Mostly I remember from writing down what I won or lost day by day by game and casino. I haven't totalled it up yet but I expect I about broke even. It's easier to write down the gambling wins/losses than keeping track of what else I spent my cash on, especially since sometimes I was tipping from my stack and sometimes from my pocket.
During every tourney I keep a blind schedule in my pocket and every level I write down my stack and the ave stack and any extra notes.
However the night I went to see Love was very blurry...
__________________
To Bet or not to Be(t). That is the question. - Billy (Big Slick) Shakespeare
RC III - Champions!
Moose, these are amazing trip reports. Great detail leaves the reader almost following along with you. Like Wetts said, there's no way I could remember this stuff either and would never take the time to take such great notes. At least nothing that would trigger such good details at a later date. You and Comp have great TR's.
Now, as you are the resident king of finding deals...Where are you getting these coupons for seemingly anything and everything? You've got them for so many different locations, you can't just be getting them from one online site? Or can you?
Now, as you are the resident king of finding deals...Where are you getting these coupons for seemingly anything and everything? You've got them for so many different locations, you can't just be getting them from one online site? Or can you?
Vegas is the live version of online poker. Just like when you sign up at a new poker site where you get new player tournies and sign up bonuses, everytime you get a player card at a new casino in Vegas it usually comes with various new player coupons and other crap. Now all the Harrah's casinos - Ballys, Harrahs, IP, Flamingo, Rio, Paris are linked so you can get the bonuses only once. Also all the MGM casinos are linked too Monte Carlo, Mirage, MGM, Aria, Bellagio? Harrah's comps are the best because they can be used at any casino but MGM's suck because there is only one card but the comps earned can only be redeemed at the casino you earned them at. Whereas for Harrahs, all my play is on one card but for example, comps earned at Flamingo and IP are added together and can be used at the Rio, if I wanted to eat at the buffet there.
Mostly you get $5-10 free slot play but I just play them out and cash out whatever is left. Sometimes you get a even money bet pays 2 for 1 coupon good for BJ or a pass line bet at craps. At Bills, new players get a free tshirt if you earn $5 in comps in a 24hour period. Just getting the player card is worth it because they will mail you hotel promos and stuff. Of course poker players are the lowest scum of the earth so you don't get much but if you are a 65 year old slot jockey you can expect tons of free hotel rooms and stuff.
I'll get on with the TR tonight or tomorrow.
__________________
To Bet or not to Be(t). That is the question. - Billy (Big Slick) Shakespeare
RC III - Champions!
Slots eh? Finally a game I can play.... Actually that wasn't the case last time I was there! A friend of mine can play a slot machine like an ATM. She looks at the damn things and they start pissing out money like a scared dog..
This May we'll be staying at the Venetian. Doesn't sound like it's connected to any of the networks you've mentioned. Ah well. I've already checked out their site and signed up for email/deal notifications. Thanks for the heads up.
I'll definitely check out the player cards you mentioned.
So next up in the DSE, as I said I lose my mind. It's lvl 3 blinds 100/200 and I decide now the blinds are worth mixing it up with internet guy on my left. OTB I raise to 575 with KJs. I figure that since so far I have pretty much left him alone that it should be a quick muck, but he calls. So the flop is all low and I decide that I am going to bluff holding a big overpr and cbet. He calls. So I decide that I am really going to show that I have an overpr and fire the turn. He calls. At this point the monkey on my back completely takes over and I stop caring what he may be holding. The river brings a J and I completely lose my mind and fire what my monkey mind believes now to be a value bet. I even mumble something stupid like 'I rivered you' as he rolls over AA. I really don't even mind the turn bet but I was really pissed at dropping down to lvl 1 thinking with my river bet when if I had half a brain I could have checked behind and saved 4500 chips. Anyways after nicely building my stack I'm down to 25k or so. Fortunately there is lots of time to recover from my idiocy as I am still double ave stack.
I don't feel like showing the table that I am steaming so instead of getting up I sit there and do a slow burn and watch internet guy get AA b2b and stack another player. Now he has upwards of 50k and I'm no longer have the table c/l. Fortunately it is only a few minutes before break and I manage to eliminate another small stack when my AQ makes top 2 and our table breaks with 2 min before break. I head into first break with 28.4k and ave stack only 12956.
My new table I get really lucky and I sit down as the big stack again. Also the screens show the break order and my table is not listed. This means I completely luck out and my table will not break until we are in the money. It's a huge advantage because I will only have to adjust to the one or two new players as they keep refilling our table. So break comes and I can steam off and my new table is none the wiser.
