Vegas Day 5

"Vegas Day 5"

Best Day so far. I was up $507.50 today. It started rather late. My first session was at 5:00pm.

Session 1: Excalibur $1/$2 NL Hold ‘Em
Bought in for $300, and my logs say I was up $299.25. As best as I can remember this session, it was simply slow and steady. I can’t even tell you a big hand I won. I played fairly conservatively. That’s probably what’s keeping me going up slowly instead of swinging all over the place.

One cool thing about this session was that it was during Sunday Night Football. The poker room has a promotion where they give everyone sitting at a poker table a raffle ticket at the start of every quarter. And then at the end of each of the first three quarters they draw a ticket and give away $50. For every touchdown that gets scored, they’d draw for another $50. A field goal would result in a $25 draw. And at the end of the game, it was a $200 giveaway. As a bonus, for me anyway, the Cowboys were playing. Brent won $50 as the winner of the first drawing. And the Cowboys scored, they called my ticket and I won $50!

For those that watched the game, you know that there was a safety during the game. I guess they didn’t plan on that ever happening because they didn’t have a drawing lined up for a safety being scored. And if you didn’t watch the game... the Cowboys crushed the Giants: 20-8. :-)

Margaritaville/Fremont:
After the game, we decided to have dinner at Margaritaville. We ordered some Volcano nachos, and they rocked! I knew the Nachos were huge and was considering just splitting that three ways as my meal, but Brent and Sean both ordered food, so I decided, fuck it, and ordered a bacon cheeseburger. The food was all great. Way too much of it, but it was still great. During our meal, a band started playing... just a cover band, you know. But man, they were really good! They started out with an Eagles song, and if wasn’t looking at them, I would have sworn it was the Eagles themselves.

After dinner, we decided to head downtown to Fremont Street so the guys could check out the Fremont light show and Binion’s. Binion’s is rich in poker history, and I think every half-serious poker player should play here at least once in their lives.

We got there about 30 minutes before the last light show for the night. Sean’s a big wuss when it comes to the cold, so he was making a beeline for the warmth of the casino and wasn’t too interested in the giant Xmas tree. We decided to kill some time playing some cheap table games. The nice thing about Fremont is that you can play stuff like $5 blackjack or $4 roulette all day long. And that’s exactly what we did.

Sean sat down and played some $5 blackjack. After about 15 minutes he was up $25 and cashed out. For the remainder of the time, Brent and I played $4 min roulette. I bought in for $100 and proceeded to get down to about $45 pretty quickly. With just a few minutes left until the last light show of the night, I was at $60. I put $20 on a 2 to 1 bet in hopes of just breaking even. I hit. I was happy to get out of there even!

The light show was not as Christmassy as expected. It was basically two chicks (and many cut/pasted clones of them) dressed up in costumes and shaking their money makers to some popular music. I’ve definitely seen better Fremont light shows, but it wasn’t bad. After the light show, we headed to the Binion’s poker room.

Session 2: Binion’s Horseshoe Casino $1/$2 NL Hold ‘Em
I made a beeline for the place where the poker room USED to be. Turns out that they still played poker there, but it looked weird. No wall of Poker Hall of Fame. No wall of WSOP winners. And it was almost completely empty. Like three tables out of maybe 20 were playing. Turns out that this area was Tourney poker only now. They had created a brand new cash game only poker room down the hall.

The new cash game room had about 8-10 tables. 4 of them were running. Sean, Brent and I were put all on the same table. I hate that. I immediately asked for a table change and got one about 3 hands later.

Binion’s is always full of locals. They love that place. And that always kinda makes me a bit uncomfortable. Not that they are better than any other players, but that they are super chummy with each other and the dealers.

I sit down to a short handed table. One big dude has a big chip stack in front of him. He’s got almost $1000 on the table. I start with $200. Immediately I saw this young Asian guy raising and this older dude re-raising to $50 preflop, and I’m like... great. They fire some more on the flop, but the board starts getting really ugly on the turn. They both slow down and Asian dude shows KK and the old dude shows AA for the win. Hmmm. Maybe they’re not crazy aggressive players?

Turns out I was right. They were extremely meek. We only played there for a bit under 2 hrs. Brent has busted out $200 fairly early and Sean was only a little bit up. I was up $91 myself. We decided to get out of there. I think we’re all starting to prefer the electronic tables at Excal to be honest.

We’re all falling asleep on the bus ride back. Dead tired. We step off the bus, head into Excal, and we look at each other... poker? Yeah!

Session 3: Excalibur $1/$2 NL Hold ‘Em
Luckily there’s a $1/$2 game running. A lot of the times there is no $1/$2 game, and we have to wait around to start one. Brent heads to 50c/$1, and Sean and I sit at $1/$2.

We play almost exactly 45mins before the game dies. Pfft. Lame. At least I’m up another $67.25. I’ll take it.

We throw around the idea of going to check out Mandalay Bay, but decide it’s probably not a good idea as it’s almost 5am and that games everywhere are pretty thin at that time of day.

So, it’s beddy bye time. Still, that was an all around kick-ass day. Good times.