Tunica trip report (long) June 14-19 '07

[LuckyTxGuy]

*Warning* Low poker content, just a LONG trip report about Tunica poker in general, which might help first timers. I’m sure I’ll ramble on endlessly and skip around in the report. I’m sorry ahead of time.[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Cliff Notes: Stayed at Gold Strike for 5 nights, played close to 60 hours of poker and had a blast. Free food, super cheap rooms and friendly people. Tunica is THE place to go for a cheap poker trip.

Just figured I’d write up a report from my latest Tunica trip. No real hand histories because I doubt you care to hear about any bad beats or “big” pots from my $3/6 and $4/8 play.lol

I made a trip out to Tunica with my buddy last month for the first time and we had a great trip. That report can be found here…… Previous Tunica Report

After my last trip, I told my wife, who also plays poker, that we needed to plan a trip over to Tunica because I knew she’d have a blast. We decided to go for our anniversary and we booked 5 nights at the Gold Strike. Last trip my buddy and I booked through the Horseshoe poker room rate and were given a room at the Grand Veranda. All that info can be found in other post but while I loved the Horseshoe, I didn’t like driving back and forth to the Veranda. Since this was going to be a trip with my wife and she might want to be at the pool some while I was playing poker or one of us might want to go back to the room etc, I decided driving back and forth to the poker room wasn’t an option. I called and talked to the Shoe and explained the situation and while they were very understanding they said there was no poker room rates given for the actual Horseshoe rooms anymore. Again, this is not me saying this, but what I was told on the phone by Dale at the Horseshoe when he returned my phone call about booking a room.

That left us with only one option in my mind and that was the Gold Strike. This actually made a lot of sense because it gave us access to play next door at the Shoe plus the GS’s main low limit game is $3/6 which is well suited for my wife, who had never had the opportunity to play below $4/8. I was told by everyone on the phone at the GS that the 5 hour/day mandatory poker play for the poker room rate could NOT be combined with anyone else staying in my room, including my wife. One of us would be required to get our hours in every single day (we could alternate days on who got the 5 hours if we wanted but it was frowned on). Johnny Grooms had also confirmed this to me in person when I asked the question on my previous trip. I had also asked Johnny G. about the GS comping meals and he said that meal “vouchers” would be provided if we played enough but he did not act like they were as free with meals as the Shoe was. I didn’t really get a good feeling about getting all my meals comped. Again, that info was gained on my first trip. More on why this is important later on.

My wife and I got there Thursday afternoon and checked out on Tuesday morning. Plenty of time for a ton of poker. Check in was smooth and quick except the machines that code the credit card type room keys all went down as the lady tried to make us room keys. Uh oh! She made some phone calls and said it might be an hour before they were fixed but to check back soon. So I took my wife on tour of the GS and we stood in line for 15 minutes at 4 pm on a Thursday to get our players cards. That line always seemed to be 10-20 people long at a bare minimum at all times. The weekend lines were horrible! After checking out the GS, we walked over to the Shoe and then over to the Sheraton. In case you’ve never been there, those 3 casinos almost touch each other. They share one big parking lot and sit side by side in a row. After entering the Sheraton I thought I’d found the location of the filming of the National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, where Chevy Chase and cousin Eddie go to the old Vegas casino and play War and “Guess the Number”.[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] Seriously, the signs on the wall said “$11.99 Lobster Buffet!” “$4.99 Steak and Egg Breakfast” and then the most amazing sign of all…. “$3 Blackjack”. Huh?! I’m not a blackjack player but have always wanted to play for fun, but being a cheapskate never have because of the $5 and $10 minimums I see everywhere I’ve been. Walking around in the place still gave me a National Lampoon’s feeling since it was small and felt a lot older than most casinos I’ve been in. Then I saw something that almost made me pass out…….$1.50 roulette!!! Yes I know how bad of a bet roulette is, yes I know I’m going to be a 5.25% long term loser but $1.50 roulette? I was in heaven. .25 cent chips are available so you can make your bets totally $1.50 on the inside. I knew I’d be coming back at some point for some cheap roulette action. We headed back to the GS and got our key and went on up to the room.

