My 2010 W.S.O.P. Story

I’m back in California; touched down Saturday afternoon; woke up early that morning in my suite at the Rio. I finished my first trip to the World Series of Poker a bit lighter in my net worth however quite a bit more experienced with this game called poker… It was an interesting trip…

Now don’t get me wrong – I did not play the “Main Event” … that doesn’t even begin until early next month. I did, however – as mentioned in my last blog – enter into the WSOP #30 Tournament – a $1500 buy-in, no-limit Hold’em tournament scheduled to run for three days (last Wednesday through Friday). Unfortunately for me, it was over in about 3 hours and 15 minutes. I was eliminated not long after the first break…

I was a bit bummed out; mainly because I had nobody to blame but myself. I’ll be the first to admit that I played my cards (as horrible as they were) poorly and basically bust out of the tournament on some very questionable maneuvers. I ended up losing it all attempting to avoid becoming a rather early short-stack forgetting the well-known adage, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” I doubt I’ll be making that mistake again anytime soon…

I arrived in Vegas early Tuesday evening – flew jetBlue from Burbank to Vegas. This was a great idea as flying out of Burbank ended up being so much nicer than flying from LAX. First off, the 45 minute flight only ran me $125 round-trip. Now that’s a bargain! The best part of it, however, was the lack of crowd at the Bob Hope Airport. I’m sure the fact that it was a Tuesday afternoon had a lot to do with the smaller crowds; however every time I’ve flown out of LAX has been a madhouse. Flying out of Burbank actually felt like air travel used to be – simple and easy…

Upon arrival I contacted Sam and let him know I was in town. You see, Sam was there basically for the same reason I was – event #30. He was also staying at the Rio and I figured we could hang out together during this trip – whilst not busy with the tournament that is… He was out having dinner when I arrived so we made plans to meet up a bit later and I hopped on a shuttle for the Rio.

The first thing I did upon arriving at the Rio was get signed-in for the #30 tournament. I needed to get a tournament receipt from one of the official 57 events in order to get the WSOP discount on my suite – brought the price down to $69/night Tuesday through Thursday and $169 for Friday night. I’m actually not sure how much of a savings this is compared to the standard room rates however I do know that it’s $80 less than the pre-entrant rates I was quoted when I booked the room. Whatever the case, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Of course signing up for the tournament required a Harrah’s Total Rewards card … so I guess signing up for the tournament was the second thing I did after obtaining my Total Rewards card (I got the WSOP version).

One thing I’ve got to make perfectly clear to anybody who hasn’t been there – the WSOP is a huge event at the Rio! The entire Convention Way section of the hotel is completely devoted to the World Series. They’ve got tons of tables set up in both the Rio Pavilion and Amazon rooms for the myriad of games always underway, a WSOP store to buy your trinkets and memorabilia, a not-so-spectacular cafeteria for the players to get their much needed nourishment during the oft-time short breaks for food, a “Bad Beat Bar” to help numb the pain when your opponent sucks out on the river and lots of displays of the former year winners and current all-star players. It’s actually quite interesting when you realize that anybody willing to front the buy-in cash can partake in this madness. It’s like being at the Hall of Fame with a ticket to play. Of course I still hadn’t got my ticket … now where, exactly, would one sign up for these games…?

It didn’t take long before I was directed to the registration room. This, of course, is where I paid my $1500 for a buy-in to the no-limit Hold’em tournament scheduled to begin the next day at noon. I then took the small hike back to the hotel registration and checked into my room with the proper receipt for the price reduction, stopped by my room to unpack – of course unpacking my one little duffle-bag didn’t take long – purchased some needed essentials from the gift shop and headed down to Rio’s standard poker room. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some practice in the night before my expensive (for me, anyway … the Main Event’s buy-in is ten grand!) tournament started…

Things went pretty well that first night. I sat down at a $1-$3 no-limit Hold’em table with $300. A little while later, Sam arrived and joined me at the same table. It was your standard small-blind, no-limit ring game – a couple “calling stations” that were getting hit in the face with the deck long enough for them to become large stacked, a number of rocks that basically lived there (talking with the dealers like they were long-time buddies…) and Sam and I – patiently waiting to put a hurt on the calling stations… I ended that roller-coaster ride of a night up $225. My patience paid off as I was able to get large sums from both our targets…

