Vegas Weekend

We checked into the Excalibur late Thurdsay night after a full day covering the WPT Championships at Bellagio. For some reason, the IP was booked solid for this weekend, necessitating our move to The Castle for the rest of our stay in Vegas. We're not so much staying in The Castle as we're staying in it's dungeon, as our room is on the first floor. It sucks to have no view, but it's surprisingly convenient. No waiting for elevators that stop on every floor to pick up tourist after tourist.

During a five minute span at Bellagio I had three interesting sightings. The first was a pair of 6'3" transvestites in black cocktail dresses and blonde wigs strolling fearlessly across the casino floor. They walked a lot better in high heels than I do. The second was a dejected Scott Fischman walking alone to his car in the self parking garage, sighing and twirling his keys around his finger. Moments before, he had busted out of the tournament in 8th place, narrowly missing the TV final table. He's the most miserable-looking man who just won over a quarter of a million dollars that I've ever seen.

After passing Fischman I noticed a twenty-something guy in a baseball hat rushing what most certainly a hooker into his tan Honda Accord. She had platinum hair and wore a red floral micro-mini dress and teetered on black patent leather platform heels.

Saturday night, we grabbed some sushi at Green Valley Ranch with the Poker Prof and Flipchip. Though Grubby has been known to attack this particular sushi restaurant's Sunday-through-Thursday early evening all-you-can-eat offerings with gastronomic gusto, we settled for an a la carte meal which, for me included some dreamy tuna tataki sashimi and the "deja-vu roll"-- shrimp tempura and avocado topped with tuna. Delish! Afterwards, Pauly and I adjoined to the poker room, where we both sat in the $4-8 with half kill. Though I worked up a $200 profit at one point, I lost all of it back on a series of gutshots that were filled on the river for the cranky Vietnam Vet on my left and ended up leaving down about $30.

Sunday afternoon we played poker at perhaps my favorite casino in Vegas-- the Red Rock. I sat $4-8 again since there was no $6-12 running and made about $50 in the 2.5 hours I played, driving my poker winnings for the trip over the $500 mark. Later on, we had dinner with our favorite Vegas supercouple, Schecky and Jen at Chicago, a Windy-City style pizzeria and microbrew. I split a meat lovers' thin crust with Schecky and Jen while Pauly opted for roasted garlic chicken. After dinner we checked out Sedona, a very chic bar/eatery on the Northwest side of town, where we had their famous chocolate fondue for dessert and played "team" Chinese Poker. Each of us played our own hands, but each couple's score combined together when it came to the points payoff at the end. Pauly and I finished up a whole $4-- boooya!!!

Today I'm off to Caesar's Palace to cover the WSOP Circuit Event for PokerNews. It's only a three day event, but those days will be long unlike the structure we enjoyed last week over at Bellagio. There should be a good amount of name pros in the tourney, seeing as it's sandwiched right in between two Vegas WPT events. My work schedule MAY require me missing American Idol this week, tragic as that is. Keep your fingers crossed for a short night Tuesday.

My most heartfelt congratulations go out to C.J. who just announced his engagement to his very own Lady Luck. Check out the ring. Nice hand, Luckbox!