Quick run down of the room for those that are interested. It’s nice, it’s clean, it’s fairly small, the TV is around 19”, definitely the smallest I’ve ever seen in a hotel/motel room, but everything was fine. The room was at least as nice or nicer than any LaQuinta or Holiday Inn I’ve stayed in but not near as fancy as a lot of casino hotel rooms. Still nothing wrong with it at all and it was just as nice and clean as the Grand’s Veranda. My wife thought it was great FWIW. One piece of advice is to put our the “do not disturb” sign when you go to bed if you plan on sleeping late because, at least on our floor, the cleaning staff was in full action by 9 am and banging on all the doors.

For anyone that cares, the pool at the GS is indoors. That might be great for the winter but for getting a tan in the summer it’s not good. How do I know all this? My wife told me.lol For the record they have a small fenced off patio area right outside the doors of the pool with a small decorative rock waterfall and about 8-10 lounge chairs for laying in the sun. This was good enough for my wife, but it wasn’t exactly the same as having a nice outdoor pool she said. For $30 a night, we weren’t complaining.

[LuckyTxGuy]

Up at the poker room, you’ve got to go over to the desk and have them swipe your player’s card in and swipe you out when you leave. This not only makes sure you get credit for your room rate hours, but it also lets them see how long you’ve played in order to get meal comps. I talked to a very nice floor man the first afternoon and he said that as long as we had 5 hours of play per room per day combined between my wife and I we’d be fine. What? This is exactly what I heard we couldn’t do. I questioned him on this and he said it would be NO problem and if anyone had a problem with it, to call him. This wasn’t really going to be a big deal with us, but I thought it was pretty nice info. He also said that to receive meal comps the preferred method was this…. Play 2-2.5 hours and they’d order you food up to the table, play 4+ hours and you could get comped meals at the buffet, restaurants, snack court etc downstairs. Sounds fair. He also said that if we were really playing much at all, there would never be any issue with meals. They were just trying to keep people from walking up, putting their name on a list and getting a buffet, then leaving. Makes sense to me. What I quickly realized is that if they recognize your face, know you’ve been playing a lot, then all of this is a moot point. You can get comped just as easily as at the Shoe.

More comp/food talk. I always tip $1-$2 to the person who gives me a comp just to be nice. This actually goes a long ways it seems because the floor person is almost eager to see you coming and why not? They are giving you a meal regardless but $2 is $2. There was a younger girl who was working the floor for most of the nights we were there and she was VERY nice. She remembered my wife’s and my name after the first afternoon/night and comping our meals for us twice. After that she started hooking us up with larger comps for the downstairs restaurants so we could basically order anything off the menu and it wouldn’t cost us a dime. We were never starving so we ended up splitting stuff most of the but it was very nice since we didn’t have to open our wallets. She was giving us an insane amount of money to eat supper and the bad part was we were usually so full we didn’t even order desert! My point in all of this is to say that the Horseshoe is awesome with their comps and it seems like you can just walk by the Horseshoe poker room and they’ll give you a meal and I was afraid I was going to have some trouble getting comped food at the Strike. I was wrong. In my opinion if you play long enough for the floor to see your face, clock in/out, they will hook you up with all the food you can eat with no questions asked.

The food was great. The buffet was ok but not near as good as the Horseshoe’s. Doyle Brunson says that the Horseshoe in Tunica has the best buffet in the world and who can argue with Doyle? The seafood buffet was ok at the GS but not great IMO. I’m not a picky eater and I’m very easy to please, which I was, but I’d probably have been a little disappointed if I’d shelled out the $40 for my wife and I to eat that night. Being free it was super.[img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] The food court area is pretty good too if you know what to order. The only bad food I had the whole week was a hot dog I ordered there the first night. How hard is it to screw up a hot dog? Well the weenie was as big as a half dollar and needed to be cut with a knife it was so tough and thick. It tasted worse than it looked. Oh and they covered it with stadium cheese. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] I ate the bun and lived to tell about it. I had other things there through out the week like a grilled chicken sandwich, salads, cheesecake, pecan tarts etc, and every bit of it was excellent. There is also a donut/desert counter that had some of the best looking fresh baked donuts I’d ever seen, however, I was always to full to try one. The Atrium is open 24/7 and is a very nice sit down restaurant. My wife and I split a steak every time we ate there and they were excellent each time. Salads were good, as were the appetizers, rolls, baked potatoes etc. It was all great and highly recommended if you’ve got 45+ minutes to spare for supper. The prices were also a little on the higher side but not bad and we were getting comps so big it didn’t matter.

