First was a quick trip to one of those automated, brushless car washes. The name of the joint was Terrible’s and all I can say is that this place was named amazingly well – the car wash was absolutely terrible! The poor quality of the automated wash added one more destination for our day: stop #2 – another car wash… For the second wash, I decided to stop in at one of those “wash it yourself with our hose and brush” spots that just happened to be located right next to the Terrible’s Auto Wash … great business planning by somebody as I’m sure they get quite a bit of business leaving their neighbor…
After all is said and done, I was able to get my car washed – twice, actually! She still wasn’t up to the admittedly high standard of cleanliness that I have set for Precious; but she was cleaner … not to mention that we still needed to drive to California the next day so lowering my acceptable cleanliness criterion seemed acceptable. Who knows how much filth she’ll be gathering on tomorrow’s trip…?Now granted, from the first paragraph of this post, I may have led you to be thinking that it was still rather early in the day. It actually wasn’t… I think it was going on 11:00am after completing the second car wash of the day. It’s all good though – Todd’s not much of a morning person and we both needed the rest. The slightly-later-than-expected start ended up working to our advantage as it was good preparation for the day/evening/night/morning that we were heading into. It was, after all, the only full day that we were planning on being in Vegas and I’m sure I don’t need to explain how these “one day in Vegas” trips usually end up…
Being that it was, however, a Saturday and banks don’t seem to enjoy opening for any useful hours on weekends; we then needed to find a Wells Fargo. I didn’t bring much actual cash with me (for some reason I thought I could just purchase chips with my debit card at the casinos … you can’t, by the way…) and had already burned through the maximum amount of money I allow myself (pre-meditated controls…) to withdraw from an ATM on any one day so I really needed to find a physical bank that would allow me to get some fundage. I was still thinking that I might be playing some of the higher-stakes poker, however I never did; but that’s cool … I was prepared…
This preparation was accomplished when we rather quickly found a Wells Fargo bank. The good news was that it was open – if I remember correctly, it was actually scheduled to be open most of the day – that’s Vegas for ya, I guess… Getting “in” the bank required the ability to quickly figure out the intricacies of a rather convoluted double, automatic, pressure/presence sensitive set of doors with a metal-detector in between; the bank, however, was open. On something like the 3rd of 4th attempt, I was able to enter the bank and withdraw a grand… I was prepared…
After visiting the bank it was a short trip back toward the car washes to get a bit of breakfast (or lunch depending on how strictly you associate named meals with times of day…).
Not that car washes are known for having great food available … there was this restaurant, felipitos, that we saw earlier that looked like it had some decent, rather inexpensive meals. It was here that we finally purchased some food. Heck, now that I think about it, I think this might have been the only actual meal that I ate that day … I believe Todd grabbed something at some small eatery in Treasure Island just prior to the “Bounty Hunter” tournament; but I can’t seem to recall eating another actual meal until just after checking out of our hotel. Seems like I should probably get back to eating on a more regular schedule – but I digress – this story’s about Vegas … not my irregular eating habits…So we ate our rather authentic Mexican lunches and headed out toward the strip. Todd really wanted to stop,
but I was able to convince him that we probably shouldn’t stop at the Liberace Museum (not an easy task – Todd just seems to LOVE Liberace…) and we continued past toward the strip. Upon checking the tournaments for the day on my cached web pages the night before, I had decided to park at Caesar’s Palace and hoof it from there to the various casinos we were planning on checking out. It was then just a bee-line (if the bee were disoriented and apt to fly routes in a completely indirect manner) to the Caesar’s Palace garage followed by an admittedly lengthy ordeal at finding an available parking spot. We did, however, find one – on the top floor, near the back…A bit of a side note here: I highly recommend the Caesar’s Palace
garage if you are parking a vehicle that you are a bit concerned about. I’m not sure if many other casinos in Vegas do the same (the list of one’s that don’t includes the Flamingo, the Palms, the Rio and New York, New York…) but at Caesar’s Palace you are required to show a valid picture ID to a live guard upon entering. Whether this equates to any sort of improved security or is merely a “feel good” extra for their patrons remains unknown to me … however, I saw it as a rather nice touch…The first tournament I was interested in checking out was, according to the information I found online, a $330 buy-in tourney at Casear’s. It was scheduled to be starting at noon – which, by the time we finally arrived at the poker room, was quickly approaching – and was supposed to be a very good “Skill Level 6” event. The thing that interested me the most was that players started with a $10,000 chip-stack which made it a more skill-oriented tournament as opposed to the BINGO-esque free-for-alls that often arise in the tournaments where the starting stacks aren’t sufficient to cover the quickly increasing blinds. Add to that the 40-minute blind levels and this tournament sounded pretty good to me…
Unfortunately, due to the scheduling of the World Series of Poker circuit events, this weekly tournament wasn’t running. There were several WSOP tournaments that we could have played; however paying the cost required to possibly win a seat into a tournament that we weren’t even assured we could attend (life has its way of interfering with spur-of-the-moment planning…) seemed a bit silly. We decided to try our luck elsewhere and headed out toward the Mirage.
