Something old. The Stardust on death row. The number of windows remaining decreased throughout the week. By Friday you could look straight through and see Boulder Station from one direction, and the Wynn from the other. Implosion is exected some time in March.
Something new. Just one of the many ways Harrah’s continues to downgrade Caesars Palace. If it’s so bad it’s good, like hanging huge pictures of David Hasslehoff doing jazz hands from the fake Arc de Triomphe, I can appreciate it. However this is just skin-crawlingly tasteless.
Something broken. When keno channels go bad.
Something green. This is what $500 in "casino credit" looks like. Oh look, it’s Celine Dion again.
Something tall. The Stratosphere from a random angle, but I kinda like this shot. "Home to the world’s highest roller-coaster", boasts the video they play you as the BMI plane touches down. Not for a couple of years it’s not been… it’s basically just one big commercial for Dollar car rental anyway, but – as you’d expect – it’s already horribly out of date.
Something dark. Westward Ho is just rubble now but it looks like the sign is waiting to be taken to the Neon Museum.
Something handsome. Best carpet in town, at the soon-to-be Planet Hollywood. Let’s hope they’ve changed enough to actually get rid of the jinx this time.
Let’s talk about the next trip before I’m done talking about the last one then…
Mansion are putting me in a top notch room in Caesars Palace for Friday and Saturday night, but as I’m going early I need somewhere to stay for the first five nights. January is typically very quiet and great for room offers, and I’ve already had a few attractive looking mailers to help do things on the cheap.
Harrah’s properties from $45/night: In fact, when I clicked the link in the email, none were actually $45. Flamingo rates started at $60 but there was nothing available on the dates I wanted for less than $90 at the start of the week. All rates were well into three figures by the Wednesday.
Aladdin from $49/night: "Your last chance to stay at the Aladdin" before it finally becomes Planet Hollywood. Claire went hunting for Silver Strikes here last week whilst I was playing at Caesars and reported a much changed interior – not a single fake plastic jewel in sight. The offer is available only on six random dates in January, but it includes my first two nights. However it already says the Sunday is sold out (yeah, ok) and every other night is $169. In fact the Las Vegas Hilton was also showing sold out for the duration of my trip, which I don’t believe either – unless there’s a very large Star Trek convention on I don’t know about.
Terribles free stay: This one actually is pretty good. The envelope promised an "Exciting Special Offer!!! Inside!!". Yes!!! Punctuated! Like! That!! It’s two midweek nights free, and it wouldn’t cost the earth to extend it for three more nights. Although Terribles isn’t half as smokey and dingy as it used to be, I’d still feel pretty isolated there by myself. It’s walkable to the Hard Rock, possibly to Tuscany, otherwise I’d need a car or a lot of cabs to get anywhere.
So the criteria for choosing a place came down to (a) must have internet so I can work and (b) must be close to a good card room so I can play. The Hilton looked a good first choice at first – even though it’s a (large) block away from the strip it’s on the monorail, and would definitely be somewhere I could work. After this trip I’m dubious about the quality of internet access downtown, and many of the rooms are small and probably wouldn’t have a desk, so even the superb $29/night poker rate at Binions would be a dodgy gamble.
I set Travelaxe on the case and it gave me a few options. Call me a snob, I just didn’t fancy the Gold Spike – even at $22/night. But this is why Travelaxe rocks – it found me a Premier Tower room at the Stratosphere for $53/night, when their direct booking web page said $99 upwards. There’s still a $5/night resort fee to add, and their internet isn’t cheap ($49/week) but I know the net works and I know that rooms in this tower have desks – we were there last Christmas. Actually we’d booked a World Tower room – the much smaller hotel building, presumably left over from Vegas World – but there was some blood on the bathroom walls (I do have a photo, but really it could be of anything) which we discovered was plenty reason enough to get an instant upgrade!
As well as being a home-from-home (this will be the 7th time I’ve stayed there I think), the Strat is a great location for me really. It has the shortest cab ride to downtown of any of the strip hotels and it’s walkable to the Sahara which has decent poker tournaments three times a day, and a monorail station. At $5 a ride, when you can get a cab to almost anywhere for $10, I’ve always though the monorail would only really be worth it when you’re travelling alone. Now I guess I’ll find out.
Binions are trying so hard to position themselves as the home of poker in Downtown Las Vegas, if not in the whole city, but it doesn’t appear to be working too well.
