What Do You Get When You...

...put together the following numbers?

• My birth month
• My birth day
• My birth year
• Our anniversary month
• Our anniversary day
• DH's birth month
• DH's birth day
• DH's birth year
• My mom's birth year
• My dad's birth year (or was it my brother's?)

You get $4800, that's what you get! At least that's what you get at Treasure Island in Vegas when you play a $5 "Pick 10" card at Keno and manage to pick 8 of the 10 numbers you selected.

On Thursday, we flew in to Vegas (10:00 AM flight on Southwest, smooth flight, on time, no screaming people or children, arrived on time), got a cab to Treasure Island, and were in our room by 1:00 PM (lovely room, Strip view, looking south towards MGM and Mandalay Bay). Having only grabbed coffee and a muffin at the airport, we needed food, so headed to TI's 24-hour restaurant as the path of least resistance. While sitting and talking about what we wanted to do while in town, I took out a Keno sheet and crayon, and KW and I started picking numbers. We put in two sheets, one a "Pick 10," and one a "Sweet 16."

When the game was over, I read the numbers to KW, who could see the board behind me. "Yes." "Yes." "Yes." "No." "Yes." "Yes." "No." "Yes." "Yes." "Yes." I reached for the little Keno brochure that shows the payouts and almost choked. I could have sworn it said that when you pick 8 on a "Pick 10" card, you got $4800, and told KW. He looked at me funny, in a "Are you sure you know how to read?" kind of way, when the Keno runner came to the table with a little print-out sheet. "You won!" she said, and showed me the sheet. Sure enough, it said "$4800" on it.

Well, anyone who knows anything about Keno knows that it has the worst odds of all the casino games. There's a 25% house advantage - compared to Blackjack with something like a 1.2% house advantage. No one wins at Keno! Apparently the number of winners from the Coffee Shop are so few and far between, the runner didn't know the proper procedure for us to get our money! First she said her supervisor would have to come to the restaurant with a TI manager, then she said we would have to go to the Keno area. So we went over to the Keno desk, met the supervisor and the TI manager, who dutifully filled out the IRS paperwork (yep, anything over $1199 gets you a Form W-2G, "Certain Gambling Winnings" form) and then started counting out 48 one hundred dollar bills.

Let me tell you, that's a lot of bills! And pretty damn exciting to use them to pay for everything on the trip... wheeee!

The rest of the trip was wonderful, too, especially dinner at Mesa Grill (Bobby Flay's restaurant at Caesar's Palace), where I was greeted by the Birthday Bear! The Bear does get around!

Late flight home today, and KW is off again tomorrow on a business trip. He gets back on Friday, then we're both off to San Diego next weekend to attend a business conference. Busy, busy, busy!