Sic Bo is sick... (KL/Genting 20th Dec - 22th Dec)

I went on a road trip with de, dan and zj to Kuala Lumpur and Genting Highlands over the last weekend. This is second time I’ve driven my car to KL in two months!

The drive up was pretty nice. In fact, I actually quite like driving long distances! Maybe it’s because it gives me a sense of space… like the world is so big… it’s a bit lame but I really do feel this way!

At KL, we pretty much did the same things I did a month ago… which is shopping at Sungei Wong, then singing KTV at Green Box at Sungei Wong. We stayed at the Swiss Garden Hotel this time, which is one notch higher class than the Alpha Genesis Hotel I stayed last month. Both rooms were quite ok for a one night's stay but de and I got upgraded to a deluxe twin room at Swiss Garden and there’s free internet in the deluxe rooms! The breakfast is definitely much better than Alpha Genesis. I guess all in all, both hotels are quite a fair value for what you pay for.

The more interesting part of the trip is when we drove up to Genting Highlands on Sunday. Genting Highlands is only about an hour’s drive away from KL and is the place to be if you like casinos! (Nowhere close to the glitter of Las Vegas but hey… this is the only one land casino in Southeast Asia)

After learning a lot from my master’s program at NUS, I decided to put to test, the fairness of the game of Sic Bo (Big – Small). The odds given by wizard of odds (see www.wizardofodds.com) are 48.11% chance for Big, and similar for Small. The remaining % is for triples (Chinese call it ‘Leopard’). After sitting down for 100 games on the big dice machine (the only big dice Sic Bo machine), I recorded 48 Bigs, 48 Smalls and 4 Triples. Uncanny but the odds are really quite accurate!

Unfortunately, this statistics experiment didn’t make me any richer and I ended down a couple of hundreds. It seems like our yearly pilgrimage (we last went in October 2007!) always end in a defeat. But this year was fun… thanks to the Fire and Ice slot machine! De’s lurk-behind-the-losing-aunties strategy worked so well for me that I managed to claw back half of what I lost at Sic Bo! I even got an ‘Ice’ jackpot (which is really small anyway… we really want the ‘Fire’ with 5 digits payout!)

Overall the trip was great fun! Good travel buddies always makes good trips… so now we want to go Bintan next!