Just back from Las Vegas and have read lots of messages on the board. Rather than go through the messages and make lots of little responses, I thought I'd make one large attempt.

1. The break-even point for a casino not to be charged die costs by IGT is 1750 for a $10 strike and 250 for a $200 strike.

2. The reason the no sale policy at O'Shea's. Flamingo and Ballys is the same is that the same person is in charge of all three strike programs. (And he runs Paris' program as well.) This happens to be the same person who canceled the second strike tournament and canceled the Flamingo and O'Sheas strikes, including the 200s. Alos canceled the 20 for a 200 prior to dumping the tournament.

3. The reason for surprise strikes appearing is that the process of approvals is a daily event. The LIST is issued monthly, but if a strike is approved on the third of the month, it can go into play as soon thereafter as it can be produced and delivered. If a casino is anxious enough, telephonic approval can be obtained, although it is frowned upon by authorities at Gaming Control. Also, some casinos let us know about strikes in advance, others haven't figured out we exist or where to find us.

4. Casino employees rarely have correct information about their strikes. You would have loved the chaos at the Mirage where Steve Zacchi and I were explaining the program to befuddled employees. It took almost two hours to get the first $200 strikes exchanged. At first, not one single cage employee believed there was any such thing as a $200 strike, much less an exchange. We finally had three execs, the cage manager and several cage persons working on it. The 200s were found in the coin vault, but could only be released by the manager of the vault and she had just gone to lunch. When we finally got the 200 strikes, the numbers were 9 and 23. We could not have any other numbers because no one had time to look through them all. (I would bet there were no more than 25-50 delivered on premises) We pointed out the numbers on the boxes, still no. So we quit and went back to the machine.

5. That machine is another story. We got to the casino about 10 AM. A walk through located 7 machines, none in play. We watched for a while and there was some activity. We were told they would be fired up in "an hour or so. Steve left with his lovely wife Linda because she had to get to work. After he returned, we were told "an hour" up to three o'clock, then it as "we are missing parts on every machine", then :we are hoping to get one $10 and one $40 up TONIGHT." IGT techs brought over some parts from their warehouse. More activity. One tech from Mirage, Bruce Chow, really knew what he was doing and finally got the $40 to work about 5:10. Taking pity on us, they offered to let me play if a slot tech could watch and stop it if there were any malfunctions, like a runaway. Either that, ot they would continue testing the machine. I played.

The $10 machine was finally brought up about 8:45 PM. I got the strikes I needed, so did Steve.

I left,picked up my extremely patient wife who was killing time at my son's house and we got home in California about 1:30 AM the next morning. That was about five hours after my normal bedtime.