Happy New Year Everyone!

As a newly invited (haha!) Seven Stars player, my mind is now turning to how best to maintain being Seven Stars if I so choose.

First a little bit about me (this will help to explain the naive questions I ask below). I am a middle-aged smart woman with a full time job (scientist in drug development) who enjoys playing but has always been (until the last 2 months) a very casual player. I research every game I play and try to understand and execute the best strategy to play but I am definitely not an AP (ie I don't count cards in BJ, or drive many miles to get the very best odds machine for VP). I am more of a card player (gravitate to BJ and VP), don't play slots at all, and don't know much at this point about other casino games. I also understand that unless I am an AP, that if I start gaming a lot more that I will have to expect eventual losses overall.

I really have two questions:

Do any of you have tips or tricks on earning TPs for for the smallest amount of loss? For example, are there any games besides VP that you would play to build TP (I am open to expanding the repertoire of games I play). Or is there is a good way to run money through certain types of games to build points while minimizing losses. It seems like low variance, low house percentage games would be the best for this purpose, but they also have to be some form of machine game because how they award TP at the tables really sucks

I already know about TP bonuses and my plan was to play about 20 sessions of VP to earn 2500 TP and get the 5000 bonus TP which would put me there. Also I plan to play on Thursdays because So Cal offers 5x reward credits (RC) every Thursday and I think it is fair to call those RC an offset to losses. I also know I likely won't have to play all 20 sessions because of TC promotions that are offered from time to time.

Next question, is there any good way to manage the bankroll/money thing? What I am thinking about most here is that it seems to me that the only way you might not have a loss with VP is by getting a royal flush and eventually over the very long haul those don't make a difference either. So should I just expect I could be down $10-15K or lower at some point playing $5 VP and that's just the way it is?

Finally a question about expected loss in VP. On the other thread there were a couple of comments about my expected loss for VP when I was playing the 25x promo. Alan and DD: Are you just doing a straight calculation of money run through machine x house percentage to get that figure? Also, I would be really interested in understanding how to calculate the range around that number based on variance/SD of a particular game. I read somewhere else that its a skewed distribution for VP, but those that play VP seriously they likely have a pretty good experiential understanding.

If you get this far, thanks for even taking the time to read all my newbie comments/questions. Cause as was said on another active thread - (paraphrasing) what idiot APs would actually want to be helpful to newbies?!