A business trip

Last night the spouse and I returned from a four-day trip to Reno to play video poker. Why, you might ask, would people who live in the Vegas area want to go to Reno to play video poker?

The answer is that Reno has more and better high-limit games than Vegas. Our bread-and-butter game, "not so ugly" (16/10) deuces wild, is available at over $1 ($5 maximum bet) only a a few places in Vegas. The highest-limit game I'm aware of in Vegas is a single-line $5 game at the Fremont downtown and, believe it or not, at the tiny Dotty's casinos scattered throughout the area.

There's only one place left in Vegas that I know of that this pay table can be found on a multi-line game. Arizona Charlie's Decatur has it on a quarter 10-play machine. That means you can play max bet of $1.25 ten times, for $12.50 a hand. Fortunately, the two machines with that game are in that otherwise very smoky casino's totally enclosed nonsmoking room. Unfortunately, you earn way fewer points playing that game than on almost all of the casino's other video poker.

The casino we stayed at in Reno was the Peppermill, which has numerous triple play/five play machines with $1 NSU on them. But wait -- there's more! Many if not all of these machines allow you to play up to $75 a hand, as opposed to the standard five-coin five-play. In other words, the max bet for each of the five lines is $15 instead of the usual $5.

Games at the 25-cent level and higher in Vegas that take more than five coins max are virtually unheard of, so when we play anything, we're in the habit of hitting the max bet button to get started. At the $1 five plays at the Peppermill, that will get you a $75 bet instead of the expected $25 bet. Hitting that max bet button to bet 25 can be a hard habit to break, as we found out early in our first trip, when my spouse accidentally bet 75 and was rewarded with a $12,000 royal flush instead of the expected $4,000.

Another casino we visited, the Eldorado, has single-line NSU for up to 25 coins, the equivalent of a $5 single-line game. We decide to play this game at 15 coins. I was lucky enough to hit the four deuces, for $3,000.

The third casino we played at was the Atlantis, near the Peppermill on Virginia Street, south of downtown. This casino has a lot of progressives, including one on single-line, five-coin, $1 NSU deuces and one on single-line 10-coin $1 NSU deuces. The game we wound up playing was a single-line, five coin $1 progressive with 9/6 jacks or better that reached $7.551 before it was hit (not by either of us).

I'll try to write a little more about the Reno trip in the next few days, but now I've got to go to work.