Vegas Vacation.
One goal – find a way to play in the World Series of Poker – Main Event.
This story starts at 5 A.M. on Tuesday, the 16th of June. We make it to the Parking Spot by 5:20. My gf and I sit in row 11a in car (as we are told) with the lights on because it is raining. One shuttle comes down row 12 a few moments later but keeps going. Then the next shuttle goes by, then the next one, then a fourth. Finally D calls the front desk and gets a rude a-hole that just responds, “They are coming! Hold on!” A few minutes later another shuttle zooms by in row 12. Finally the rain stops and D calls again half yelling, half crying because we have waited patiently for over a half hour and now we are verging on missing our flight since it takes off at 7.
Luckily we got their attention because the next shuttle came directly to our car so we loaded up and had a direct path to the Southwest gate. I had hoped this wasn’t the start of a bad trip and more bad karma headed our way.Thankfully everything else on the way there and getting to our Hotel, the Flamingo, was without issue. It was a smooth flight to boot with lots of eye candy as I bent my head at awkward angles to see Manhattan once again. The window seat also gives me the urge to pull out a mouse and try to move the countryside around like I’m using google maps. 
Once we were checked in at the main desk, we dragged the luggage upstairs to the room. One thing is for sure…it’s a damn good thing that you go to Vegas to do things outside of your room because this room was nothing special. I quickly compared it to something of Motel 8 standards. We had the option to take the ‘upgrade option’ for an additional $25 dollars a night but screw that non-sense….we only stay in the room a few hours a night anyways. Who goes to Vegas to sleep? On a side note, the other hallway was freshly remodeled. I didn’t see inside any of the rooms but I had heard someone else mentioning how they were stuck in the old side as well. Your mileage may vary at the Flamingo, just keep that in mind. I’m not trying to write the place off for anyone else in the future. It is a place that was fairly cheap and in the middle of the strip. You can’t beat that deal.
I’m going to skip most of the stuff like going to all the malls and checking out 80% of the casinos with-in a couple miles of the Flamingo. That just mostly deals with a lot of window shopping and walking around…lots of walking around. We ended the first night at Bill’s Gambling Hall & Casino (because we like it alot). They have cheap Hold ‘EM and cheap BJ there for both of us to enjoy.
I entered a poker tournament at midnight that night at O’Shea’s. I got 10th out of 45 or so. Not bad, but no money and I don’t remember how I got beat. That might have something to do with the free Guiness I was getting (w/$1 tip) every 20 minutes.
Wednesday we headed to the Miracle Mile (Planet Hollywood) – ate at some mexican joint that I can’t remember and did some more walking. About 1 P.M. that day, I took the shuttle over to the Rio to check out the WSOP which was currently running three or four events at the time. D went south to a Coach outlet mall and spent all of that gift certificate she had and then some.
After playing rail-bird (taking a lot of pics) for an hour or so, I signed up for the $330 tournament that starts at 3 A.M. It was pretty amazing to see all these poker players throwing around chips. They are willing to put 10k, 5k and 2.5k on the line for their respective tournament…something I wish I could do myself. I’d love to go toe to toe with some of these guys, proving that I belong in poker’s elite club of very few. Thus, playing small ball, I am hoping to play my way into the main event where I could compete with 5k other folks for the big prize, ~$5 million and the coveted WSOP bracelet.
So here I am, in my seat along with nine others with a field of 65. All I need to do is out last 63 others to get my free ride to the main event. Everyone plays pretty tight poker at first because they don’t want to get all their money in on a mediocre hand this early. I usually try to take advantage of this and make a few semi-bluffs in the first hour of poker because people are less likely to call.
