Vegas and LA

Vegas, Vegas, Vegas. I miss it. I recently took a trip out to L.A. to visit a friend and planned on hitting Vegas on the back end for Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned in L.A. so I decided to hop on a plane Tuesday and fly over to Vegas instead of driving over on Friday afternoon. Possibly the biggest problem was that L.A. was not only bigger than I realized, but also had more traffic than I realized. Since my buddy lives in west L.A. and works in Venice Beach, it’s a painstaking process to get over to the Commerce Casino which is on the east side of town and probably 90 minutes each way away from his office with traffic. Turns out the Hustler casino was actually close to his office, but it was still about 30 minutes away and I had to ride with him in the mornings (not fun to wake up on a vacation), take his car, go there to play poker, and then come back pick him up. Rinse, repeat, blah blah blah.
Unfortunately, at that time in the morning, there were only two games running: 50-100NL and 100-300NL. Before you go nuts, know that I’m not talking about the blinds. These were the buy-in ranges for 1-2 and 2-5 NL games. Nothing bigger is running at that time of the morning (for obvious reasons), and the action was pretty poor, even with me playing about half of the hands and mixing it up. Needless to say, I booked a flight for Tuesday night at 9:35 p.m. on Tuesday around 1:00 p.m. Of course, when I got to the airport, the Delta agents had no record of my ticket purchase, so I had to re-purchase the ticket for double the cost at the last minute. Only good news; I got on the earlier flight.
Daniel (notontilt09) and I had a suite lined up at Venetian but ended up switching it to MGM due to my friend from L.A. dropping out last minute because he didn’t want to make the drive by himself, which is totally understandable by the way given the traffic. Memorial Day weekend was straight up ridiculous. We met up with a group of 15 people or so and ended up blowing the town up Thursday-Monday. I think for the entire trip, most of us were actually up money at table games (I played poker Tuesday night and Wednesday during the day so that I didn’t have to play when the others were here, many of them being non-poker players). Unfortunately, a couple individuals got destroyed, repeat destroyed, by the blackjack dealers on one night and then ended up missing the boat on a legendary craps run in which our group collectively beat the casino for about 20K on a 75 minute roll (insert props to Rashad for that roll here).
Unfortunately, Bailey and I decided that the night wasn’t over at 3 a.m. and decided to meet up with a buddy of mine from college who was grinding 1/3. Earlier in the week there wasn’t really any good 5/10 running at Aria so I decided to play 2/5 deep and had some solid results in the 2 sessions I played. Since 1/3 can get ridiculous at times, Bailey and I decided to spice it up by playing a game that Daniel (notontilt09) had played a few nights before.
Rule 1: Drinks are a must, shots every time the dealer changes (30 minutes I believe)
Rule 2: If we get to a pot heads up, the 8’s and 3’s become wild.
When Daniel and I played this version of the game, I owned him because I had position, fair enough. He also stacked off to me with top pair and a wild card, but I had him crushed with the 83 for the mortal nuts. Consequently, Bailey had position on me the second time, so he completely owned me. After a while, both of us were super card dead (see: lack of 8’s and 3’s) and just ended up paying a bonus for each hand won with the 83, regardless of who it was with.
Sidenote: If you do decide to play this game at a table, which I highly recommend doing (especially if you get more than 2 people), make sure that you don’t table your cards immediately because the dealer will be forced to push the pot toward the person with the legitimate hand.
On a similar poker related note, I’m going back to Vegas to play the WSOP Main Event , although I’m hoping that I don’t get too sidetracked while I’m out there. But hey, it’s summertime and the livin’ is easy. I’m going to be working on lowering my golf handicap to see if I can get down close to scratch. After the series, I think that Daniel is going to be coming back to Atlanta to try and get down to that number as well. I’m going to be taking a few lessons to fix my long irons and my driver, but my short game is super strong at the moment (if anyone wants to play me inside of 100 yards in golf-related games while I’m out for the series, let me know, and I’ll bring my clubs out). I’m a lock to be erratic for anything outside of that distance because I’m having trouble getting through the ball…my left knee and Achilles tendon are killing me because I have a ridiculously fast swing. Other than that, I’m just counting down the days until I go back to Vegas for the ME.