I just got home from Vegas tonight, thought I'd give a little taste of what's ahead for those of you going to the tournament in a couple weeks. I wanted to join in, but because I couldn't change my summer vacation plans, I have to wait for the next one. Fortunately thought, I was in Vegas for the weekend on business and managed to sneak in a couple strike outings.

Planet Hollywood: I was in on Friday night, Casino pretty quiet when I got there. There is a "Slot Machine Locator" right at the strip entrance, we typed in "Silver Strike" and it gave us a little map of where they are. There were three machines back to back in a little triangular island toward the back near Heart Bar. I can't say for sure if each machine has mixed strikes or not, but the choice was easy for the first strike. The "Pleasure Pit" strike was showing as a sample in one of the machines, so that got my first $20. I hit after 4 pulls, and sure enough a PP token dropped out. (This is a real nice strike, could see it in the running for Strike of the Year for my vote) Anyway, I gave it a few more pulls just in case and cashed out with $10 in credit for machine two. I was down to about ten credits on that machine and hit a "Heart Bar" clad, but "Extra Lounge" was showing in the window above so I played out the rest of the $10 to no avail. I put in another $20 and hit another strike, this time the "Extra Lounge" clad dropped out. I gave a couple more pulls and then slid over to the third machine. This machine has a bunch of tarnished logo strikes in the display (They were the .999 fine in the display window). I finished up what was left on my $20 on this machine, no hits. Total numbers... $40 in, three different clad strikes out. Good way to spend 15 minutes for sure.

Palms Casino: We couldn't get free until Sunday afternoon to visit the Palms. We got there around noon and promptly started looking for machines. We came in the entrance by the taxi stand, didn't take to long to find a machine just inside the casino from there. I put in a $20 but before I could even start, we were greeted by a Palms Casino employee asking us if we wanted to join Club Palms. He was a real nice guy, told us where all the strike machines were and although he didn't know much about the strikes...he knew about us! For those of you who haven't played that machine, it's different than every other Silver Strike slot I've played. It DOES NOT pay if Silver Strike is on the payline UNLESS you match it up with two like BARS. So, it's a real bummer when you see the right third wheel, but one and two don't match. The good news is though...if you have two double bars you get two strikes. If you have triple bars, you get three strikes. And yes, these did come up. So, we finally got at it and after about 15 pulls I hit a single "Rojo". I had a few decent slot wins on this machine so I was able to play a while on the $20. I hit another "Rojo" pretty quickly and decided to keep at it. A third win on this machine dropped a surprise .999 Silver Alize in a perfect case. I was not expecting any .999 strikes on this visit. I added another $20 in and hit a clad "Drift" after a bit of a dry spell. I moved to the other machines. One is near the poker room, the other near the Club Palms counter. I played the poker room on first, had a bunch of Rojo and Drift drop out, but it was paying well. I moved over to the machine by Club Palms. It played a bit tighter, but dropped an old .999 "Hart and Huntington" on me. By this time I had amassed enough strikes so my wife couldn't close her purse. The great majority of these were the clad ones. So I went to the cage and asked the attendant if there were any strikes turned in that she could trade out for my dups. She said no, but asked how many I had. I had a total of about 15 at that time, she said get it up to 20 and we have a big one you can trade up to. To my surprise, they had at least two of the 2008 Christmas Strikes! My wife and I had a little lunch and got back at it. I hit a treasure on the Poker Room Strike machine almost right away, a large Playboy Logo bunny in great shape. Then three pulls after that, a perfect "Shiver Staikes" 2005 dropped. I need clad to trade...not these ;-) Anyway, to make a long story short, there are still a bunch of .999 strikes in the machines. I put in $240 total and ended up with 30 strikes. Twenty were clad, ten silver. I gave up two silver and eighteen clad to get the pounder. After three and half hours, I left with the $200, Alize, Nove, Pearl, H&H, Shiver Straikes, Gasser, Eagle, and Large Bunny Logo and I kept one of each of the clads. The only duplicate silver was Pearl.

The folks at the Palms couldn't have been nicer, hats off to everyone there and thanks Craig for loading in some silver ones! Maybe some old strikes are being turned in by the locals with the economy off there. All three machines have silver! Have fun and somebody let us know how the tournament goes.
Paul SS#1140