After break I keep luckboxing into sets and stacking players and by the 5th level I have built my stack over 50k with ave stack 19k. Last hand before break though, the monkey comes back and I defend my BB with my new nemesis hand, KJ. Flop comes KQx and I call the cbet. Turn is another Q and a flush draw in hearts and villian fires again and I call. On the river now villian quickly fires 12.5k and I think WTF is the overbet for and tank. Now villian starts talking smack and eventually clocks me. Monkey decides that he is bluffing a busted flush draw but monkey is disappointed to see AQ. I totally got played on the river and I'm pissed at calling off such a huge chunk of my stack. Again I steam off into the break down to 31575 and ave creeping up to 23178.
Over the next couple of levels I kind of hold my own but the ave stack keeps creeping up and I end the 7th lvl at 33100, just over ave of 31725. Lvl 8 the blinds are 100/500/1000 and I can't maintain this for long.
I should have mentioned already the players at my table. As I said I joined the table as the big stack. Most of the table was unspectacular but 3 seats to my right was a solid aggressive player who was also intent on destroying a 12 pack of bud light by dinner break at 7pm. When I first sat down there was still an away player 2 seats to my right and he showed up a hand or two after me. He had preregistered but was clearly badly hung over from the previous nights activities. He kept his head in his hands and never said a word the entire time, finally after about an hour he overshoved Q8s or something, lost and was gone, having played only one hand.
There was a constant stream of small stacks filling the two seats to my right. I met some girl from Vancouver, who was sponsored to 20k by some internet site in China. I recognized her as Canadian from her card protector.
I had seriously been considering getting one from this set myself as a card protector so I instantly recognized it. Anyways, she lasted about 1/2 an orbit and was gone too. Now a solid midstacked player took her place who had the chips to make some plays.
Next up AQ, AQ and then QQ and BOOM!
__________________
To Bet or not to Be(t). That is the question. - Billy (Big Slick) Shakespeare
RC III - Champions!
So I had better finish this TR or I never will. I had now drifted down to just over ave. stack. Around this time, Wes shows up. Good person to decompress with on breaks. All he asks for in return is for me to mooch free drinks for him. lol. I tell mmoose to go look him up but she can't find him in the sportsbook and shortly after she decides to head back to the hotel room.
Only problem is her sense of direction is brutal so I walk her all the way back to the elevators and figure that's good enough. Wrong. 20 min later she comes back and says she can't find the car and that she is going to take a cab back to the hotel, which is completely stupid. So I sit out and RUN to the parking garage. We both thought the car was on the fifth floor. Just to be safe I start on the 4th. Nope. 5th nope. 6th nope. Now I actually believe the car is stolen. Reminder - I am sprinting btwn floors, not bothering for the elevator and running for where I think the car is, turning around and sprinting for the next level. 7th level - there is the car. Fuck me. I run back and toss mmoose the keys and this time I wait for the elevator because I'm not running back down all those flights of stairs. There must have been some big hands while I am gone, because I miss less than an orbit. But now I am sadly in need of some serious Fiji water.
Anyways it's 8th level 100/500/1000 and I start to pick up some hands. I've been playing with mostly the same people for several hours now. I had bud light, who was getting very hammered two seats to my right and a fairly solid-midstacked player on my immediate right. Bud light had been pretty liberal with his raises and he open raises once again and midstack calls. I have AQ and decide to flat and see a flop. 3 handed the flop gets checked around and I fire in pos and everyone folds. Pretty much std play for bud light.
Next hand, midstack open raises and I have AQ again and decide it's time to repop. Only midstack instashoves on me and I fold. Shortly after bud light open raises again and I repop with a small pp 95% of the time he obv has pure crap and of course he shoves it in. Our stacks are fairly even and I decide to fold again. From this point on in the tourney, no-one really challenges budlight and he liberally open raises for the rest of the tourney, constantly building his stack, and he basically cruises to among the chip leaders. It is essentially the last time I saw him put his entire stack at risk. Anyways now my stack is getting low and I finally have fallen below ave stack for the first time in the tourney.
Still in the 8th level, midstack open raises and I rr with QQ. He shoves on me again and now has me covered. I comptemplate how cold decked it would be if he has AA or KK but I can't wait any longer and call. He rolls AK and QQ holds and I cripple him. I had been playing over 6 hours and this was the first time my entire stack was at risk. I end the level at exactly 45k and ave has crept up to 36783.
Soon after the crippled guy is gone and another midstack takes his place. I chip up a bit attacking shorter stacks and end lvl 9 with 53.8k, ave 47439.