To be honest, I don’t even remember checking the poker room at the Mirage. I’m sure we did although my lack of recollection tells me that we didn’t find anything playable there… We basically did the tourist thing at the Mirage – walked around a bunch, saw the large
aquarium behind what appeared to be the hotel registration desk (at least that’s what I believe I remember…), checked out a few of the interesting bars and attractions and spent some time near the Beatles, Summer of Love – Cirque de Soleil gift shop. We didn’t attend the show and, from what Todd has told me he heard from several that did, didn’t miss out on much – as far as Cirque de Soleil shows go, the Beatles aren’t quite the right material… We then decided to head over to the Treasure Island tram (one of the few no-cost travel conveyances left in Vegas). After arriving at the Treasure Island Casino, we quickly found their poker room and headed in to check out the possibilities…Treasure Island has a rather interesting, somewhat low-cost tournament run on Saturday evenings – the “Bounty Hunter” tournament.
I believe it’s actually run every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 7:00pm and is a standard no-limit Hold’em tournament with a bit of a twist. The buy-in is $125 with a $25 fee and the prize-pool is split 50/50 between the top 10% finishers and bounties. The way the bounties are paid is that every player in the tournament has a $50 bounty on their head – knock anybody out and you instantly claim the $50. This gives an opportunity to make the money without actually “making the money” … you could, theoretically, win back all or some of your buy-in without even making it to the prize payout. It’s an interesting twist and a rather decent tournament for your standard weekend visitor…Todd and I decided to buy-in to the “Bounty Hunter” tournament, plopped down the $125 and received our starting seat assignments. Of course, since it was only early afternoon at the time, we needed to eat up the remaining several hours before the start of the game… We decided to check out Vegas a bit and began the activity that is ever-so-popular in Vegas – walking…
We headed over to the Wynn, waited a bit on a bus to take us to the north end of the strip – and perhaps downtown –
that never came, walked past the Palazzo (apparently a newer extension of the Venetian) and ended up at the poker room in the Venetian. The games at the Wynn were a bit too expensive for Todd (and, a bit more than I was comfortable playing at the time) but we were able to get a couple seats (this time on the same table) in a $1/$2 no-limit ring game at the Venetian. I bought-in for $300 and Todd, I believe, for $200 and we ended up spending the remaining time prior to the “Bounty Hunter” tournament here. As poker usually goes, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride … I was up, down, even … until the last hand I played…I had been playing for at least a couple hours thus far – Todd, unfortunately, was out. The table had the usual cast of characters – the kid with the horseshoe stuck up his ass that kept getting slapped in
the face with the deck (he had recently left the table), the guy playing with his poor girlfriend stuck watching (she must not have been a player and he was trying to impress her with his poker prowess…), the aggressive guy that I was patiently waiting to spank and a few obvious tourist fishes that really shouldn’t have been sitting there. I was back to my starting stack of around $300 when I was dealt a pocket pair of 7’s. Nothing to get too excited about – just a mid pair; however I was the big-blind and the miniscule raise made by the aggressive guy pre-flop wasn’t enough to get me out. I called the additional $5 in order to see a flop…The flop that came was pretty good for me – ace, king, seven … none suited… I was first to act and decided to try to trap the aggressive guy – I checked it. This was quickly followed by a $5 bet from Mr. Aggressive and a call from one of the remaining fish. Excellent – my trap worked. I “hesitantly” raised the bet to $10 which Mr. Aggressive quickly took to $15 and the fish came along for the ride. I went “all-in” (somewhere around $300) and was called by both. This brought the pot up to a bit over $700 (I had more money than both remaining players) and all betting was over with…
Now the rules for ring games are varied depending on casinos. At the Venetian during a ring game, an all-in player doesn’t need to show his/her cards until after the river is dealt. It allows people to “save face” on stupid plays as well as creates a game where bluffing is a bit more fostered. Since my goal was to spank the ultra-aggressive guy in this hand (nothing bothers me more than machismo-induced, hyper-aggression – and it seems to me that the airing of the WSOP on ESPN has increased the likelihood of running into this type of player several-fold…) I decided not to wait for the river and slowly turned my pair of 7’s over…
After a few choice words and a lot of excited emotional spasms, Mr. Aggressive slapped down his Big Slick. I think all the fish had was an ace-nothing which, of course, lowered Mr. Aggressive’s already miniscule number of outs to three. After the remaining cards were dealt, my two opponents were busted and I pulled in a profit of $417 on that one hand. That actually ended up being my final hand at that game as Todd and I needed to get back to TI for the “Bounty Hunter” – it was scheduled to be starting in a bit over a half hour…
I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for the rest of this story as I’ve written all I’m going to for this day. Thanks for reading my silly little adventures and remember to come back for the remainder of this trip – you can learn what not to do in Vegas… Actually, who am I kidding? I think the Vegas lessons have already been taken by most … whether or not they are ever “learned” remains the unknown. Heck, I’m sure I’ll be signing up for the course again in the near future … perhaps in late June…bis später,
Coriolis
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