The Lucky Donut

Five nights in Paris Las Vegas: the first truly unnecessary hotel rental of this trip.

I only took this one because I’d never stayed there before.  It was the first – and just about the only time – I’ve seen dates available as fully comped under my account, and given that it’s a miracle I’m still getting room offers from Harrah’s at all surely the last chance to check it out.  I was just a bit curious as to what the place was like.

In the pecking order of Harrah’s casinos, based on typical room rates Paris seems to sit in second place – below Caesars Palace and above Rio.  So I expected something quite fancy – especially when we were given an upgrade to a newly remodelled "Red Room".

It may well be as "chic" as they claim, but I have to admit that I don’t really get it. 

Aside from the red blankets, there was also a bit of red padding behind the beds…

…and a red wall in the bathroom. 

There’s a big-ass television…

… and a well stocked mini-bar.  That’s traditionally something you don’t get in a Las Vegas hotel, but more properties are starting to like the idea of charging $4 for half a tube of Pringles these days.

The finer design features were clearly lost on me, and it just seemed like a fairly typical hotel room, although it actually felt a little on a small side compared to other places I’ve stayed.  Which is a bit odd, because although these rooms have been renovated, the resort is not quite ten years old.  Not exactly a relic.

It hardly seems worth the hype of giving a special name to this type of room, and not quite what I was expecting from a Red Room…

Sometimes it just makes sense to buy two copies of the same newspaper.

Friday’s Las Vegas Review Journal contained an insert magazine called Coast Connection from Coast Casinos, which contained a boat load of offers for Sam’s Town, The Orleans, Gold Coast and Suncoast.

We played at Suncoast on a busy 5x points Sunday afternoon last weekend and it was filled with the largest number of miserable gamblers I have ever seen.  It got to the point where I was walking around actually looking for anyone with a smile, or who seemed to be even vaguely enjoying their time at the casino.  I didn’t find anyone.

And this was before they had something to be really unhappy about, as just a couple of days later Suncoast pulled out all of its good video poker.  There’s absolutely no reason to ever go back now.

However the other three Coast Casinos are great and have been pretty good to us.  Gold Coast in particular is somewhere we’ve been playing a lot – helped in part by it’s proximity to the Palms (where there’s something free to collect most days; this year’s haul so far includes a t-shirt, an apple pie and a tyre pressure gauge) and, where we’re living right now, it can be virtually on the way to most places.

We’d already marked in the diary a 5x point weekend at Gold Coast this Saturday and Sunday.  That promotion turns a 99.7% payback machine into a 100.5% winner and as these are multi-line games with the Super Times Pay feature, they allow you to push money through at 3-6 times faster than the usual single line games.

Positive expectation times fast play equals lots of monies, right?  Well, it’s great if you’re winning but those games costing $4.50 or $7.50 a spin can be pretty painful when things don’t go your way.

Fortunately, Claire hit her second Royal Flush of the trip for a thousand dollars more playing money 🙂

The magazine gives you another two 5x points day of your choice at both Gold Coast and Sam’s Town (one before August 15th and one after) and one 5x points day at The Orleans.  Sam’s Town has Full Pay Deuces Wild (100.7% before points, a whopping 101.6% with 5x) and The Orleans has several games that can be manipulated into positive plays with the coupon.

Don’t forget, there’s further meta-benefits in the form of room offers and free food too.

As Claire and I will play together on one slot club account on any given day, two copies of the newspaper has therefore bought us ten days of advantage play on video poker!

But that’s not all.  The supplement also contains a $10 and a $20 blackjack matchplay coupon.  As you get paid double when you win, and you win about 48% of all hands, the value of the coupons is a little under half of the amount of the bets that they match.

Cost of newspaper: $1.  Value of matchplay coupons alone: $14 ish.

Unfortunately, you can’t just rip the coupon out of the newspaper and plonk it on the table with your money.  In order to use the matchplay you have to take the coupon to the players club to get a different coupon, and that way they make sure everyone only gets to do it once.

It’s a smart move because believe me, if this limit didn’t exist, I would have bought significantly more than two copies!

I was delighted today to see that a Las Vegas landmark has returned to its former glory.

Luxor is, once again, just a big black pyramid.  It looks magnificent.

For several years now, the front side of this iconic building has been violated by some kind of advertisement as part of the growing trend in Vegas to ruin the exteriors of the hotels by turning them into gigantic billboards.

Most recently, and until today, Luxor has carried an advertisement for the latest Transformers movie.  This wouldn’t be quite so ghastly if there was some connection to the resort.  I thought, perhaps, the movie was being shown on the Luxor’s IMAX screen – and then remembered that the IMAX was dismantled last year to make way for a positively non-Egyptian exhibition of stuff from the Titanic and some human corpses.