The poker games were good. My wife and I are both mainly limit players now days and $3/6 seems to the “house” game at GS. It’s their lowest limit and they usually had 3-4 tables of $3/6 going every single night and at the very least 2 tables. I never entered the poker room when there wasn’t at least one $1/2 NL and a $3/6 LHE game going. The room seemed to have 4-6 tables going pretty much at all times and on Thursday-Sunday afternoon/nights the room would be packed with 2-3 empty tables at the very most. They seemed to have a hard time opening and keeping $4/8 games going though, which sort of disappointed me. I’m used to playing $4/8 and prefer it but the times they did have a $4/8 game going, I just couldn’t force myself to get up and leave my juicy $3/6 game. On a couple other occasions they’d open a new $4/8 game and we couldn’t get it full enough to keep it from breaking after 15-20 minutes. As I’ve already alluded to, the play was horrible (awesome). I’ve never seen so many tourist walk up to the table and sit down with no experience at all playing hold’em. They all bought in for $60-$100 and seemed glad to give it away and most were happy to rebuy. I saw many folks, often middle aged women or couples, sit down loose every dollar in front of them and go on and on about what a great time they were having. These people view poker just like the table games and slots……it’s all luck and they know they are going to loose, they just want to have fun doing it. If you are looking for juicy low limit games, the GS is the place. Granted you aren’t going to get rich at $3/6 but my wife and I were there on a vacation and while I had NO intentions of loosing any money, I wasn’t there to pay my house note either. For that reason, I kept playing the donkey $3/6 instead of going over to the Shoe to play the slightly more profitable $4/8 games. One thing I noticed about the $3/6 games is that they tended to draw a much younger crowd (lots of women) than any $4/8 game I’ve played in.

[LuckyTxGuy]

One thing I wanted to touch on was the dealers…..they are overall very good. There are a few of them who need attitude adjustments but the same can be said for any room I’ve ever played in. Some of the dealers don’t say a word while others talk, tell stories and liven up the game. Over all I’d say their dealers are about dead even the Horseshoe’s. Some good, some bad, and some that shouldn’t be dealers. The GS does have ShuffleMasters and a few of the dealers can really deal the hands out. Playing tight, I often get bored when the I go card dead so I will take a chip out of my stack and place it to the side for every hand a dealer deals on his down, thus keeping track of how many hands an hour I see. I do this a lot and it’s actually pretty cool info. One young guy, I think Chris was his name…can’t remember, was really running a fast but professional game. I counted and to my great amazement he dealt 19 hands on his down! That is huge at $3/6 where people have to ask how much they can bet half the time and there is a showdown 95% of the time. I complimented him on this and he was surprised that I was counting. The next dealer felt much slower but we still got 16 hands on his down for a total of 35 that hour. That’s pretty impressive at $3/6. I counted off and on during the week and pushing 30 hands an hour was not uncommon with the better dealers. And speaking of dealers, I know it’s a tough job and one I wouldn’t want, but the way a few of these guys treat the new players is just wrong. Several times we’d have new players sit down who literally didn’t know if a straight beat a flush. While this can be frustrating for everyone including the dealer, verbally berating them and treating them like 3 year old is NOT good for the game, it’s not good for the tip box, and it increases the chance that these people will never come back. I saw this time and time again with certain dealers and sometimes I was so embarrassed for the new player I almost couldn’t stand it. It got me to thinking…… no where in the entire casino, other than the poker room, can you go where the games are so confusing, there is no one to explain them to you, the other players treat you like crap and the dealers even laugh at you and treat you like a child. This is not good for poker and it’s not good for a winning players profits. Just an observation. Again, this was by no means all the GS dealers, just a select few I can think of. I don’t think most of them had any idea how rude they were coming across either. They’re probably just so calloused from dealing to donkeys and newbs all the time.

We did make a trip or two over to the Shoe to play $4/8 and eat the buffet and as always the room was hoping pretty good and the staff was friendly and helpful. I do like the Shoe and they have a very nice room. I’ve got some complaints about it, but no more than I do with the Strike or anywhere else I’ve played. Oh and speaking of other places, I did make a venture to Sam’s Town on Saturday morning. Wow, there’s an interesting place. I got there at 11 am and there were two tables going. A full $4/8 and a $1/2 with a couple empty seats and not much money on the table. I sat down in the $1/2 waiting on a $4/8 seat and wish I hadn’t. I lost the customary $100 about the same time I noticed the empty seats at the $4/8 game. The $1/2 was very soft and very passive. $7 was the average pre-flop raise and $10 pf was big. I played two hands and played one of them horribly wrong costing me the pot and about $70. Now to my $4/8 story….this got me steaming. I walk up to the desk as they were seating a brand new $3/6 game.