10th lvl 200/800/1600 a huge hand occurs. UTG, a short stack shoves, UTG+1, the new midstack instashoves, I look down at KK and reshove. UTG+3 comtemplates and folds. Button tanks for a long time. Shows his hand to the rest of the table and folds. BB thinks briefly but also mucks. So it is a 3 way allin. Now the dealer opens the exposed hand, and button had folded AKs. BB (budlight) says 'No way'. He had folded AK and UTG+3 says he folded AJ. Anyways all my outs are gone, UTG 99 and UTG+1, JJ. The no-out KK holds and I rake a monster pot and eliminate both players. I end up with $112,300 and I'm back among the chip leaders. But how sweet it would have been if button had come along. I head into dinner break with $111,500 and ave is $62667. I meet up with Wes and we go eat at the noodle house, right by the poker room. Great meal and not a bad price for about $13.
Also at this point I should mention that I don't see the FullTilt internet guy that I had been playing with on my first table, again, so I assume at some point he must have blown his stack.
So we resume play just after 8 pm. Once again, as in the Aria tourney, the dinner break kills me and I go completely card dead. I literally play 4 hands until the bubble breaks. Bud light, who was completely drunk at dinner break seems to have sobered up and an extremely good player has moved in beside him. Between those two players I manage to find 2 hands with which I can steal the blinds, and two more hands worthwhile to seeing a flop with and of course hit nothing. 12th lvl ends with me getting blinded away to $90300, but ave has crept up to 84600 and lvl 13 is going to 400/1500/3000. So at the 12th lvl break I wander around and look at the stacks. Top 46 pay, and there are 56 left and a lot of short stacks. The 13th lvl is a sick sort of fun because I literally get nothing worth even attempting to play and they are the easiest folds of my life.
Finally in the 13th lvl, a short stack at my table shoves 1010 and of course bud light holds AA. He has something like 250k now and the very strong player beside him has about the same. I am all the way down to 55k. We redraw seats and form 5 - 9 handed tables. I start to pick up hands again and steal a few. 12:30am and I am actually putting my entire stack in for only the second time in the tourney. Then UTG raises and I find JJ in mid-position. My M is still over 20 but not much room for reraising and I hate flat calling in mid-pos with no idea what is going to happen behind me. I really know nothing about the new players at my table. The only person that comes with me from my old table is the really solid player who was beside bud light and he is on my immediate left now. I decide I will have lots of opportunities to keep stealing and after about 5 sec of contemplation, I muck. You can rip on me for that fold if you want, but I didn't know the player, he was raising UTG, I didn't think I could get him to fold and I didn't feel like sticking a M20 stack in from mid-pos. Anyways I guess UTG could sense my dilemma, even though I really didn't think long and he flashed AK. I end lvl 13 at 66400 but ave is now 101520. Still have time though, lvl 14 is 500/2000/4000, but not much time.
Shortly after that I open raise with 88 and the solid player right beside me reraises. It seemed funny to me, especially after all the hands we had together at the other table and I muck. He flashes AA. Unfortunately now I am in push/fold mode. I take a few more hands but with 43k left and blinds going to 500/3000/6000 in under 2 min, I shove A10 into AK and IGHN. It's almost 1 am and I have been playing for 13 hours. 423 runners and I cash 30th place for $747. The really solid player beside me is the one who ends up taking it down the following day.
Of course being a chip nut. There has gotta be chips.
My winnings and registration card.
The winnings:
This one kind of shows the chip molds a bit better:
When you register you can choose from a hat, a t-shirt, a bag, a card protector or a $10 food comp. I diddn't really need any of those, so I went with the card protector and kept some chips to frame up.
I'm hungry and it's after midnight so I stop for the Midnight $5.99 ribeye and eggs special at the Flamingo. Now I have had the worst steak ever for $5.99. Ok it's just the worst steak ever, and it breaks the record set for me only a couple days ago at Terribles. The eggs and hash browns aren't bad though and meat is meat at 1 am, so I belch and move on to bed.
So on Wed I couldn't decide what I wanted for my free gift and they close up after 2:15, when registration closes. So Thurs morning we go to Denny's for breakfast to use a $5 gift card we got on our last trip. Only 4x as expensive as Terribles and not nearly as good. Then we walked over to Tix4Tonight and bought Love tix. Then mmoose dropped me off at the Venetian and I redeemed my ticket for the card protector. After dinner the night before, unfortunately, I could not find Wes at all. I walked over to the Mirage to exchange my vouchers for seats to the show and then walked to Caesar's.
On the way through the Caesar's shops, I passed Pete Rose signing autographs at some memorabilia store. He looked extremely pathetic. Not one person was interested in autographs and he sat there in a completely empty store. Anyways I had planned to play the Caesar's noon tourney but by the time I got through the line-up at the Mirage and got to Caesar's they were already in the 3rd level and I decided against it. Now you may also wonder why I was playing a lot of 2-4 limit at Flamingo - it was basically because I was chip hunting for myself. The Flamingo had brought out new racks about a week before and as I played I was sorting through the chips and finding all the new ones. After every sesssion I would take a couple racks up stairs to my room, take out any new ones that had any small chips in them and then return the ones I didn't want back to the cashier.
