"It was the best of rooms. It was the worst of rooms."
Irish Mike
Just returned from a week of staying/playing at the Bellagio and if this
economy is in a recession those guys ain't heard about it. The room was
jammed the entire time with long waiting lists for most games. I should
mention that this was really more of a social trip than a poker trip and I
spent a lot of time going to shows, group dinners, etc. However, I did
play
$4/$8, $9/$18, $15/$30 and $30/$60 LHE. Of course the WSOP is going on at
the Rio and that certainly accounts for some of the action. The first
night
there I went down and signed up for $15/$30 but was about 23 down on the
list so I also signed up for $4/$8 and got a seat in about 25 minutes. It
was a great table with all the usual suspects; drunk young guys, a grinder
or two, a semi-clueless young girl and, of course, the obligatory low
limit
poker expert. Two of the young drunk guys were tem****ary dealers who came
in from Mississippi to deal at the Golden Nugget tournament. For their
player's sake I hope they dealt better than they played. Every one was in
a
good mood and the action was so crazy it reminded me of the low limit
games
I used to play in at Bay 101 back when the dot.com boom was in full swing.
I
just played tight, aggressive and figured I could beat this table with my
eyes shut. Sadly, the poker gods didn't see it that way. The
semi-clueless
little girl sitting on my right just cleaned my clock. I played good
cards,
flopped good hands but she murdered me. In one hand I started with KK and
flopped a set. Turn and river came 7-7 and she turns over 77, which btw
are
her "luckiest cards". No bad beat of course. She literally defied all
known poker odds and after a while it just became funny. When they called
me for $15/$30 I told them to roll me down and stayed in the $4/$8 game.
I
finally quit down about $260.
The Bellagio poker room - what can you say? Forty tables crammed in a
space
designed for about 34 tables. Then you've got the high stakes room which
has two tables in space that could hold six tables. When you take a seat,
if the room is full, you will get bumped about every three minutes or so,
all night long. You either get used to it or feel like jumping up and
decking the next son of a ***** that bangs in to you. And then you've got
cocktail waitresses, chip runners, food servers bring in tables to sit
food
trays on and girls trying to give player's massages. After a while it
starts to look like a big key stone cop cluster ****. On the positive
side,
it's the busiest poker room in town.
The dealers, as a rule, don't like high stakes players. Rude, cheap
assholes who stiff the dealers would be an accurate dealer description of
most of them. Of course, all the dealers add that there are exceptions
like
Daniel Negraneau and a few others. One of the most universally disliked
seems to be Freddy Deeb who I saw btw. He looks even shorter and balder
in
person. I was playing in a game about 4:00 am and suddenly we heard a
loud
crash. One of the globes on the light fixture over the high stakes room
fell from the ceiling and shattered on the floor. With out missing a
beat,
our dealer says "Too bad - usually there's be one of those high stakes
assholes standing there".
Between the Bellagio and the Rio, I saw a whole slew of big name players
and
a bunch of wanna-be big names - Negraneau, Juanda, Deeb, Farha, Hellmuth,
Hansen, etc. I saw Greg Raymer playing in a high stakes mixed game at the
Bellagio - huge food tray sitting by his seat. I know he's a nice guy but
he needs to take some of that poker money and hire a personal trainer.
The
guy is the size of a small pick-up truck and that, combined with a
sedentary
occupation like poker, just can't be very healthy.
I didn't play in any WSOP events because they all went two days and I
didn't
have the time. But I did watch some tournament play and looked at the
merchandise in the WSOP retail store - some of it nice, some of it silly
and
all of it over-priced. For any who remember him, I saw Jimmy Summerfield
working one of the WSOP events. Jimmy is a nice guy, originally worked at
the Horseshoe in Tunica and ran tournaments and satellites in other parts
of
the country. He moved to Florida and invested in some kind of gambling
boat
that, I heard, went belly up. That was the last I heard of him until I
met
him at the Rio. In any case, I'm glad to see he's back on the poker
scene.
The rest of my poker play didn't amount to much. I went up and down in
the
$15/$30 games - lose a few hundred one session, win it back the next. I
had
a $2,300 win in a $30/$60 session but gave about $600 of it back before I
called it quits. I'm going to play a couple of online tournaments to try
to
win a main event seat but have never had much luck with those in the past.
One final observation about Vegas. Walking out there is a *****. The
strip
was never designed to handle today's volume of pedestrian traffic and the
casinos want to keep people on their property and make it as hard as
possible to walk to the next place over. Moving side walks in, no way
out,
etc. One of the worst architectural monstrosities to get through and
around
is Caesars Palace - which looks like it was built by a committee of blind
men. I've been to Ranger school, Jungle Warfare school and I've navigated
in swamps, mountains and jungles . Well they're all a ****ing piece of
cake
compared to finding your way around Caesars Palace, especially out side at
night. And the night time crowds out on the strip - not to mention the
army
of **** pushers that clog every spot where the side walks narrow, can make
walking a real chore. The best thing they could do for pedestrians in
Vegas
is put in triple wide moving side walks with exit points at every casino
and
major shopping area. Of course it ain't gonna happen, but it's a nice
thought.
So bottom-line - Vegas is Vegas. Its got 31,000 vacant houses and they're
building million dollar high rise condos as fast as they can. The City
Center project being built just south of the Bellagio is expected to cost
some where around $8 billion dollars. The low value of the US dollar has
even more Asians and Europeans pouring in to the city and the prices for
every thing are jacked up higher than ever. Can't wait for my next trip.
Irish Mike
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