MWRT – 2025 – Travel day to Minneapolis/St. Paul

This was mostly a beautiful travel day on the road from Green Bay Wi, to Minneapolis/St. Paul MN. This region is so amazingly beautiful, filled with green rolling hills filled with corn for silage and snap beans for processing. Agriculture is a huge business all across this region as well as the other areas travelled thus far. It is quite a contrast to the Hill Country parched ranch land from home. There is so much farmland that it seems like every few yards there is another huge red barn accompanied by multiple massive silos. They are almost as prevalent as Mexican food restaurants back home 🙂

On a personal note, I’ve been on the road for 13 days, travelled over 2,500 miles, passed through 6 states including Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and visited 10 casinos to play Blackjack and one more Indian Casino where I couldn’t play but went just to see it on another Indian reservation. I’ve been suffering from a bad back due to some strange injury I experienced prior to leaving home and only today did I feel sufficiently recovered to restart my exercise routine. I didn’t push it though, just 20 minutes cardio and 10 minutes of good stretching. I’ve got to get ready for all the hiking we will be doing in Glacier National Park. Cannot wait for that.

So let me regale you with my adventures playing Blackjack once again. The day before my journey from Green Bay, I went to the Oneida Casino for an all day session hoping to get in at least 8 hours of play as my primary goal. This casino was pretty small and they only had two tables open for Blackjack at the time I arrived. I got a good positive shoe right off the bat and had a pretty good win but then the day turned into a grind with shoe after shoe just treading water above and below the surface hour after hour.

You may ask why would I do it? That’s a story for another time.

I can say that though the play was a grind, the experience was still pretty entertaining due to the casino staff and the regulars that I played with throughout the day. As soon as I sat down, I immediately noticed a lot of the dealers and floor personnel appeared to be tribal Indian ethnicity. The men all were sporting long hair in braids with dark ruddy complexions and cheerful demeanors. My dealer noticed my hat when I sat down, which I had purchased at the Meskwaki casino gift shop a couple days before. He commented about them being a different nation than the Oneida and I asked if they were “friendly Nations”? He cocked his head to one side and simply said in a low and measured voice, “it all depends”. At first I thought I’d struck a nerve but then he broke his stone face and laughed! All good fun.

The other interesting story about this day at the table was in regards to the two players on my right and left. The guy on the right was Asian and like so many Asian’s I’ve played with, was betting a lot of money and randomly changing how much on any hand based on some whim he was feeling. In a matter of minutes I saw him buy in again and again after losing hand after hand, with probably $10,000 buy in. The guy was a terrible Blackjack player. His worst move was centered around surrendering his hand. Surrender is a very uncommon rule in Blackjack outside of Las Vegas. This casino has been the only one that offered it. It’s a huge favorable to the player type of rule, if properly employed. It gives the player an opportunity to relinquish half his wager just after the cards have all been dealt. It really makes a lot of sense to do that if the dealer has a 10 or an Ace and your hand totals 16, for example. This Asian guy was surrendering all kinds of hands, like a 13 against a 7. That hand is pretty close to a 50-50 chance of winning so to Surrender is insane. He eventually lost so much money that he left. I don’t think he spoke to anyone on the table once and never cracked a smile.

The guy on my left was nicely dressed man about my age who was very friendly and also betting a lot of money. He seemed to be well versed in Blackjack Basic Strategy and played correctly 95% if the time. He really got on a roll with bets winning for $100 to $400 dollars. After a really good shoe he had about $5,000 in green chips ($25ea) stacked in neat columns and he was having the time of his life. We’d been chatting and I took the opportunity to suggest it might be time to retreat and take the win. My advice didn’t seem to register and we played on. You know where this is going, right. A terrible shoe came around and I watched as those neatly stacked columns of chips began to disappear. Fate was unmerciful as he never got a good trend of wins to recover from, and eventually, all was gone. Amazingly, he kept his composure the entire time with looks of consternation and smiles of desperation sprinkled throughout. He was done, stood up, smile once more and stated “well, that was fun”, and walked away. I had my doubts.

Back to my goal for the day, I still had at least a couple more hours to go before I was going quit for the day. The grind had continued and would continue for those next two hours. On particularly terrible shoes I would get up and leave the table to let the other players finish them out, coming back only when the next shuffle had finished and the new shoe was ready to start, This added another 90 minutes to my time at the casino since I didn’t count those times as true time accumulating to my 8 hour goal. Finally, I had one more shoe to cross the 8 hour threshold. Another dud shoe. Time to leave.

But at this point, I didn’t leave, I decided ok, it’s been a long day with no good shoes, what will it hurt to play just one more and then quit. It’s only 15 more minutes.

And what a quarter hour it was! All that time grinding away was washed away as this shoe heated up early, only 1 or 2 decks in. I began winning most hands and began increasing my wager. Continued win after win. Max bets, WIN. It was crazy. That is just how Blackjack can be. It was a good feeling and a lot of fun. How did I know this last shoe was the one? Of course, I didn’t know. Had it been another dud, it would not have been unexpected. But it wasn’t a dud and I made out like a bandit. Time to cash out and get some rest before my travels the next day.

This is the casino that I couldn’t play because the tables were not yet open. Menominee Casino resort.