So at Caesar's, another chip nut had asked me to pick him up two racks of $2 chips. So I got 3.5 racks worth from the cashier and sat at an empty poker table and started to sort through them. After about 1.5 hours and about 10 racks worth of chips, I decided I wasn't going to get anymore decent chips, picked up my two racks and walked out.
Anyways these are the chips I collected:
__________________
To Bet or not to Be(t). That is the question. - Billy (Big Slick) Shakespeare
RC III - Champions!
On the way through the Caesar's shops, I passed Pete Rose signing autographs at some memorabilia store. He looked extremely pathetic. Not one person was interested in autographs and he sat there in a completely empty store.
He has been there EVERYTIME I've been in Vegas when I passed by the store.
I ended up going to the Nelly performance at TAO on the Thursday night you cashed (hotel guest with a VIP card I got the night before got me in for $10). Friday I ended up just playing 2/5NL (dropped about 10BB, no interesting hands really) at Venetian to check out the ruckus that was the NAPT and got a bracelet to the NAPT Opening Party at TAO hosted by Slash.
I'll pick up that $8 chip from the Wynn from you when I get back into the country in mid-March.
So I'll try and wrap my report now. I had just finished collecting two racks of Caesar's $2 chips shown above and trucked them back to my hotel room. Mmoose was playing 1/2 in the Flamingo room and I sat down at 2-4 limit to collect some more $1 chips. We needed 4 hours of play to qualify for the 9 am $2k freeroll the next day. I fell in with some friendly folks and steadily got hammered with them. Soon we realized we had to go to dinner if we wanted to make the Love show. I cashed out up $40 and mmoose +$7.
We headed to Ellis Island for the $5.99 1/2 chicken and 1/2 rack of ribs. We arrived to find a huge crowd around the craps table and mmoose got us on the wait list while I bought into the game. Some lady was on a really hot streak and at only 2x times odds I got there in time to make $49. Woot. Free dinner and my horrible craps streak had come to an end. The lady sevened out and everyone ran to the cage to cash out. It was crazy how fast the table actually emptied. We went over to the host and begged him to seat us next for dinner because we had to make the Love show. He kindly bumped us up and I think we slipped him a fiver for his troubles. Dinner was awesome as usual and I ordered another beer, which in retrospect probably wasn't the greatest idea. We raced over to the Mirage and got there 15 minutes late. Fortunately they still seated us. It was a good thing I was completely hammered because I can't think of any other way to enjoy the show. Basically take every Beatles song where you would think to yourself 'WTF was John and Paul thinking?' and this was a visual explanation for that song. Hammered, it kind of made sense. The music was good and the entertainment factor was good but that was all. It really wasn't a circus at all just basically the performers in weird costumes dancing around or floating through the air. I figure it is where they stick all their performers who are injured and can't do their circus act anymore. I guess I can say I found a Cirque show worse than Ka now. Anyways I kind of pass out for part of the show because it is so boring and come to for the end. 1:45 min show and we missed 15 min of it so pretty much not worth it.
We head for the hotel and crash with 2 days left in our trip.
The next day we get up at 8 am and rush down to the poker room to register for the $2k freeroll, then go back up to our room, shower and get back for the 9 am start. Maybe 65 runners or so. For $5 you get a $1k dealer addon, that doubles your chips. The blinds are 15 min I think and basically the goal is to get the thing wrapped in 2-2.5 hours. It's mostly push fold poker and mmoose busts after an hour or so and I play on. With 4.5k left and blinds 1000/2000 we get to the final two tables. Essentially at this point, the common thing to do is chop for $100. It looks like everyone is into this idea, so I make my favourite chip aquisition of the entire trip. I take advantage of all the clapping and cheering and I steal a T500 chip from my stack and put it into my pocket. Only problem is now one guy decides he doesn't want to chop. He is such a dick, he isn't even the chip leader at our table, never mind the tourney. So now I have basically screwed myself because I may need that chip and there is no way I can pull the chip out of my pocket and put it back into my stack. Fortunately we play one hand, two guys bust and they give the POS who didn't want to chop and the chip leader at the other table $150 and everyone else $100. I tip another $5 for the dealers and I'm up $90.
These are the chips I scored on my trip. Check out the Flamingo chip in the bottom left.
We head back to the Venetian to try and find Wes, but no luck so we pick up vouchers for the Todai sushi buffet from Tix4Tonight and have sushi essentially for breakfast. From there we drive to Boulder City to go see the Hoover dam.
__________________
To Bet or not to Be(t). That is the question. - Billy (Big Slick) Shakespeare
RC III - Champions!
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