Vegas Trip 2007

Linda and I just spent last weekend (Thursday through Sunday) in Vegas, and we had a lot of fun. Linda's friend Lisa joined us on Friday. Danimal, Todd, Erika, Mike, and Mike's Linda were also on the trip. All of us Bend folk took advantage of cheap airline tickets from Allegiant Air, which flies directly to Vegas from Central Oregon.

On Friday, Dan and I played in a tournament at Caesar's Palace with a field of 140 players. Caesar's has the largest poker room I've ever seen -- although I understand that The Mirage also has a large poker room -- and it was a very comfortable place to play (soft chairs, roomy tables, no smoking, great dealers, and fairly prompt drink service). The $80 buy-in got us 1500 in chips, and the $50 rebuy -- which you could take at anytime in the first 80 minutes of play regardless of stack size -- got you 3000 more chips, so the rebuy was pretty much mandatory.

The tourney was a blast -- the blinds went up every 40 minutes and you had plenty of chips (assuming you took the re-buy), so it was like playing a tourney on TV. It was a completely different experience from playing in tourneys where you feel rushed from the beginning to make moves.

Dan lasted about 3 hours and finished in the top 1/2, and I lasted about four hours and finished in the top 40 (both of us finished well out of the money, though -- only folks making it to the final table won money, with the winner taking home over $5,000). I got great cards for the first two hours -- including a near double-up on the second hand of the tourney when my A-J suited held up -- and was the chip leader at my table for a while, then lost the bulk of my stack when I called an all-in on the turn with trip aces but got beat by a straight.

After that, my only move for the last two hours was all-in, which worked every single time except for the last time (funny how that works). Dan won a monster hand playing his favorite pocket cards -- a 9-6, aka "sixty-nine" -- which must have infuriated the two players who busted out of the tourney when Dan hit his full house.

The only thing I didn't like was the fact that I stayed up into the wee hours the night before playing craps, so I was pretty tired once I got into the third hour of play or so. Next time, I'll try to get a good night's sleep before playing in it.

Gambling was so-so for me winnings-wise. I broke even on craps after that long Thursday night session, but got crushed on Friday, losing a total of $350 that day ($100 on craps, $20 at video poker, and $230 at live poker, which included the tourney buy-in and re-buy). But I won about $125 playing poker on Saturday and won $75 at craps on Sunday, so I lost only $150 for the trip. Danimal fared much better than I did. He won many hundreds of dollars playing $1/$2 no-limit at the Flamingo, where he and I did several JagerBombs on Saturday night while we were playing (which was like drinking cough syrup, something I gave up doing a long time ago ;).

Linda and Lisa hit a place called Tao on Saturday night, and saw lots of celebrities who were in town for the Mayweather-De La Hoya fight, including Will Farrell, P Diddy, and some famous basketball players whose names escape me.

This trip was much less frustrating than the last one, mostly because this time we were staying right in the middle of the strip at the Flamingo, so we didn't have to deal with long cab waits. Also, our plane out of Vegas didn't leave until late afternoon on Sunday, which meant that we were able to hang out on The Strip on Sunday morning/early afternoon. I got to play craps for about 90 minutes on Sunday, which was great because it gave me my first winning craps session in Vegas after a long drought.