I didn’t even know Sam’s Town spread $3/6 until then. I noticed the $3/6 game had two empty seats and every player looked like a total tourist fish. The $4/8 game had 3 or 4 empty seats now and there was no one at the table under 65. I asked the floor man if he knew any of the people in the $4/8 game, not wanting to play with the old folk regular crowd when I had a fishy $3/6 option. The floor man says “No I don’t know any of those people. You want to play the $4/8 game, it’s a lot better game. You don’t want to play $3/6.” I immediately realized he didn’t want his $4/8 game getting any shorter and breaking and this is why he was pushing me to it. Fine. I bought a rack of chips and watched the $3/6 game for a second and it looked juicy. I looked back at the old folks in the $4/8 and just had a bad feeling…not that they were good players, but just that it was a bunch of old griping and complaining regulars. There was an older woman (65+) at the desk by the young guy I’d just talked to and I walked straight up to her and said “Do you know anyone in that $4/8 game right there? Are any of them regulars?” It was the table closest to the desk. She said, “oh you need to play that game, it’s a lot better than $3/6.” That is not at all what I asked, again knowing they didn’t want the game to break, I knew they were pushing me. So I point blank looked her in the eye and asked the same question again. This time she said “No I don’t recognize any of those folks…..none of them are regulars.” Ok fine. I sat down having a feeling I’d been lied to. It took me all of 20 seconds to figure out I was right. Everyone knew everyone by name and were all talking about the local town gossip. The dealers were calling the players by name and laughing it up having a good time. I immediately figured out that every single player in that game was a local regular and I started steaming because I’d been lied to. Then an older Oriental looking fella at the end of the table got up and went and cashed out. 5 minutes later I see him buttoning up a dealer’s uniform and he comes and sits down in the box!!!!!!! Not only had these two floor people lied to me about not knowing any of these people, one of the players they said they didn’t know was a freaking dealer in the house!!!! This might not seem like a big deal, but it was just the whole situation that really pissed me off. I’m actually not sure that there wasn’t some sort of Mississippi gaming law broken when they lied like that and one of the players was a dealer there. I wanted to go tell the floor exactly how I felt but I’d kept hearing about their low buyin (high juice) donkaments and I thought I might bring my wife back over there for one of them and didn’t want to do that after I had gone nuts on the floor staff.lol In reality it didn’t really matter because the play was horrible and I managed to get my QQ cracked for a small loss before I racked up and left, needing to meet my wife back at the GS. That ended up being my only experience with Sam’s Town.


I can’t speak for any other tables games or slots in the GS because we never really played any. I think I put $5-10 in a penny machine one time waiting on my wife to leave her poker table for supper but other than that, no gambling at the GS for us. Now back to the Sheraton aka National Lampoon’s Casino. Our last night was a Monday and by about 11:30 pm our $3/6 game was breaking, mostly because of a rude unruly drunk who was about 30 seconds from getting 86’d according to the dealer. We didn’t feel like waiting to get in another game and we needed to get to bed at a decent hour so we could leave the next day anyway. We cashed out and headed over to the Sheraton for some $1.50 roulette just to say we played it. Wow, what a blast. It was really a lot of fun and the roulette dealers were crazy, cutting up and having a good time, basically putting on their own show. The pit boss was even coming around and joking with us and for a Monday night it was pretty wild. I’m sure when you’ve got a place like the Sheraton, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to keep the players you’ve got in the place.lol Long story short I bought in for $20 in .25 chips and cashed out $35. On the way out the door my wife stuck $1 in a penny machine and couldn’t loose it. She just kept winning over and over, almost every single spin. I finally made her cash out when she hit $10. I figured turning $1 into $10 on a penny machine in less than 2 minutes was more than beating the odds and we better get while the getting was good. Back to the room to bed.