I played the 8pm tournament on 24/12 – way too tired after waking up at 3am on the first day there to be concentrating properly on poker, but I still made the final table and finished just out of the money. It attracted just 36 players. Sure, it’s Christmas Eve – most tourists won’t land for a few days (although you wouldn’t know it from the traffic, which you can be sure I’ll whinge about plenty) and the locals who play there regularly might easily have other commitments. I thought very litle of the poor turnout until I heard someone asking whether this was typical and the dealer replied that they’d normally run with about five tables. When I played the afternoon tournament later in the week, five tables was spot on. Seven spots were paid but the last eight made a deal, giving $400 to me and six others and $1000 to the massive chip leader.
In the summer, these games were regularly getting 100+ runners both afternoon and evening. I love the Binions card room and it’s not good to see it struggle, especially when the casino floor was busier than it’s been for quite a while. This may or may not be aided by the new carpet (yes they did have one before, but the replacement is definitely not before time), and the Binion Dollar Babes, who were as good at dancing around to Shania Twain CDs as anyone I’ve ever seen. These ladies are cunningly positioned right inside the main doors and visible from Fremont Street as you pass. Who needs fountains to get people to stop walking outside your casino?
They’ve already cut the buy-in on the weekend tournaments (used to be $125) so it’s $70, with a $40 rebuy, every day. They’re pushing a $29 poker room rate, a $4/$8 game with 5% rake and also trying to draw in bigger players with the Ultimate Poker Championship events. I did play one of these, buying in directly for $660 after I dumped out of a satellite. I’d already decided to buy into one, so I would play two if the satellite attempt worked.
This could very well be the best regular tournament in town – 10,000 starting chips and 40 minute levels, with the top seven coming back the next day to be filmed. Once again, numbers were down and i was amazed that only 32 took part. Four spots were paid, so three would to get their fifteen minutes on television without taking home a penny!
Those that bothered to show were mostly very tough players, and I was pleased to keep up with the pack until my KK ran into AA, with me getting it all in pre-flop and still wondering whether I could have avoided it. If you don’t want to hear the bad beat story, turn away now.
I raised first to act and, although just ahead of an average stack, did not have enough chips to put in a third raise of anything less than everything when he came over the top. The player has only been at the table about 20 minutes and I don’t have much information, but he’s seen me being my usual tight self. However, I still figure to be ahead more often than not here. QQ or AK are both possible, and although there’s a very good chance I’m only called if beaten, I move all-in for really no other reason than I can’t work out how to play it post-flop if I call out of position leaving myself with just one pot-sized bet. I can’t fold KK pre-flop to a single re-raise and I can’t check-fold any flop.
After the long walk home to the hotel next door, I scribbled some dirty maths and convinced myself the push was still +EV, even if we never expect him to have pocket jacks or worse. Fortunately I binned the notes so you don’t have to endure that right now, but I might have another go sometime.
That $400 chop was on the last night and I didn’t want to push my luck with any more tournaments, so I sat in a $2/$4 game until I could stay awake no longer. Things started rotten, with me flopping top two pair against bottom set in back-to-back hands. I swung down $150 and not winning a single pot for over two hours before finally dragging one down with a QQ that I played much too softly against TT on a low board. With confidence restored, a new beer on the way and having had plenty of time to work out that this table was, in fact, a great one I ran warm enough to claw it all back. In my last hour at the table I was red hot, making quad jacks and then shortly afterwards quad eights. There’s no high hand jackpot at Binions yet (so there’s only $4 taken from each pot, not $5) but you do get a shirt or a cap for hitting four of a kind or better. I had one of each 🙂
I ended the seven hour session with $5 more than I started with. Not the best hourly rate in the world ever, but a respectable recovery.
As I’ve finally made the effort to figure out how to post YouTube videos on here, what could be better than a little festive music.
Ladies and Gentlemen
Please welcome
Performing “Christmas in Las Vegas”
From his new album “Silent Nightclub”
Which HMV told me was in stock
But won’t deliever in time for Christmas
And it’s now too late to order from anywhere else
The legendary Richard Cheese
(ripple of applause)
Because for once we arrive in Vegas on a Saturday (T minus 5, by the way) we’ll be able to spend Sunday camped out in a sportsbook watching ten NFL games simultaneously. I’ve also somehow managed to convince Claire that this is a great way to spend Christmas Eve. The obvious choice of venue is the Las Vegas Hilton Superbook. It’s huge, self-proclaimed World’s Largest, of course, and more impressively boasts the "largest sports ticker in Nevada". I’m quite fond of scrolling LED signs. It’s also enclosed by several banks of video poker machines that have pretty good paytables (or at least did the last time we were there) in case having multiple giant screens just isn’t enough to make up for not being able to spin through the commercials on Sky+.