Now to briefly diverge from my story, one more bad aspect about me going to Vegas is the urge it gives me to smoke. You see, I quit smoking “cold turkey” last August. And if you know me well enough, you’re well aware of exactly how difficult an accomplishment that actually was. Suffice it to say that last August was NOT a good month for me (nor have been pretty much every month since, but that’s a whole different rant…). The one good thing that came from then was that I actually did quit smoking. Sure, I’ve had this completely unexplainable issue with sporadic claudication since then (very interesting as smoking is listed as a main cause for that … and I had just recently quit…) and my life has become nothing more than an ever-agonizing struggle to pry my pathetic ass out of bed every morning; but at least I quit smoking! I think I burned through a pack a day in Vegas. I gave what I had left (about ¾ of a pack) to some dude that was smoking outside the airport upon leaving and haven’t smoked any since; however the time spent in Vegas was definitely not healthy for me. It’s just so hard to ignore the cute “cigar, cigarette” girls… Now I get to experience the excitement of going “cold turkey” again … nothing like a good challenge, huh…? Anyway, back to what I was originally talking about…

So that first night was a positive sign of good things to come, right…? Well, not exactly. You see, that was the only time I left that poker room in the black. I ended up playing there quite a bit – basically due to the fact that I wasn’t spending nearly as much time as I had hoped in the main tournament I came to play – but, apart from that first night, it always ended up costing me. I will say this: If you go to Vegas, don’t go alone. Being alone in Vegas with nothing to do can become quite expensive. Heck, being in Vegas at all can become quite expensive; but not having someone else there to be a voice of reason can really cost you. Sure, I suppose if I were a normal functioning male of our species, I could spend my free-time (and what I’m sure would end up being some of my money as well…) hitting on the throngs of beautiful women that seem to flock there basically looking to be bad; but, as anyone who knows me knows, I do not possess the required skills. No … what I end up doing is primarily playing poker; and when I’m done with that (usually signaled by losing all the money I sat down with – sometimes a bit more…) perhaps sitting at a penny-slot smoking a cigarette (and I don’t even smoke…) and partaking of as much free booze as I can. Don’t worry … I tip the beer maids…

The next morning I met up with Sam and his roommates for breakfast before the tourney. I believe, if memory serves me correctly, it was somewhere around 10:30 in the morning when we stopped off at the São Paulo Cafe. We got some breakfast, played a couple rounds of pick-20 Keno (Sam and I), paid our bill and picked up our Keno winnings (easily done as there weren’t any…), then headed out for a smoke prior to the start of the tournament. Sam and I parted ways here as I needed to take a leak (I didn’t need to go into the tournament with yet another distraction…) which was fine – I’d see him at the tournament. He was seated at table #70. I was assigned seat 4 on table #64.

I believe it was something like 20 minutes prior to the tournament start when I headed into the Rio Pavilion. Finding my table was easily accomplished and I was quite eager to get this thing started. I took my seat as soon as the announcement for my tournament was aired and chatted it up a bit with my table’s dealer and the dealer of the table directly next to mine (which just so happened to be table #70 – Sam’s table). Upon speaking with these guys, I quickly realized that the quality of dealers found at the WSOP is pretty much a crap-shoot. From what I was told, somewhere around 1000 dealers are brought in from all across the country for this event although that number steadily declines as the event goes forward. Apparently (now this is from the dealers I was speaking with) the pay basically sucks and Harrah’s has a bad habit of cheating the dealers out of the full 70% of the tips that they’re due. This makes it difficult for out-of-town dealers to justify being there as they need to pay for their stay with a large portion of the income received making any profit earned miniscule. Now I have absolutely no way to verify these claims; however this was basically from the horse’s mouth – although I can’t really say how “gruntled” these guys were… I would, however, experience the divergence of quality that such a system creates, first hand, soon enough…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this story, I didn’t last very long in this tournament. I lost all of my 4500 starting chips (please excuse the photos … I only had my phone with me and the camera on my phone sucks…) in a bit over 3 hours. In this short period of time, however, two rather major dealer errors were made on our table – and not too surprisingly, I was involved in both hands… The first faux pas happened very early. Position 1 went “all in” and I called. I don’t remember what the hands were, and it really doesn’t matter – if you’ve heard one “poker story” you’ve heard ‘em all – but the end result was that I won the pot. The error occurred after the hand when the dealer informed the poor guy in position 1 that my chip-stack had him covered. It didn’t – he actually had 200 chips left after the official count however he was never informed of this. He was already up from the table and out the door long before the floor was called over and an announcement was made for “position 1 on table #64” to “please return to your seat”. Not that it mattered too much as he was seriously short-stacked at that point. It was, however, “a chip and a chair” and we all know how that goes, right…?

