From There to Here

So Saturday didn’t go any better than Friday.

In fact, it was much, much worse. This one was basically over by the end of the sixth inning. Buchholz didn’t pitch great, and gave up four runs (three earned). But the real damage was done by Snyder and Corey, who gave up six runs in just two-thirds of an inning. Tavarez didn’t let it get any worse, but ten runs is really bad enough.

I did take a ton of pictures of the game, but I’m not going to bore you by posting any of them. You know what Clay Buchholz looks like. I’m sure you’ve seen David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez before. And who wants to see Kyle Snyder? Oh, fine, here’s one of Clay. But that’s it.

So after the game, Mike and I went back to the hotel room to hang out/shower/nap for a while before heading out that night to do something. We weren’t sure what we wanted to do, but we ended up sitting around and watching poker on television for a little while. We decided, sure, what the hell, we’ve already played some blackjack on this trip — we should go play in Canada.

So basically, we had two choices — go two hours north, further into Canada, to a place called Casino Rama or head back south toward the U.S. border and go to Niagara, where there are a few casinos. With it already being cold in Toronto and having problems finding/using our money, we thought driving two hours further north wasn’t really the best idea. We headed down to Niagara and started at the Fallsview Niagara casino, which is where we were originally going to stay on the trip home before we changed our return reservation to Turning Stone.

And thank God we changed our reservation. The Fallsview is a loud, garrish hotel, with a crappy poker room and little redeeming value, as far as I’m concerned. Granted, it was its busiest time on a Saturday evening, but there were 75 people ahead of us on the list to play poker when we put our names in and all their tables were jammed. The last time I remember anything this ridiculous was Foxwoods old poker room, when they had it upstairs. They told us an hour and a half — we walked around the hotel, walked around outside to look at the falls and checked back in. No progress, we decided to finally take off.

How garish was it? Here’s a water fountain/time machine/ridiculous contraption you see right after walking in.

Hungry and not wanting to blow all our wampum, Canadian dollars, whatever at the crappy casino (that charges $10 CAD for parking by the way — how ridiculous is a casino that charges for parking???), we decided to dine at a fine establishment that you can only find in a wonderful Canadian town.

Ok, maybe not. But in our defense, we did want to watch the NCAA basketball game. Then Kansas destroyed UNC, going up huge at the half, and the game really was as much of a blowout as the baseball game earlier in the day. That having been decided for us, we decided to try another casino. Mind you, we already visited one, and left with nothing more than a player rating card (which I’ll never use again) since we could never get on a table.

About one mile away, we checked out Casino Niagara.

This is kind of the ugly stepsister of the Fallsview, not that its ugly, but that it’s less expensive and has lower limits on most of the tables, at least in my estimation. It really is the Fallsview’s sister casino, as the player cards work at each. They also charge for parking, but it’s free with a player card. The garage to the casino is also right next to it, but unattached — something that’s kind of strange for most casinos I’ve been to (I’ve honestly never experienced this before, believe it or not).

So we again head to the poker room, where they tell us it’s going to be about an hour and a half. Fine. We put in our names and went to go hang around the casino. We found a $15 minimum blackjack table that they were just opening, so Mike and I each went over there. Normally, I hate blackjack in the casinos, but we decided to give it a shot. I started with 180, as did Mike, so we could each have at least 12 bets at the minimum. And if I lost 12 hands in a row, I wasn’t going to play any more anyway.

The casino does it weird. They use 5 decks, but they use continuous shufflers. After every hand, cards go back in the automatic shoe, which shuffles them in. Really weird, and it makes it impossible for the players to gain any advantage — not that I could anyway. But Mike and I hung in there — he hit about 8 blackjacks in an hour, and I hit blackjack twice and doubled down pretty effectively. We didn’t win much, but we still did win — Mike made about $30, and I won about $20. I was pretty happy to walk with that from the table, as blackjack isn’t my game.

So after a little more than an hour and a half, we check back in at the poker room… and we’re told it’s going to be another hour and a half. Screw that. We left, but not before hitting the cage and cashing out. And thank God, they changed us out Canadian dollars to American money. Score.

Today, we’ve got a day game, and then we’re driving back to Turning Stone in Verona. I can only hope the Sox can pull one of these three out. I don’t really like the prospect of driving a total of 20 hours to watch the Sox get swept, so maybe Beckett can best Halladay later today.