Shortly after the first blind raise, 30 minutes into the game, I am looking at AJ in early position and I decided to call in the big blind because I wanted to see who else was in the pot. The guy to my left raised to 200, blinds were 50/100. Then the next lady raised to 400. I call, other guy calls. Flop comes As 7h 4h, two hearts showing. I had two hearts and pushed all in. Dude folds but the lady calls me down with the other two bullets. Oops..I put one of them on KK the other on AK, AQ. It was a bad move for me to push in first position and I realized that but I was trying to make a push for more chips early in the tournament. Most of the battle to tournaments is laying down a lot of hands and outlasting the blinds. You have to win a battle once in a while, but it was not this time. No heart came down for me and the bullets knocked me out. $330 gone in 45 minutes.
I mope back to the rail, take a few more pics, then I head back to the strip with my head hung low. Bummer. D and I meet at the hotel room, then proceed walking north, checking out other casinos like Venician, Wynn, etc. I ended up winning 80 dollars off my 20 dollars on the first spin of some Monopoly game, so I “invested” my 80 dollars in another tournament – this time at the Imperial Palace. It was a cool tournament because this was a “bounty” tournament. That means if you knock someone out, you get their bounty chip which you can turn in for $10 dollars later on. I think 13 people played…I took 4th and knocked one guy out. So I got $10 dollars and nothing else since they only pay top 2. bah!
I head back to Bill’s, say hello to D and back to the poker table for me. I throw down a hundy and walk away with about 160 a few hours later (about 3 A.M.).
On to Thursday- we head to chipotle for lunch which is just north of Harrah’s. After lunch we split again so I can go back to the Rio. I believe she went shopping again and maybe back to Bill’s. On this day, I’m just another rail-bird taking pictures. With his break nearly over from one of the poker games, Daniel Negraneau comes over to the edge of the tape and says “Hi” to everyone that is standing around yelling his name. He takes several pictures with several ladies and signs a bunch of stuff, too. The guy is seriously one of the nicest dudes on the poker scene, bar none.
One of the most surreal pieces of this trip was about ten minutes after the started playing again. I’m standing by the rail taking several pics of the players and various tables. All of the sudden Daniel throws his hand away, looks at me and says, “Hey!” pointing in my direction. I turn around and look at some old dude that is smiling from ear to ear thinking he is talking about him. He points at me again and looks around the table. “Doesn’t that guy look like David Oppenheim?” Another guy on the table speaks up, “I have no idea, how is that?” Daniel says, “He is a good poker player from Hungary.” “You guys don’t know who Oppenheim is?” “I can’t believe it!” Just then Daniel folds another hand, then jumps out of his seat, runs over to the table behind him where John Juanda is sitting and pulls him out of his chair. Then he runs him over to his chair and points and me and says it again. “Doesn’t that guy look like David Oppenheim?” John nods his head and says, “Yeah, the goatee really makes it.” John starts laughing as he runs back to catch his next hand. Daniel checks his next hand, tosses that one away, then runs over to the next table against the rail with Barry Greenstein. He starts hopping around like a little kid waiting for the bathroom since Barry was currently in a hand. He kept hoping until he saw the next hand being dealt to his seat, then ran back and decided to play this one.
I wasn’t even sure he was talking about me until I looked the guy up today. Here is a picture of him…keep in mind I had my powercat hat and glasses on since I was using my phone to take pics. Let me know what you think.
A bit later, I decided I’m going to try my hand again and join a second satellite tournament. The one rule in poker like many other sports, “go strong or don’t go at all.” I was all about making the main event and that wasn’t going to happen with my camera taking pictures like a tourist.
The tournament starts at 3 P.M. once again. To my amazement, only four people were there on time, one of which showed up right at 3 when we started dealing. We have eight stacks on the table and 4 of them don’t even show up. Are you kidding me? Why don’t you just hand me your money if you don’t care about the tournament?