Now the second blunder came shortly after the first break in play. I was having my usual luck (and admittedly not playing my “A” game) and was quickly becoming quite short. I needed to make a move soon if I wanted any chance to survive the marathon so I pushed “all in” with top-pair and a king kicker. I was called (interestingly enough by position 1 again … different guy, same seat…) and lost – outkicked by an ace – however this guy’s stack didn’t quite have me covered. Now the blunder occurred when the dealer was counting off the chip differential to see exactly how bad off I was. At the end, he sent 150 chips my way and was about to sweep the rest toward position 1 when the guy sitting at seat 2 said that he thought the dealer miscounted. The dealer ignored his plea and swept the pile. I, on the other hand, did not ignore his claim – I was very interested in discovering whether or not this statement was true. It was then that the guy sitting to my left (position 5) also said that he had doubts about the dealer’s count and I was getting less and less happy.

A strange thing occurred then. Position 1 had no problem with attempting to rectify the situation quickly – fair play is fair play, after all… Since nobody was exactly sure how much the count was off, position 1 offered me 300 chips. Position 2 was saying that he thought the dealer was off by somewhere around 500; however I was more than happy to take the 300 and let the game continue – either way I was very short in the tournament and had little hope of surviving much longer. Position 1 offering 300 as a quick solution seemed fair enough for me. However the dude in position 10 basically had a hissy-fit when I accepted the 300 chips offered. He slammed the table with his fist and made some sort of statement that what we were doing somehow was unfair for him. Bear in mind that this guy wasn’t in the hand, his chip stack wasn’t going to be affected in any way and the only thing that was happening was that I was going from 150 in chips to 450 – still very short at this point in the tournament. He, however, wasn’t going to allow this! The end result was that we wasted more of position 10’s time by calling over the floor and “re-playing” the hand. The result of this was that I ended up coming out of this with 750 chips. I’m sure this made position 10 feel much better about his stupidity…

He didn’t need to worry about me for long though; our table was broken down shortly after that fiasco and we were dispersed to separate tables. I still don’t know why that dude was so adamant about my chip-stack size – and I guess I never will – but he was safely away from me and free to get upset with somebody else from that point. I was moved to my final table and, within minutes, eliminated from the tournament.

So I guess I didn’t need the four nights I booked at the Rio. I could have easily flown in the morning of the tournament, dropped $1500 and made it back home in time for supper; but who knew? Ends up I needed to kill two and a half more days in Vegas. It’s a shame there weren’t any poker games to play. Oh wait, what am I talking about – it was the middle of the World Series of Poker – there are constantly games to be played…

One of the best games they had running was this daily Deep-Stack tournament that started at 1:00pm. It was only $200 to buy-in and started you off with 15,000 chips. Other than the large stating chips, the structure was identical to the main event I played with all of the time periods cut in half. It was, at the time, not being capped on number of players and was running through to the wee hours of the next day’s morn. There were over 400 in the Deep-Stack game on the day I played my main event. I would probably have played it after getting knocked out if I hadn’t lasted long enough to miss the buy-in window; however I would now need to wait until Thursday to give the Deep-Stack a shot. I headed back to the regular Rio poker room to waste away the rest of that day…

