Originally Posted by coach belly View Post
Originally Posted by kewlJ View Post
stop with the "mother's purse nonsense" both you and Alan have posted in the last few hours.
I was responding to Alan's suggestion that your mother could carry your cash. He only brought her up because you wrote some time ago that your mother was driving you. You never explained that it was for only 2 weeks and no longer, until now.

Originally Posted by kewlJ View Post
I have two banks, one a local Nevada bank and one a national type bank, where I have arranged higher than normal ATM withdraw amounts.
To be clear, if you tap out of your chip inventory on hand for the casino you are visiting, then you hit the ATM and buy back in with cash? Is that correct?

Understanding that you are playing green & black chips w/$25-$200 spread, and should you win $10K or so at a single table or group of nearby tables...don't they ask you to color up before you leave? Do you typically comply, or just carry 100 or more chips away from the table, and then stash them in your pocket and leave?
I think I have mentioned the situation with my mother. Like I said, knowing that I prefer not to drive, she offered to assume that role. I even was considering and even started to teach her some basics of the elementary machine play that my partner used to handle. But it just wasn't a good fit. I love my Mom dearly, but didn't want to spend that amount of time with her. I also had a close friend that wanted to assume that role, but decided against that as well. I am quite capable of driving myself, despite that I don't care for driving and have been for almost 6 months now. In addition, I made the decision to move away from that elementary machine play activity that my partner handled as the casinos have dramatically tightened up on the free play mailer/offers in the past year or two, so the timing was right for that.

Your details of my approach are mostly incorrect. First I don't have a set spread. I play different spreads and limits at different locations, based on what I have determined is that particular casinos comfort or tolerance level. It is different for different casinos and even different days/shifts at the same casino. Without getting into specifics of that, I currently play spreads of $25-$300 (low end), up to spreads of $50-$600 at a couple larger casinos that handle that well. On occasion during busy holiday or big even periods I might even spread $100-$800 and on very rare occasions, even bigger.

But in general $500 is a key max bet number that I want to stay below at many locations. $500 is a key threshold level where interest intensifies at many locations.

I only use a chip inventory to enter the game, not for all play, even at that table. To have enough chips for all your play at any casino would require six, seven eight, thousand dollars in chips at each casino in your rotation. And since it is best not to have chips over $500 denominations (casinos sometimes ask for ID for larger chips), that would require buckets of chips for all locations.


What I want to do is enter the game with chips, avoiding that first interaction with pit, the buy-in and pit approval. This only requires 2-3 hundred in chips at each location. A small handful of green and black chips works nicely. Should I lose that, I continue playing with cash. This too has a plus side as well as negative. On the plus side, pulling out cash after losing your initial stakes, looks like a typical player chasing losses. On the negative side, this will (most likely) require an interaction with pit at this point.

But in all probability, if you have lost initial stakes, count has probably risen and you are betting bigger and there is a good chance you have been noticed already. All a chip inventory does is help you initially get into the game with minimal interaction. If the count never risen (bigger bets), you may get in and out with no interaction, but that is fairly rare and not even desirable, because if this scenario occurs, you probably didn't make any money anyway.

Next, while one of the goals is to avoid coloring up at the table (pit interaction), sometimes that can't be avoided. Sometimes I abruptly exit, if the count tanks and/or at the shuffle up after showing spread, and I scoop up a handful of chips and bolt. There is almost always an attempt from dealer to get me to color up, but I just decline as I am walking away (not even breaking stride). This is unnatural, but I haven't figured a better way of yet. But when I have accumulated more than a handful of chips, this becomes too extreme. At that point you have to go ahead and color up. In other words, if you have won too much, you have to color up. Sort of a bad problem to have. I usually utter something like "great I won back what I lost at XXX casino this morning", although that kind of spoken "cover" is lost on surveillance so has minimal effect. But it doesn't hurt to try.