So Zeebabar does trip reports, so why shouldnt I? As many of you know, I have been working 2 jobs delivering pizzas and being a lab monkey for several years now. In 2019 through now I kicked it into overdrive working 100 hour weeks on a regular basis. I managed to save up a bankroll of 80,000$ a few weeks ago.

I am a contractor at my lab job so they required I take a month off. Since I had a decent bankroll I decided to hit the road the entire month and do a hail Mary. Since I live in the south, i was planning on hitting every casino in North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas (about 50 in total).

I have never played at this level and immediately ran into several problems as a result. First of all, carrying around tens of thousands of dollars is beyond stressful. Secondly, figuring out which spread to use on the varying games (some DD some shoe, some S17 some H17). It took me nearly the first 2 weeks of my month off just to get ready for my road trip. I was initially exhausted from working so much for so long the first week was just catching up on sleep. The second week became a mad dash to create a spread for all the games I would find as well as remember the indices (catch 63) for these games. I settled on a 2×50 -2×500 spread for DD and a 1×25- 2x500 spread for shoe. I also create a "universal" indices chart that kind of averaged all the indice numbers since I use hi low for shoe and halves for DD (the numbers are very similar). I also made a point to separate the S17 and H17 blatant differences (for example in H17 the standing indices for stiffs 15 and 16 vs dealer 7,8,9,X,A are much lower than the corresponding S17 indices). So long story short, the first 2 weeks flew by and I wasnt even on the road yet.

I finally hit the road the 3rd week. I played about 30 hours in North Carolina and Tunica. It was a great start. I immediately went up 10k in NC and decided to move on. I get to tunica and lost 12k but immediately got it all back. Then I slowly climbed to a high of +24k. Unfortunately, this became the end for me. I continued playing into the week (big mistake) and lost a few thousand back and get backed off. So I'm up 20k but now I'm fliered and done in Mississippi. I continue driving around Mississippi but realize the vast majority of the small casinos would never dream of taking my 2×500 action. Feeling exhausted and defeated, I retreated back to Atlanta after a week on the road and 30 hours played. I only generated about 6k of EV so my 20k win was definitely not deserved.

There are a few lessons I learned. The biggest one is that playing at purple chip level (as max bet) is an ENTIRELY new beast. I was lucky with the variance but just the process of carrying around tens of thousands of dollars in your pants and shirt pockets is so stressful and draining. I was so paranoid of being shorted by the dealers I was constantly counting my chips over and over again which definitely wore me down faster. I even caught a dealer trying to short me 500$ (he stacked the chips only 4 high instead of 5 high, for 5 stacks and counted them as 5 high). If I didnt count my chips down before I colored up I might have not caught it. I was fortunate enough to have 1500$ in dealer mispays, all from purple chips wins being paid out too generously. Finding casinos tolerant enough to take my action in the south was a real challenge. People make fun of Smallcap for tapping out but the real reason he had such bad variance is he is forced to use a very tight spread and extreme betting cover just to get any action down on the table. Betting at this level also requires extensive travel and flying to different parts of the country, all which involve substantial travel expenses which only increase ROR.

In summary, I was definitely disappointed at only getting 30 hours in. Winning 20,000$ shot my bankroll up so that I'm at about 110,000$ right now. Probably will plan to do another trip soon, but will definitely not be returning to Mississippi any time soon.