And waste it away is exactly what I did. I dropped something like $500 playing the $1-$3 no-limit ring game for quite a few hours and then signed up for the nightly turbo tournament that they were running on this set of four or five tables they had set up directly outside of the poker room. The tourney began at 9:00 and, being a turbo tournament, finished something like 3 or 4 hours afterward. It was only $80 to play and I survived to the final two tables. Didn’t make the money, but it was a decent way to eat up the remaining time before hitting the sack. After all, I was planning on playing the Deep-Stack the next day…

I woke the next morning quite early. I believe it was prior to 9:00 when I headed back to the São Paulo Cafe for some breakfast … alone this time. Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering how Sam came out in the tournament, he didn’t make the money either. He did last longer than me – I think it was an hour or two after my elimination when I received his call – but neither of us succeeded in our goal of getting filthy rich by playing a silly game … perhaps next year…? At breakfast, however, my luck seemed to be changing. Since I had time to kill, I picked up a Keno card, marked off three numbers (5,10 and 25) and put $20 down as four $5 rounds. As I was eating my breakfast, I hit all three numbers on the first round; two numbers on rounds 2 and 3; and only hit one on the last draw – I collected $220 for my $20 bet! Not a bad start to the day as I had successfully won my buy-in to the Deep-Stack tournament!

That, unfortunately – apart from the $10 I won at a “Crazy-4 Card Poker” table and the $1.25 I pocketed at the airport playing video poker before my flight home – was the last winnings I would see on this trip. I did decent in the Deep-Stack – lasted 8½ hours getting knocked out just before racing off the black (100’s) chips – but missed the money by less than 70 people – not bad considering 717 people started that tournament… I tried it (the Deep-Stack) again on Friday where they capped the entrants at 200 but only made it 2 hours before being unlucky enough to flop a boat. (Yes, you read that correctly – “unlucky” enough to flop a boat…)

All in all, it was a rather expensive trip for me. I think I’m going to be heading back next year!

bis später,

Coriolis

A Bit of a Funk

So … a bit of an update on that ever-exciting world of online dating. In one word – useless.

I posted a blog article a few weeks ago that basically outlined my initial attempts at using Chemistry.com to perhaps find a date. I have since tried my best to remain positive and hopeful that the procedure outlined would, in time, produce positive results. Unfortunately, I am now realizing that “positive” results was far too optimistic of an expectation. I have basically been getting somewhat sporadic results in general and the number that I would consider “positive” stills remains zero.

Here’s a warning for anybody that thinks these dating sites are packed with honest-to-goodness real people, like yourself, that are interested in meeting someone new – they’re not. What they are filled with is countless fake identities set up as Internet-fishing schemes. Of course I only have my experience on Chemistry.com to go by; however I’m prone to think that things would be similar at the other sites as well.

Although it took quite a while for the scam responses to start arriving – I had been implementing my routine for over a month prior to the onslaught – they are now hitting my account at a rate of several per day. And they all look pretty much the same. It’s always a “lady” giving some sort of extremely general compliment about my profile followed by some seriously stupid explanation as to why she never logs onto the site and that I should email her at her personal email address (which, by the way is always a {random.crap.name}@yahoo.com). Without fail, these accounts end up becoming “no longer available” in a few days as the scams get reported to Chemistry.com which gets me to wondering why they were sent to me as possible matches to begin with…? Perhaps because I was stupid enough to pay the fee required for a six-month membership at Chemistry.com and they want it to appear that I didn’t waste my money. But I’m not fooled – that money was most definitely wasted.