It’s several years since we sat in a Vegas sportsbook to watch anything of note. In 2002, we were on a two week romp along the West Coast. Las Vegas was the last stop and, in retrospect, it would have made a better place to start. Two jetlagged English folk didn’t find a whole lot to do, waknig up at 4am in San Francisco. The venue we’d chosen for Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference Playoffs between the LA Lakers and Sacramento Kings was Monte Carlo. We’d arrived early enough to grab a good seat and brought a huge pizza for sustinence, which impressed those sitting next to us, although you could tell they wish they’d thought of it too. The atmosphere was amazing and the game was pretty damn good too. 19 changes of lead, 16 ties (obviously I had to look this up, nobody’s going to believe I remembered it) and an eventual overtime win for the Lakers.
My memories of exactly where we went on that holiday are sketchy, I think there were 8 hotels in 15 nights. However, in a "do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot" kind of way, I do remember quite clearly a dingy motel room in Torrence, California which we’d chosen because of it’s proximity to the Del Amo Fashion Center – the mall where the money swap goes down from several different points of view in Jackie Brown. That Days Inn was, oddly, also home to the first Indian restaurant we’d seen in the USA. I’d turned on the TV to catch the last quarter of a previous Lakers/Kings game in that series, which featured possibly the single coolest moment in sports I ever saw.
OK, I know you didn’t click the link, so here goes. The Lakers are down 2-1 in the best-of-seven series and by two points in the game. Seconds to go. Superstar Kobe drives in to try to take the game to overtime… no good. Superstar Shaq has a crack… denied. The ball falls into the hands of Robert Horry standing behind the 3-point arc who apparently doesn’t know the meaning of the word pressure. He launches and nails it as the buzzer sounds, and the Lakers win 100-99.
Since then, we’ve always seemed to be in Vegas at the wrong time to catch any sport worth watching on TV (yeah, it’s usually baseball season) or flown on two Sundays when there’s football to be missed. Now we’re going to be in town for Week 16, when almost all the games are going to matter.
I’m ready for some parlay card action, and probably another large pizza.
Clothing: To help you pack, Fox Sports Net requests that men wear business attire–collared shirts, jackets, ties optional; women—smart business attire–suits, dresses. Note: no white clothing, no logos for the telecast. The dinner Friday night is held at one of the top restaurants in Caesars Palace or the Forum Shops, please wear appropriate business or resort attire.
It’s over seven years since I had to wear a suit to work, but I still have quite a collection of downright horrible ties. Given that I very much doubt they’d consider any of my non-plain shirts to be business attire (let’s be realistic – they’re not) a tie looks like my best chance to wear something ghastly on TV. I used to be a master at picking the tie that clashed most with any given shirt. Can’t wait to see if I’ve still got what it takes.
I’m not completely sure what they mean by "resort attire". I have a couple of t-shirts from Caesars, and – seriously – also a dressing gown. If it was a toga, and I was a little more attractive, it might be OK.
In answer to a Trivial Pursuit question that I can remember from like twenty years ago, table tennis is apparently no longer the only sport that you can’t play dressed in white.
The guys from the Sentinel apparently spent all day yesterday trying to get hold of Claire for a quote, causing much embarassment in the classroom. "Miss, your phone’s vibrating". Repeatedly.
She never got chance to talk to them but it looks like they’ve run the story anyway. I’m right there, above a story about the panto.
Hotels in Las Vegas tend to skip the 13th floor. As far as I’m aware, they just pretend like it doesn’t exist, numbering the floors 11, 12, 14, 15, etc. It might be possible to grab a crowbar and jam open the doors at just the right moment to get there but (a) that was the 71/2 floor in Being John Malkovich, so it may only apply to floor numbers ending in a fraction and (b) why the hell would you want to tempt fate like that anyway?
I worked out that I’ve been to Las Vegas twelve times in the past seven years. You don’t actually want to know how long it took to figure this out, from passport stamps, email history and – where everything else failed – a mountain of old credit card statements. But I’m glad I made the effort.
It’s eleven days (not that I have a countdown using oversized playing cards or anything…) to trip number fourteen.
You’re not 100% superstitious, but there are certain things that you’d rather avoid…just in case! … Overall, you likely realize deep down that superstitions are mostly not true, but the ones you follow have become old habit. It makes you uncomfortable to break them, so it’s simply easier to keep – especially since many of them are tightly woven into our cultural fabric. … As long as your superstitions are not controlling your life in any way, there’s probably no harm in them.
I’ve got my dates now: Episode 36, filming January 27th, airing on Fox Sports Net on January 28th.