[LuckyTxGuy]

I’ve had a few people ask me about the tournaments and I honestly didn’t play but in one. I played the Monday 11 am $60 freeze-out at the Strike. There were between 42-48 players, I can’t remember exactly, and the structure was ok, but not great. On average the players were bad. There were two all-in’s within the first 10 hands at my table. AA vs. QQ and KK vs. 99. There were a lot of regulars who were willing to get it all in as quickly as possible trying to either double up and bust. A 4x BB pf raise did nothing and there would still be 6-8 seeing the flop. I actually saw a guy make it 14x the BB pf and he got called in 3 places! I limped a few times with marginal paint trying to see a cheap flop and never connected. I finally had AK in a big multi-way raised pot and flopped a King on a rainbow board and led out and surprisingly took down the pot which was fine, because it was a nice chip increase. I then had 10’s and re-raised pf after a raise and a couple early callers and ended up taking it down pf. I won another small pot and was actually sitting very pretty from having been short sacked early on. The players started dropping like flies and I was really surprised how bad a lot of these players were. I was card dead and needing to win a pot before I had to shove and hope for a double up. I ended up getting bluffed on a key hand that hurt my stack. Before I knew it we were again combing tables and we were at the final table. I had been trying to shove all in with the 400/800 blinds and 50 ante but there were so many all-ins I kept folding trying to at least have some decent cards if it was going to be a multi-way pot. So I went to the final table with an embarrassing $3,100 and when we high carded for the button, I ended up in the BB and the new blinds were $500/$1000 and a $100 ante. I was going to have to put it all in no matter what I had. Unfortunately, I had J6o and was up against 99 and he flopped a set. Oh well it was fun and I was out in 10th.

Last thing and I’ll wrap up. The hotel checkout was somewhat interesting. I was asked the poker room floor two times on Monday night if I’d have any trouble checking out the next morning and what I needed to do. Both times I was assured that I’d played waaaay more than required and to just go to the front desk and they’d call up to the poker room and confirm my play and that was it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work exactly like that. I happened to get an unfriendly clerk and she looked at me like I was stupid and asked where my “proof” was from the poker room. I told her what I was told by the poker room management the night before and she said that was bad info and she couldn’t just call anyone. I needed to go up to the poker room and get them to fill out a slip of paper as proof. Great. It’s 8 am, it’s pouring rain and I’ve got an 8 hour drive home and I’m already running behind when I’d like to have left. So I leave my wife with our bags in the lobby and I take both of our players cards up the poker room and give them the only floor person on duty I could find, who happened to be a guy I’d never seen all week. I explained what the clerk told me and he acted slightly disgusted and said she could have handled it differently but he was very nice to me. He found this slip of paper and asked how many nights I’d been there. I told him and asked who’s name the room was in and quickly filled out the form. He never swiped our cards, he never asked any questions, nothing. He had no way of knowing if I’d played 1 hour or 1,000 hours. That really surprised me. I guess after hearing so much before the trip about how my wife and I couldn’t combine our hours etc, it struck me as odd that this guy didn’t even check to see if we’d played a single day in the last 5 nights and since he hadn’t been working the whole time I was there, he’d never seen me before. It didn’t make a hill of beans to me, I just found it odd.

I can’t really think of any other Tunica info to include so I guess I’ll finally wrap it up. Sorry for being so long and I hope if you made it this far you weren’t bored to death. If anyone has any questions I’ll do my best to answer.

[LuckyTxGuy]

Sorry I guess I didn't really realize how long all that was. Don't blame ya for not reading it. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[NicksDad1970]

Nice read and glad you and your wife had a good time. I told Heather that you had really complemeted her. Others were standing around asking if anyone had mentioned them.

[Chipr777]

Nice trip report. Glad you had a good time in our little town.

[steamboatin]

[ QUOTE ]
There is also a donut/desert counter that had some of the best looking fresh baked donuts I’d ever seen, however, I was always to full to try one.

[/ QUOTE ]

Last time I stayed there it was Krispy Kreme.

[rrb]

Thank you - nice read - I'm heading to Tunica soon -- and your trip report answered a lot of my questions about comps and poker rates

[Bluegrass Poker]

[ QUOTE ]
After my last trip, I told my wife, who also plays poker, that we needed to plan a trip over to Tunica because I knew she’d have a blast. We decided to go for our anniversary and we booked 5 nights at the Gold Strike.

[/ QUOTE ]Man, it was hard to read after this, I am really jealous! An anniversary trip to play poker!!

Can't believe I've never walked down to the Sheraton for my blackjack fix. $3, WOW, I would have lost a whole lot less money at $3! [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

Great TR, even if it didn't involve any blow, hookers, strip clubs or other debauchery.