And speaking of wasting money, I headed back to the Commerce Casino yesterday. On Sundays they have this decent little $65 buy-in tournament (with a $50 re-buy option) that I had played once before. I figured that, if nothing else, it would be a nice little warm up for the WSOP tourney that I’m going to be playing later this week at the Rio in Vegas. Now, granted, the scale of these two tournaments has a large delta (WSOP tourney #30 has 60-minute blind levels, is expecting to be seating over 2000 players and is scheduled as a 3-day tournament whereas the Commerce tournament has 20-minute blind levels, far less than 100 players and will easily finish in one afternoon) however my frequency of playing tournaments has gone down quite a bit since leaving Colorado where I used to waste quite a bit of time at the Denver Poker Tour games. Now the one thing I do know is that playing poker tournaments is like most skills where the finer details can fade with extended down-times. Of course the flip-side of that is also true where too much playing can hurt your play (especially in these low-buy-in tournaments – aka “free-rolls”) but I have no worries about that – I needed the practice as a refresher…

Unfortunately I didn’t get too much practice as flopping two-pair got me knocked out of the tournament right at the end of the first round. I thought the other guy was power-betting a flush draw with the two hearts that hit but was a bit shocked to find out that he was on the flush draw with an already made straight – bad play by me… The flush didn’t hit; unfortunately a straight usually beats two pair in most respectable casinos… Oh well, que sera sera … that’s poker. Unfortunately paying that $115 for the tournament (I did the re-buy right away so was unable to continue after my stupid play) ended up being a complete waste. Not only that, but the money I foolishly spent in a couple ring games before made the day a bit more expensive than I was hoping … but I’m just gonna rack all that crap up as the horrible ending of the horrible weekend I had.

I’m not a big fan of life right now. I sure hope things go a bit better in Vegas…

bis später,

Coriolis

A Typical Vegas Night

Okay … so where was I…? Oh yeah, Vegas. I had just completed a couple hours of poker resulting in a $417 profit (obtained on the last hand) and needed to get back (along with the Toddster) over to Treasure Island for the “Bounty Hunter” tournament that we bought into earlier in the day. I believe I may have ruffled a few feathers at the table when I announced I needed to leave directly after taking what was pretty much the biggest pot of the day; however time – she was a’tickin – as she so consistently does and I wasn’t about to miss a tournament that I had already paid the buy-in for … so, I left…

Todd and I rather quickly made our way back to Treasure Island (much quicker than I expected, in fact, as it was still something like a half hour before the tournament started when we arrived). Todd headed off to grab a bite to eat at one of the available eateries and I bought a rather expensive can of Red Bull (I forget how much I paid although I remember that it seemed quite overpriced at the time) and patiently waited for the start-time to arrive. I smoked a couple cigarettes (something that I no longer do … haven’t smoked since a week ago yesterday…), drank some Red Bull (needed the “wings” I guess…) and watched the ever-growing crowd of people line up for Cirque du Soleil’s Mystère show … it, as well as the “Bounty Hunter” tourney, was scheduled to begin at 7:00pm…

At 7:00 (well, a few minutes before…), Todd returned from his meal and we both took our assigned seats for the game. I wouldn’t be sitting in mine too long – I was eliminated shortly after the first break – however Todd fared much better and would be occupied for quite some time. This, of course, meant that I had some time to kill. Time to kill in Vegas can quickly become expensive for many … for me it actually became a bit profitable. I got bored just sitting there waiting for Todd to finish the tournament so I headed on out to the casino (you know – where they keep all those “one-arm bandits”) and did something that I don’t usually do … I started playing slot machines…

You see, I’ve never quite understood the allure of slots. After all, these machines are basically nothing more than computers programmed to take your money and they (the casinos) don’t even bother to hide this fact. They actually use signs stating something like “98% return on our slots!” to lure in their victims. I understand exactly what that means – it means that you are pretty much guaranteed to walk away from these machines poorer by 2% of the money you play. How is this an incentive? And, if you factor in that – on the rare occasion – somebody’s going to hit big and walk away with many times the amount they were playing, it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to realize that it’s going to take a heck of a lot of people walking away with nothing to keep that median payout at a mere 98%. But I guess that’s the dream – to be the one that causes these losses to be necessary. I was, however, bored … so I thought I’d attempt to be “that guy”…

