exchange…Or
How Not to Get Reamed on Currency Conversion
When
you play craps in Canada, you have to convert some of your U.S. dollars into Canadian
money. It’s as simple as doing any other
transaction at the casino cage. The
conversion-rate is clearly posted at nearly every wicket-window. Some
people don’t like the fact that there is a difference between the
“sell-rate” (which is the rate you get if you are “selling” your U.S.
dollars and converting them into Canadian dollars) and the “buy-rate” (which is
the rate you get if you are “buying back” your U.S. dollars with Canadian
dollars). In
some cases, the “float”, which is the difference between the buy-rate and
sell-rate, can be as high as a couple of percentage points.
On a $1000 exchange, that could add up to $20 or $30 each way. Fortunately,
there are several ways around that: Ø You
can set up a Line-of-Credit at Casino Windsor (or any other Canadian casino), based on
your U.S. bank-account. The L.C. is "drawable" at the tables without having to
convert ANY of your cash. Ø Only
your losses (if any) are payable in Canadian dollars instead of your entire buy-in.
Ø This
way, you do not pay ANY exchange on ANY transactions except for the money
that you actually lose at the tables. When
you pay off your marker, you COULD pay it off with U.S.-converted-to-Canadian
money. This way, you only get a one-way rip on the "float", instead of the two
that a buy-and-sell transaction would incur.
Ø However,
you SHOULD pay off your marker with a check from your U.S. account (denominated in
$CDN). That way, you only pay your own
bank's exchange-rate float which should be about 1/3rd lower than the casinos
exchange-rate.
Ø If
you play in Canada quite a bit, you might look at either keeping a portion of your
bankroll in Canadian dollars, or you could open a Front Money account at Casino Windsor,
and only pay the exchange-rate once in a while when you repatriate your winnings into
USD$.
Ø Or
you can have the casino cut you a check in Canadian funds from your Front Money Account
when you want to drain off some of your profit. That way, you only pay the exchange-rate
that YOUR bank is offering, and not be subject any usurious casino rates.
Ø If
you need any additional information on Casino Credit, Front Money accounts, or Casino
Markers; you could have a look at Casino
Credit – Part Three as well as my entire four-part Casino
Credit Update series (especially if you are interested in having any of your
outstanding markers heavily discounted from their face-value). As
with most other places, Casino Windsor has three levels of players-cards…basic,
silver and gold. Of course they fancy it up
by calling them Prestige, Preferred and Premier-level. Their comp system is fairly generous when compared
to the LV-Strip or to A/C, and a free buffet is yours for the asking after a few hours of
low-spread action. A
couple of dining highlights: Ø Pan-seared
soft-shell crabs at the Riverside Grille…overlooking the river. In the moonlight, Detroit looks downright
inviting. Ø Hazelnut-encrusted
Pickerel and Tangerine Crème Brule at Caché…which
unfortunately is only open to silver (Preferred) and gold-level (Premier) players-card
members.
As
good as those two places are; C-W’s temporary Promenade Buffet falls a
little short in several areas, but it still beats most other non-casino buffet
feeding-troughs by a wide margin. The
Hotel
As
with every four-star, four-diamond hotel, Casino Windsor’s hotel delivers every
in-room amenity that you would possibly need or want (okay it didn’t come with the
topless room-service attendants like they have at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai, but this
is still Canada after all…no matter how far south Windsor is on the
map). The
level of luxury in their deluxe/executive suites is pleasing but definitely not as over
the top as you might expect from a gaming property that was created and managed (until
McHarrah’s takes it over) by the multi-headed Caesars/Park Place/Hilton hydra. I blame that on (or credit it to) the mostly
conservative and restrained tastes of the high-end players who get first shot at these
comped digs. When
you look out over the Detroit River and beyond to Lake St. Clair in one direction and to
Lake Erie in the other; it’s not difficult to get caught up in the juxtaposed beauty
of the brutally subdued proximate Motown skyline which serves as a backdrop to the
waterscape that stretches for miles in either direction. Heck,
from that height, Detroit looked downright inviting.
Now
that I had validated my All-Across-Lay method as a legitimate money-maker, I
wanted to start fine-tuning it to deal with one particular on-axis box-number dominant and
its correlated off-axis fraternal twin that was single-handedly constraining my
win-rate…and the Detroit casinos looked like an ideal place to do it. I hope you’ll join me for that leg of my Darkside-shooting journey. If you have any comments or ideas for future issues, feel free to email me at ed@irishsetter.com And as always, I'm looking for contributors with a fresh perspective.
Know someone who
would be interested in receiving future editions of Precision Shooter Newsletter, Good Luck! Irishsetter |
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![[image]](http://dicesetter.com/images/mdchart.gif)