Anyways…this time I played for quite a while and tried to play a bit more conservative to keep more chips in front of me. I was able to set up someone two hands in a row to take all of his chips. Early in the blinds I was clearly in control of this table with the most chips and power but then the cards turned on me. I got a run of crap cards and I mean crap. I was getting 8/3 and 7/2 more than my fair share for about the next hour. After an hour and a half of play we were forced to leave the play area for a break. They even shut the doors behind us. I thought it was pretty weird but they were probably being cautious and counting everyone’s chip stack to verify nobody had slipped in extras….or maybe they were yelling at the dealers. They had some dumb ass rules like if a guy shows up late and buy’s in late, he can’t get in until he pays big blind, which could mean waiting for eight hands. One poor guy had to wait through the entire first 30 minutes of blinds because it was taking so long.
Side story- apparently they start out with something like 8k dealers and they get a bonus of 30k if they still have a job at the end of the two months of WSOP action. At this point in mid-June, someone said they were down to 6k and they were having problems with people quitting all the time. The dealer I had on the first day was trying to get out of working for Harrah’s and had recently put in on an application at Ameristar up here in KC. He had a bunch of questions for me which I answered all before we played the first hand. He told me all kinds of stories about where he had been a dealer and all this and that. It was an interesting conversation.
Back to the main story- After break, we started playing 100/200 with 25$ ante per hand. I was doing OK at best but no where I wanted to be. I need more chips, now! I went card dead for a few more hands until I found AJ suited again. I tried to play them slow but I didn’t want anyone in the hand playing trash so when it came to me, in last position, I raised to 500 w/3 others in the hand. I got two callers again and the flop came down A J 6, sound familiar? It should. It was almost exactly like the last one. Check around and I pushed. The guy across the table had bullets again and I didn’t catch on the last two so I go walking out the door…. He played it well and got lucky. If he raises pre-flop, I put on the brakes. If anything but an ace comes out, he could get run out by a set considering I raised it 500. Ah well.. at least I didn’t get rivered to end my run.
From that point, I ran back to Harrah’s where I met up with D and we headed back to Bill’s for one final night of Poker/BJ. It was a good run for me but not so good for D. She lost her hundy and I gained only about $50 on the night.
The next morning (Friday), we started packing up all our junk including the additional bag we now carry due to the stuff we had bought. We took our bags down to the bellhop to check them in and then ran over to Bellagio. I hadn’t been in there since I was 17 so I thought I’d check it out again since we don’t spend that much time on the west side of the strip. Once that was complete though, back to Bill’s for one last hurrah! She lost all her money again while I put away another $25 or so. Then we wasted a bit of time in Flamingo playing the “ducks.” I forget the name of the slot machine but you are supposed to match up three ducks to get the bonus. I played some other quarter machine and hit the bonus on there, winning a few more bucks.
About 4 we started our trek back to the airport, even though our flight didn’t leave until 7. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of time but it wasn’t an issue. There wasn’t too many people in the area and got through checking relatively fast so I could waste more money in their slot machines near the terminal. I never have any luck in the airport for whatever reason but hit quite a bit in Flamingo.
We had quite a bumpy ride home with a spoiled crazy kid a couple seats back. Luckily as the engines turned on and we were up in the air you, it covered most of the whiney baby noise. Unfortunately we ran into turbulence at five different elevations. I think the captain said they settled on 30k? and it was mostly OK, but in one spot I had to check my pants to make sure they were still clean.
We rolled into MCI at midnight and headed out to the Parking Spot where they bent us over for $31 dollars (after coupon) for 3 nights of parking. Lame, especially after their crap earlier in the trip. Come to find out Economy parking is only $5.50 a night…meh. I had no idea Parking Spot was so damn expensive ($8.50 a night).
All in all, I went with 1K, came back with almost 300 and spent 660 on WSOP so I don’t feel I am that bad off after giving away a bunch of singles for tips everywhere. I believe D is pretty close to even as well, even after the couple bad nights. We had a great time and even though I didn’t make the Main Event this year, you can bet I will try again and try often until I’m in it. Maybe next year…
Here are a bunch of pics from the trip that came off my phone. Some are good quality but my phone doesn’t like movement. The shutter delay smears people all over the place. Enjoy.