I wasn’t “that guy” – I never hit anything huge; however I was able to walk away with some profit. I started at a few quarter machines – turned ten bucks into twenty five, another ten into nothing, the twenty five into some smaller amount (I wasn’t really keeping track – just cashing out and pocketing any profits made and considering the busts bad choices at machines…) and finally decided to try out one of those dollar machines. It was a typical slot machine in that you could bet various amounts (1-3 dollars) per spin and, of course, your winnings would have slightly higher proportional payouts if you chose to gamble more. And it had a special “hit” on the third wheel that would let you play the bonus game. The bonus on this machine was a Deal or No Deal type game where you would get offered an amount of money that you could choose to accept or deny on up to four chances. If you denied the first three, you were forced to take the fourth offer. Being that it was a dollar machine, the offers were pretty good. I was actually lucky enough to hit the game somewhere around 4 or 5 times and never ended up taking less than $35 … not bad on a $1 spin…

So basically I sat there playing with any bills I had that were less than $100 until I collected payouts of more than $100. I then headed over to the cashier and got the money and returned to the same machine to play with any new sub-$100 bills until $100+ was won again. It was a nice way to waste some time – I played slowly, smoked a few cigarettes and had a few drinks “on the house” – and I actually walked away with something like $70 in profit (may have been more … may have been less … I really don’t remember…). In time, Todd emerged from the poker room and found me…

The good news was that he was able to place 5th (if memory serves me correctly) in the tournament! The bad news was that payouts began at 3rd … the even worse news was that he didn’t succeed in collecting any bounties either. So basically his results were the same as mine (complete loss of the buy-in) even though it took him a few more hours to achieve the loss. He wasn’t happy about this… But, that’s poker. Especially with tournaments … it can often be a long trip to nowhere… The night, however, was still young and we decided to head out…

We walked back to Caesar’s, hopped in the car and headed out for the Palms. There we paid for our free drinks by playing several slot machines. We both lost a decent amount (the figures have long since been forgotten by me) but did our best to make up for the losses in free drinks. In time we decided to head on over to the Rio where we did basically the same before deciding to return to the strip. I’m pretty sure we parked at Paris … pretty sure… Whatever the case, I remember us being at Paris. I also remember heading over to Harrah’s and briefly considering going to some sort of after-hours club that we couldn’t even get into – we were wearing sneakers which apparently wasn’t allowed… Come to think of it, the club wasn’t even in Harrah’s – it was located in that casino on the way to Harrah’s … it’s all pretty much a blur to me now…

One thing that I do remember is that we (Todd and I) must appear to be “easy money” to your standard Las Vegas prostitute. We’re not, mind you; however we sure as hell must appear to be since they were approaching us pretty much everywhere we went. I don’t remember any at the Palms or the Rio; however they were out in full force once we returned to the strip. It was rather comical to see these women in action with little to no regard for the police that were also there. I guess being a cop in Vegas is akin to being a child in a chocolate factory as far as vice is concerned… One lady approached us not more than 20 feet away from a couple of cops that were basically herding prostitutes like cattle. Sin City, indeed…

I think it was somewhere around 5 or 6 in the morning when Todd and I finally called it a night. After all, we still needed to drive the rest of the way to California later that day and we needed to check-out of the hotel by noon – amazingly enough, we were able to accomplish this. Getting Todd up before check-out was not easy (I ended up returning the key with Todd still in the room) but we did leave the hotel without getting penalized… We stopped off for breakfast (well, lunch as breakfast was no longer being served) at the surprisingly decent, extremely no-frills restaurant located at the Knights Inn. I think I had a BLT… It’s not important what I ate … I’m still amazed that I was able to function considering the lack of sleep I had recently had and amount of alcohol I had drunk the previous night. But, hey, it was Vegas; so we finished eating and drove on down to New York, New York … we wanted to see if they had a poker game…

In case anyone was interested in learning, they don’t. We walked around the casino looking for a poker room or at least a sign that might direct us to one; but completely failed in our quest. I even broke down and did a very un-manly thing by asking the lady at the information desk. Interestingly enough, New York, New York appears to not have gotten swept up in the poker craze of late – they do not offer any live poker games. We were directed to try either the Excalibur or the MGM Grand – both located directly across the street from NY, NY; one south and one east. We headed east, across one of the many pedestrian crosswalks, to the MGM Grand Casino. We knew there was poker there…