In the past, they have used building wraps to advertise their own shows: Criss Angel "Believe" and Hairspray.  It still makes it look nasty, but I don’t mind this half as much as just random commercials being plastered over the walls.

The Luxor is not that dominating along the Las Vegas skyline during the day.  There are many newer buildings that are much taller.  However, even the small ones in Las Vegas are huge, and there are still times when it is the only thing you can see.

Giant black pyramid, twelve o’clock. 

How much better is the view above than it was earlier in the week, when it was also spoilt by a crosshair pattern (this had been added to three sides of the pyramid) as a way to entice potential advertisers?

This is why, sadly, I have little confidence that all black will remain a permanent look for the Luxor.

All four sides have been cleared, so chances are something new and tacky is going up all the way around.

It’s at night when Luxor really shines.  Literally.  You can see the Batsignal from miles away (as well as from space, apparently) but it’s most impressive close up, when you can see the animated lights along the edges of the pyramid shifting towards the peak, and then that impossibly bright beam poking out of the top and reaching upwards for miles.

The last thing I want to see distracting from this is an enormous picture of a bottle of vodka.

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The music clip above is the actual jackpot tune from the royal flush Claire hit today at Terrible’s for $2,000.

There is no sweeter sound you can hear in a casino. 

WOOHOO!  Two grand baby!

The music is about a two-minute loop, and we got to hear it several times as it took a while to get paid, but in the end everything went smoothly.

As Claire has never hit anything large enough to trigger tax paperwork before we weren’t sure what would happen.  As I understand it, any machine win of $1,200 or more has to be reported to the IRS.

US citizens are expected to declare gambling winnings on their tax return (or be able to prove a net loss from gambling for the year).

Foreigners, by default, are deducted 30% unless they come from a country that has a tax treaty with the USA.  Fortunately, the UK does but I still thought it probably wouldn’t be so straightforward.

I already have an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) which I had to give when I hit a jackpot last year so I asked if we could put the payout in my name, but they insisted it had to be whoever was playing the machine at the time.

Not only was Claire’s players card in the machine, but I’m led to believe that casinos also have one or two cameras around the place, and that they take a special interest in players who win money, so it wasn’t worth messing about.  

I’ve seen in poker tournaments (where the threshold for reporting wins is a ridiculously low $600) that overseas players have completed the ITIN application on the spot and received the full amount straight immediately.

I’ve also heard of players getting stiffed because the casino didn’t know what to do with the paperwork (or couldn’t be bothered to work it out) so they just kept the 30% and left it for the individual to work out how to get it back.  If they didn’t pursue a claim, whether or not that 30% went to the government or to the casino’s stockholders is anybody’s guess.

To be honest, I don’t know how Terrible’s processed this one, it was all done off in a back room somewhere while we waited by the machine, bopping to the funky jackpot tune.

After about 20 minutes, a team of three slot attendants turned up with a wad of cash and handed Claire a "Foreign Person’s Income Subject to Withholding" form along with two grand in crispy notes.

The form said income: $2000, deductions: $0.

And, obviously, we didn’t question that 🙂

It’s not immediately obvious why a watch store would be billed as a must-see attraction, but it is the (self proclaimed) World’s Largest and to be frank there’s not a great deal else to do in Laughlin when you want a break from gambling and it’s too hot to mess about on the river.

The Watch Man is inside the Riverside Resort and boasts 20,000 watches for sale all under $20.

Yes, of course they’re all cheap imitations or just plain tat, but what can you expect for the price.

20,000 watches for sale is a bold claim, and one that I couldn’t be bothered to verify, but there is a pretty impressive selection.

It’s like shopping in a giant motorway service station car park.

Of course, being in a casino, there is a fine selection of gambling-related watches.  Wheel of Fortune was one of my favourites…

… although some of the poker watches were impressive too …

In the more vocational selection, I was particularly impressed with the rotating stethoscope second hand on this nurse watch.

The best thing is that there literally is a watch for everyone.  Seriously.  Where else could you find such niche timepieces as these?

There’s even something for the Lady Bear lover in your life.

My absolute favourite, though, was one I didn’t even notice in the store.  It just caught my eye when I was reviewing these pictures and I’m gutted that I didn’t get chance to buy it.

After all, who doesn’t love chickeny things?

It’s not really any surprise that it’s hot in the middle of the desert in the summer.

