Choctaw Casino

We are at the Choctaw Casino KOA RV resort for our spring South-Central Coaches for Christ rally. We were last here in October, 2014, with Miss Daisy, for a fall South-Central Coaches for Christ rally right after the South-Central Area Rally in Shreveport. We were so brand new to all things RVing then! This time, we are "co-hosts-in-training", AKA, I think Darline wants us to be ready to host rallies in the future - uh oh!!!

We got checked into the RV park on Wednesday, even though the rally doesn't actually start until Thursday at supper time. We are going to help Darline and George in any way we can - we (and others) helped carry things in from their coach and car this evening. While others who are also here went out for Italian food, we decided to head over to the casino since we had not visited it when we were here before.

When we checked in to the RV park, the guy at the desk told us that there was a free shuttle. We kinda figured we could walk it, but having dealt with being at conferences in casino hotels in Las Vegas, we thought it might be safer to take the shuttle because it was likely we'd be walking a lot when we got there. Dwayne had looked up eating options; often the buffet is a good deal in casinos, but the price on the website was showing $18.99 per person - that didn't sound like all that good of a deal. But, what's this? they have a $11.99 price for "Rewards Club Members". We are good at joining rewards clubs at grocery stores - how much harder could it be at a casino?

We headed over on the shuttle, and found the place to get our rewards club card right away. In addition to providing a discount at the buffet, it came with $10 "bonus" for free play at a slot machine. We weren't real sure about that, but started walking around. We found a non-smoking area of the casino that seemed to have some machines where we might be able to use our "free play", but decided to look for a place for dinner first. We walked past most (maybe all) of the restaurant options, and finally decided to go for the buffet.

The buffet was good - lots of choices. We both got a steak which, while a bit tough, was very tasty, as well as several other options off the buffet.

Then we decided we should go ahead and use our free play $10. We went back to the non-smoking area, and were wandering around trying to figure out where we could use the cards that the lady in the rewards club signup had given us. Patti finally asked a lady who was playing if these were "slot machines" and where the card could go, and she pointed to a spot at the top of the machine where we could put the card in. It turned out that there was a guy who worked at the casino there close-by, so he explained that we could "download" $5 or $10 to any of the machines, but then we could not take that money out, though we could take any of our "winnings". We had decided to play the nickel slots to make our $10 last as long as possible.

Patti started out, and with her $5 downloaded to the machine, probably took out about $0.20 in "winnings". Dwayne did a lot better with his first $5, taking out probably about $3. Patti then used her second $5 and Dwayne his second $5. We only spent the $10 we were each "given" as bonus for free play, taking any winnings out as cash back coupons. We are cheap (or frugal)! Once we cashed all our cash-back coupons, we had $13.75 which were our "winnings" from the $20 that the casino had originally given us. We figured our net was that our two buffets cost us about $15 - which was an ok investment!

We don't think we will ever be tempted to gamble - we learned a very basic lesson about how the house always has an edge many years ago when we were in Curacao. We had signed up for a "night life" tour from the resort where we were staying; they took us around town in a van. One of the things given to us was that each person got a ticket that we could play at the roulette wheel in the casino that they took us to. As I recall, there were 4 couples in the van. The lady from the resort asked us before we left the van if any of us had played roulette before. None of us had. She suggested that the wife put her ticket on red, and the husband on black, and one would win and one would lose, and we would then have played the game. So the 8 of us walk into the casino and stand around watching the roulette wheel. One couple screwed up their courage and the wife put her ticket on red and the husband on black, one of them won (so had two "chits") and the other one lost. So immediately, the other 3 couples all found their courage, put one on red and one on black, the wheel was spun, and it came up double-zero, which is green, not red or black, so we all lost!!! What a terrific lesson for us to know that the house always has an edge!