And with that, I’m going to end this installment of my little blog. Apart from losing around $50 playing poker at the MGM for a few hours and a drive from Vegas to Camarillo that took quite a bit longer than was expected (Sunday afternoon/evening is NOT when you want to be driving from Vegas back to California … traffic is pretty bad…), this also pretty much completes this story. Vegas always ends up being an interesting trip and I’ve already got my next trip to Vegas scheduled at the end of June. The plan’s to meet with my parents, introduce them to my new steady girlfriend, take in a performance of Cirque Du Soleil: Mystère at Treasure Island then drive back to my home in Colorado for –get this – an emissions test. Since it didn’t occur to me that I needed to get this done for this year’s registration, I failed to get an emissions test prior to driving Precious back to California. Now I get to drive back to Colorado in order to complete this task … followed shortly by yet another drive back to California… Precious is finally beginning to acquire a few miles.

bis später,

Coriolis

Vegas by Day

So that was day one of our little trip – a lot of driving, a little poker and some much needed sleep. I was down a little, Todd was up a little and we had one more full day (and night) left before we needed to leave on the remainder of our trip to California. I seem to remember that I woke rather early Saturday morning – a bit too early for Todd if all his bitching and moaning was taken as an indication. On my agenda for the day was to find a local Wells Fargo (get some cash), find a local car wash (Precious wasn’t looking her best…), get a bite to eat and head down to the strip in search of a decent game. Todd got over his morning grouchiness soon enough and we headed out to find the needed services…
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

Vegas, Baby...

A couple weeks ago, Todd and I had ourselves a little adventure. I had, as mentioned earlier, flown back to Colorado to participate in the DPT semi-finals, get myself a new tooth (in the form of a porcelain crown) and pick up my Firehawk. It was in the Firehawk that Todd and I would be driving back to California and Todd had a flight back to Colorado scheduled for the following Wednesday. Of course a road-trip from Colorado to southern California just wouldn’t be complete without a short stay at this quaint little city that we would be passing through on the way – Las Vegas! So we decided to book a room at the Knights Inn for Friday and Saturday nights.

It’s about a nine hour drive from Longmont to Vegas and we left bright and early Friday morning – I believe it was about 9:00am when we began the drive. I had gotten enough sleep the night before and was feeling pretty good – a large bonus as I would be the one driving. Todd, on the other hand, could’ve used a few more hours… It didn’t matter though, we were Vegas bound and there’s not much better for a couple of poker players on a mission…

Okay, so let me qualify that last statement a bit… I was more of the “poker player on a mission” than Todd. I’ve been earning a pretty good bankroll as of late with my job in California and figured that this might be a nice time to give some of the more substantial games a try … perhaps I would buy-in to a $500 tournament, maybe play some of the higher-stake ring games … you know, give this whole poker-for-a-living idea a real world test. You can’t go pro if you never actually start… As it ended up, however, I never really played anything big. In hind sight, this is probably a good thing – Todd’s bankroll was somewhat smaller than mine and he had the sense to stay within his means (as much as is possible in Vegas…). And since I didn’t want to abandon the guy in Vegas, I ended up staying within my means as well…

Our first stop on the journey ended up occurring at Copper Mountain, CO. We both were in need of a nicotine hit (no smoking is allowed in Precious…) and I figured I could top off the gas tank. Also, it was a nice place to pick up a Red Bull to keep my wits about me whilst driving through the wet and slushy portion of I-70 that we were currently traveling through – as fate would have it, a little snowstorm had just passed through this section the day before. Amazingly enough, my little sports car actually performed pretty well in these conditions – a nice surprise to a guy that had previously driven his old Z-28 into not one but two freeway dividing walls in the past during snowstorms… The only problem with this first stop was the realization that we didn’t dress appropriately for it – it was 29° F at that stop and we were basically wearing jeans and T-shirts, standing outside the vehicle, quickly sucking down cigarettes and risking frost bite. It was a pretty good way to wake up though…