Until a spate of storms cooled things down, Las Vegas was set to trigger an excessive heat warning with temperatures forecast up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Quite how they decide where to draw the line between "you’ll just sizzle a bit if you go outside" and "you’ll probably die if you go outside" I don’t know.  But apparently 112 F is that line in the summer, the point where it suddenly becomes unsafe to spend too long outdoors – even though it’s not much higher than the average 106 F in July.

To be fair, it’s felt quite warm lately.  Relative to the usual scorching heat, I mean.  This is my 5th summer here and, mostly, I’m used to it and know how to cope.

Wear a hat, drink lots of water, don’t assume those massive casinos are as close together as they look.  That kind of stuff.

And then, we went to Laughlin.  My dashboard says it was pretty hot there. 

I haven’t quite pinpointed my precise tolerance to desert heat, but 122 F is on the wrong side of it.  It was absolutely horrible.  Even on a short walk from car to casino, or back again, it felt like every drop of moisture in my system was instantly sucked away.

Because sweat was evaporating faster than I could produce it, my body basically turned into one big water pump, which ran dry in a matter of seconds.

Thank God for air conditioning.

The original plan to go jet-skiing on the Colorado River went out the window, and we stuck to indoor activities.  Like earning a free lunch.

The River Palms casino usually has a decent free grub offer.  This time it was a free burger or chicken sandwich if you earned 100 slot points – equal to $1000 cycled on video poker.

It used to be possible to get fed for free while also playing a positive expectation game, but sadly those machines have now been converted to tournament machines.  However, the next best thing was still pretty good: 99.7% Deuces Wild.

This game only exists there as "Spin Poker’ which is a strange beast.  You play video poker but the cards are dealt onto slot machine reels so you are paid out based on winning hands along a gazillion different pay lines.

The 0.3% house edge on $1000 gambled is $3, but that same 100 slot points also earned me about two dollars in cashback and another dollar in comp.  

Not that I wouldn’t pay $3 for the burger below, it just tastes that little bit sweeter when it’s totally free.

Overheard at the players club desk in Terrible’s casino, where I was waiting patiently to claim yet another free t-shirt (and if anyone actually wants one of these leave a comment with your size, I’m sure I’ll win some more before the trip is done).

One player was just signing up and had some sort of free slot play offer that you claim at the machine by punching in a PIN number.

"You need to follow the instructions on here", she said, producing a card.

"This one is in Spanish, that’s all we have left, but you can just follow the pictures".

Which just made me wonder why, if it was so simple, they’d bothered producing a Spanish version of the instructions in the first place.

EDIT: Managed to get hold of one… and an English version!

Never mind spending a hundred dollars or more on a ticket to see Circque du Soleil or Bette Midler, there are still some great entertainment deals to be had in Vegas

Check this out: fifteen bucks to see The Donnas at the Hard Rock!

Sure, with Ticketbastard fees it’s more like $50 for a pair, but what can you do?  Still an absolute bargai, and not to mention one of the greatest bands in the world.

I’d hoped to be able to catch a show at the new Joint at the Hard Rock but there wasn’t much that appealed this time around.  At a push there’s No Doubt in a couple of weeks, but with tickets starting at $121 I was just too meh about it.  That’s more than the Spice Girls, and there’s no comparison.

The Donnas played in the rock club venue, Wasted Space, which is a much more intimate affair.  It’s tiny – supposedly a 400-500 capacity venue but with the stage area separated from the bar last night there can’t have been more than 200 there.

The picture above is poor (my small camera appears to be on its last legs as it started doing some mad shaking instead of focusing properly, it’s about the best I could do) but it shows how close I was, with just a couple of fists in the air in front of me – and I was virtually standing at the back.

Mandalay Bay is the latest casino whose text message list I’ve subscribed to.

They don’t make it particularly easy to fill your phone with their crap though.  To begin, text "MBTODAY" to 37160.  Then you have to confirm by replying with "MYES".

What’s wrong with just a plain "yes" I don’t know.

Fortunately I have a full keyboard on my phone, but I feel sorry for anyone trying to negotiate it using predictive text.  You’d get something like "oatodaz" or "navofax" when trying to write the signup message.

But are these moffers worth mfighting with the technology mfor?

Not really.  Here are what I’ve had so far – no special promotions, just a bunch of junk mail for stuff that’s already going on.

To compare, the Rio’s text list sent out offers last week for buy-one-get-one-free on drinks, free desserts with your meal, $5 off their buffet and $10 tickets to see the Chippendales.

The latter was available to the first 50 people to respond and for that night’s performance only. Although they could perhaps do themselves a favour by targetting these offers rather than sending out to the entire list, I can still recognise that this would be a great deal for someone who likes looking at naked men.