Posted by Al Pastor

3/22/05 Oaks Club $2-4 Hold’em
2:30-4:30 PM
In $60 Out $255   +$195


3/29/05 Palms (Las Vegas)  $2-4 Hold’em
6:15-6:45 PM
In $50 Out $34  -$16

MGM (Las Vegas)  $2-4 Hold’em
8:15-10:00 PM
In $60 Out $110  +$50


3/30-31/05 Golden Nugget (Las Vegas) $2-4 Hold’em
12:15-1:00 AM
In $100 Out $92  -$8

Mirage (Las Vegas) $3-6 Hold’em
7:15-8:00 PM
In $100 Out $10  -$90

Bellagio (Las Vegas) $4-8 Hold’em
8:30-9:45
In $100 Out $33   -$67

Plaza (Las Vegas) $2-4 Hold’em
11:30(3/30/05) PM-12:45 AM
In $100 Out $140   +$40

Golden Nugget (Las Vegas) $2-4 Hold’em
12:45-1:30 AM
In $60 Out $7  -$53

5:00-5:45 PM
In $100 Out $136  +$36


4/2-3/05 Oaks Club $2-4 Hold’em
10:00 PM-1:15 AM
In $100  Out $87  -$13


Hours Played 2005  79.25   YTD -$535


1. I lost the fucking sunglasses. The Lenscrafters products. What can I tell you? Probably in Bellagio, somewhere, maybe near the world’s largest chocolate fountain. If I believed the universe gave a shit about my squinting or singed retinas I might conclude that forces greater than me were sending me some kind message or extracting some kind of toll in the currency of tinted lenses and Italian frames.

It was not quite worth the price of admission, the loss and replacement price of prescription sunglasses, plus whatever time I am forced to spend without them, in Vegas and at home, having the cruel sun and its evil UV drilling into my unprotected retinas, but I did get to go backstage in Mirage and in the Golden Nugget, to the casino’s respective security offices to check the lost & found glasses boxes. The backstage area of Mirage as a maze of wide hallways with various departments--UNIFORM  CONTROL, RISK MANAGEMENT--well marked with standard signage. The carpet was the same as the carpet on the casino floor and the wallpaper was the same as the wallpaper throughout the hotel. The illusion continues off the casino floor into the back. The lighting is brighter, and the constant clanging and ringing of the gambling pits disappears behind the swinging doors.

The Golden Nugget only has one swinging door, and the Golden Nugget as we know it stops at said door. The carpeting stops, the wallpaper stops the lighting stops. Bare cement, drywall and harsh fluorescence.

Both security offices have covered plastic bins full of delinquent sunglasses, just like every lost & found everywhere.

2. Lots of assholes in Vegas. Over half the  tables had some full on dick making me miserable to the point where I left the game.  This is something I need to improve, because one game I left I was beating rather soundly. Every poker room was nonsmoking, except for the Palms, the putative hipster destination, which not only allowed smoking but seemed to be encouraging it. Leaving that game was no great loss.

a. White guy, mid-/late-thirties, at the MGM, spiked/moussed up hair very thin at the top in purple, black and sparkly silver LA Kings Jersey over a purple turtle neck. Keeps ordering MacCallam’s neat, tipping a dollar. He’s with another dude, who serves as audience for. “I sat right in her lap lap, right, an I go, I go, ‘where’s your boyfriend?’ and she goes ‘I don’t have a boyfriend!’, an I go, ‘Good., ‘cause I got some roofies.’ an the whole table cracks up. An she’s like ‘What’s that?’”

b. Late night at the Golden Nugget, Late 50’s, white guy with silver Jimmy Johnson/George Jones sculpted-n-sprayed silver fox hairdo with optional Burt Reynolds mustache, who keeps telling the woman next to him how much younger and prettier she looks when she smiles.

c. Asian-American trying to engage the table, but speaking to me specifically, on as to whether or not Terry Schiavo was dead yet and if not, why not and when? Afternoon at the Golden Nugget.

d. Late night at the Plaza, whose nominally nonsmoking poker room was delineated by makeshift rails,  I played with a very unpleasant fellow who was abusing the dealer for being slow, abusing other players for existing, not tipping the waitresses who were hauling his HeinekenTMs out to him with startling frequency, and just generally being an asshole to all concerned, except me, really. I was pushing the table around pretty handily, and though the asshole was the loudest person at the table, he was losing just like the rest of them. Every time he would get all in, though, he would win the hand and survive. The reason I mention the makeshift rails, is that the asshole had a butt going in an ashtray on one of the makeshift rails, and he would get up to take a drag every time he was not directly involved in a hand, which had him popping up as soon as he was out of a hand, admonishing the dealer to include him, and running back in time to take his turn. This constant absence from the table gave us time to talk about and mock him. At one point the little old lady sitting next to him says, while he is up sucking on his MarlboroTM fake cork filter tip. "Let's gang up on him and bust him so he goes home." This is just one of the old women that made up for all testosterone issues I ran into, Vegas-wise, and who could form their own list to counter the ugliness of this current one. Another was the lady in the Mirage, in a wheel chair, wearing big-ass Joan Didion sunglasses, playing $4-8 Stud, who checked and called her pair of aces (probable winners without any improvement) until it turned into a straight.

   
 3. I should have driven. The drive to Las Vegas is  just a little too long, and the drive back is even longer, but if I had left from work Monday I would have made it into town about the same time as my flight landed. Then I would have needed to sleep, though, and I would have had to leave around noon Thursday. Everything worked out fine, but I should have driven.

4. Saw David Sklansky in the Bellagio card room, playing no-limit with $500-1000 blinds and $40,000 minimum buy-in. The games in that room were top heavy, meaning they had way too many way too big games. I had gone there to see poker celebs, but I was thinking Dolly and Annie and the Phils. Not Sklansky, who is more important than anyone. Sklansky is the kind of poker writer I don't recommend when some hapless chump comes in looking for a book to help them play better. I will recommend Dolly, usually, whose SUPER/SYSTEM and SUPER/SYSTEM 2 are great books and very well known, but contain too much information, some of it out of date. I recommend Hellmuth's book, not because he is a good or interesting player, but because his ghostwriter does a good job giving a beginner a useable strategy. But I almost never recommend Sklansky to anybody I don't know.  Sklansky you find on your own.

5. It's 3 AM and the souvenir shop smells like bacon. Not real high end bacon, either. More like a grease trap than bacon really, but enough like bacon for it to be 80% nauseating, 20% appetizing, sort of like a truck stop. I walk around trying to breathe through my nose. I am pondering the idea that Las Vegas is really about two-thirds of the way to being the Pleasure Island Utopia of its potential, that if they could find someway to leave the foot washing hypocrisy and open up Amsterdam style coffee shops and outfit the cocktail waitresses with mirrors and straws and disposable glass pipes with hotel/casino's names embossed on them, when I realize the bacon/grease smell is coming from an old (ancient) hot dog warmer, the kind with rollers and a grease trap underneath. It is all the way in the back corner of the store, alongside a dormant popcorn machine.

6. I could go on and on about Vegas, about my Father and Nana and The Golden Nugget, Bill Boyd (the Man Who Killed 5-Card Stud) and Steve Wynn, the Desert, the City, how I came to this place and all about me and Don Gately digging up that skull, but I don’t like to make you, my gentle reader, take in more than about 1500 words against this evil yellow.