The show is now being shown on FX over here. That makes four programs on that channel, alongside X-Files, Highlander and Cops. But obviously those stalwarts of the schedule get top priority and Pokerdome is squeezed on at 2am. I’ve put it in Sky+ and will try to work out how far behind we are.
The package includes:
Round Trip Air Transportation to Las Vegas They’ve confirmed that this is for one person only. Although it’s unlikely Claire can get time off during term time anyway so I’m almost certainly going alone. Which will be strange. If they book it for Fri-Sun though it won’t be a direct BMI flight. At the very least I need to try to get them to make it Thu-Sun and then I can get diamond club miles too, as well as stand a chance of being awake when the tournament starts! Have to make sure they’ve heard of other airlines than Virgin so I don’t end up having to get to Gatwick! If I’m only going to be there for a weekend, a 24 hour round trip journey is an absolute upper limit, don’t you agree?
VIP Check-in at Caesars Palace (2 nights included Friday and Saturday) Never stayed at Caesars. Always said its probably where I’d choose if money was no object, and I said that even before they had a card room. So this is pretty damn cool.
Welcome VIP package in the room (champagne, mansion welcome wear) Free shirts = always good. Champagne = don’t care. How much fun is it going to be to arrive by yourself and sit in your room and drink bubbly anyway? I’m sure I can find an appreciative wino…
$500.00 Casino Credit Sounds like this is actually just five black chips, according to http://pokerworks.com/article-674.html. Play em or cash em… well I can’t see there being any tables games lower than $25 minimum at Caesars on a weekend, so I’ll probably cash em. Or, I could try to do some real life rampaging at $2/$5 NL and see how just far I can spin it up…!
Welcome Dinner and Introduction to the Poker Dome (Friday Night) Oh God, I have to be sociable? After an 11 hour flight? At like 5am UK time? Is this optional? 🙂
VIP Transportation to and from the Poker Dome (Saturday) Why they’re not putting us in a Downtown hotel I don’t really know. I’d probably still want a ride from the El Cortez at night, but anywhere else saves them a load of hassle.
$50 meal credit at hotel If it’s good at the Cheesecake Factory, you can be sure I’m going to be trying to smuggle a couple of those bad boys back home.
VIP transportation back to airport BFH. Super, smashing, great.
The tournament itself is a three round, six-handed, speed poker shootout for a million dollars. 15 players stand between me and $1m – hey, it’s just like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire! And, if this article is to be believed, you can almost ask the audience too. There’s also that annoying drone of tension music all the way through. If I beat five players, I win some money that I can’t lose and get to come back for more. It’s $25,000 for round one, and a further $50,000 for round two. Second place gets diddly squat though. The speed poker element is that you get 15 seconds to make each decision and there are two dealers to keep the cards flowing quickly.
In the rules I’ve been sent (which, incidentally, are all TV rules, and nothing to do with poker) state no logos on clothes, no ipods, and no recourse whatsoever if they decide to make stuff about you to make the show more interesting.
"I hereby release Producer from, and covenant not to sue Producer for, any claim or cause of action, whether known or unknown, for libel, slander, invasion of right of privacy, publicity or personality, or any other claim or cause of action"
I’m also a bit worried why they need to include this:
"I understand that there is a possibility of i) risk of injury to me or others and/or ii) damage to either my property and/or the property of a third party as a direct and/or indirect result from my participation in or connection with certain activity(ies) which may be included within the production of the Program."
Something old. The Stardust on death row. The number of windows remaining decreased throughout the week. By Friday you could look straight through and see Boulder Station from one direction, and the Wynn from the other. Implosion is exected some time in March.
Something new. Just one of the many ways Harrah’s continues to downgrade Caesars Palace. If it’s so bad it’s good, like hanging huge pictures of David Hasslehoff doing jazz hands from the fake Arc de Triomphe, I can appreciate it. However this is just skin-crawlingly tasteless.
Something broken. When keno channels go bad.
Something green. This is what $500 in "casino credit" looks like. Oh look, it’s Celine Dion again.
Something tall. The Stratosphere from a random angle, but I kinda like this shot. "Home to the world’s highest roller-coaster", boasts the video they play you as the BMI plane touches down. Not for a couple of years it’s not been… it’s basically just one big commercial for Dollar car rental anyway, but – as you’d expect – it’s already horribly out of date.
Something dark. Westward Ho is just rubble now but it looks like the sign is waiting to be taken to the Neon Museum.
Something handsome. Best carpet in town, at the soon-to-be Planet Hollywood. Let’s hope they’ve changed enough to actually get rid of the jinx this time.
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