Officially Made Platinum

My flight out to Denver this weekend officially got me to 60 segments for 2010. Not bad for having my first flight this year in May.

Next year should be a bit easier - for one thing, I'll be starting in January. So that should help out right there. I should need 15 trips to retain my status in 2012. (I get at least 4 segments per trip, 15 * 4 = 60 segments).

I also maintained by Hilton status, but that needed a bit of trickery as well. Hilton Diamond is achieved through either 28 stays (a check-in at a hotel) or 60 nights. I only had 58 nights, but I was able to get 32 stays - a couple trips I jumped hotels to get closer to an airport for the flight, or something along those lines.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tasker: Get Voice Command

The way I decided to set up Tasker is to use some reusable tasks that can be called from other places. The first one I'll talk about is the Get Voice Command. This task listens for some stock commands like "yes", "no", "cancel", or "repeat". It is a quicker listener than the "Get Voice Input" command which I'll talk about in another post. This is meant some some quick one or two word commands. It uses regular expressions to match commands (meaning, you can say "yep" or "yeah" or "yes sir" and it will return "yes"). Being generic like this means that I don't have to duplicate all these regular expressions everywhere. I can just call this task and if it returns "yes", then I know the user (me) said something like "yes" or "yeah" or whatever. There's an input parameter to the task of the message to speak before listening for the answer. The task will re...
Read more

Blackjack Streak House Advantage

One of the side bets you can play at several casinos in Black Hawk is called "streak". This is a bet where you get paid if you win that many hands in a row (2, 3, 4, or 5). How much is the casino advantage on this game? Well, it all depends on the payout. There are several factors in play, but as a general rule you can assume that the odds of winning one hand in blackjack streak is 47.51% (or .4751) - thanks to Wizard of Odds for that. So the odds of winning "x" hands in a row are .4751^x, which is .22572 for 2 hands, .1072396 for 3 hands, .0509495 for 4 hands, and .0242061 for 5 hands. If you take that number, multiply by the amount you get if you win a streak of that size, and then subtract from 1, you will get the casino advantage. A typical streak pay scale is 3, 8, 18, and 38. So, for a streak of 2, the casino advantage is 1-(.22572*4)=0.09712 (9.71%). For a streak of 3, it's 3.48%. For 4, it's 3.196%. For 5, it's 5.596%. So the best bets are strea...
Read more

Picking 87 NCAA Basketball Games

My friend Tim and I picked 87 NCAA basketball games against the spread on Saturday. We alternated picks - first I would pick one, then he would pick one. Once a pick was made, the other person was automatically the "house" for that pick (meaning, you automatically had to take the other side). The way the picks were made, you wanted to make the ones you were most confident about early (before the other person had a chance to pick it). We made the picks in 3 waves - morning games, afternoon games, and night games. There were 24 morning games, 35 afternoon games, and 28 night games based on our breakdowns. In the morning games, Tim was 4-7-1 and I was 8-4. Our "top half" (picks 1 through 6 for this set) were both 2-4, however. That means I was 6-0 in the games lower down the list (ones I was basically guessing). In the afternoon games, Tim was 8-10 and I was 6-11. Our "top half" (1-9) picks were both 2-7. Again, we did better on the ones where we were guessin...
Read more