After a quick stop in Glenwood Springs for a bite to eat at Burger King, it was just a bit of driving … and driving … and driving … through a rather large portion of Utah and a rather small portion of Arizona before our next meal stop in Mesquite, Nevada. There was a $4.99 prime rib dinner in Mesquite – how could we pass that up? The best part about this stop – apart from the surprisingly good cheap meal – was that I was finally able to get in touch with my newly acquired girlfriend. Okay, so we weren’t technically “boyfriend/girlfriend” yet … heck, we weren’t even officially dating; however after leaving a couple voice messages on a couple unsuccessful contact attempts and not getting the anticipated return call from my new female interest, I must admit that I was beginning to worry. That just seems to be my luck in the relationship department – I finally meet somebody that I honestly connect with and she dies in some horrible twist of fate before we’re even able to explore the possibilities… Turns out she left her cell phone at home and I was able to contact her at her place of employment after the prime rib dinner. I was relieved, recently fed and excited to complete the 80-some miles left to Vegas. We easily covered the remaining distance in less than an hour…

The sun was setting as we arrived in Vegas. Unfortunately, I was quite a bit worn from the drive. But that didn’t matter – we were in Vegas! The first task at hand was to check-in to our extravagant hotel. (Don’t let the sarcasm pass you by … the Knights Inn is basically a dive. When in Vegas though, a hotel usually becomes just a place to crash and, to a certain extent, pretty much anything will suffice. The Knights Inn approached this extent rather precariously…) After some poor navigation by myself, we found the hotel, checked in and – in what was obviously a bad choice due to my worn condition – headed out to the strip to find a ring game…

Now this was a bit of contention between me and Todd – not the poker game, but how we were going to get to the strip… You see, driving Precious around the mean streets of Vegas with all the insane, possibly drunk tourists was not – I’ll repeat that for emphasis, NOT! – something that I was looking forward to. Todd – having really nothing to lose in the ordeal – just didn’t seem to understand my concern. Okay, he probably understood it, but he sure as hell gave me shit for having it. I finally gave in when we checked the shuttle schedule at the Knights Inn – best described as “not very often nor very late”. That and the realization that my car would probably be much safer in one of the larger casino/hotel’s parking structures than in the parking lot of the Knights Inn eased my concern a bit. We parked Precious near the top of the Flamingo’s garage…

We then set off to find ourselves a game. The Flamingo had one seat open on a $1/$2, no-limit table however, rather than wait for a second seat to become available, we decided to head on over to Harrah’s. Todd had played there before and thought the game was pretty good. Here we were able to find a seat for each of us (on different tables – no sense taking each other’s money…) at their $1/$2, no-limit game and sat down with $300 (actually, I think Todd may have sat down with $200) in chips.

Todd did pretty well. I don’t remember the exact amount, but within an hour or so he got up from his seat and called it a day. I was down about half my stack at this point. What I should have done, of course, was “cut my losses” and get some sleep; unfortunately I chose to continue playing until I went broke. The worst part about it is that I know damn-well that one should never be playing poker when they aren’t well-rested and eager for the game. I was neither and was even considering not playing this night and opting for some sleep instead. BUT – I was in Vegas… So, as is usually the case with being in Vegas, decided instead to pay $300 to once again take a class that I thought I had already passed. Oh well, perhaps I will learn better with iterations – costly iterations … perhaps…?

After generously donating my money to the nice people at my table, I got in touch with Todd and we headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest. We checked the cached poker tournament information my computer – the Knights Inn does not have WiFi so cached sites were all we had – for the next day, selected a few possibilities to check out and got some shut-eye. It really wasn’t that late either – somewhere around midnight although neither of us had adjusted our watches so it may have only been 11:00… Whatever the case, we got some sleep…

Well, as is sometimes the case, this posting is getting a bit on the long side. I also have other tasks that currently require my attention; so I will be stopping here. I’ll try to get around to posting the remainder of this story sometime in the near future; however I received a package Todd recently sent me that might limit my available time for blog writing a bit. Check back in a little while if you’re interested in hearing the rest of this story…

bis später,

Coriolis