Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Welcome to Scheckytown

About 150 miles southwest of Las Vegas, along the northbound side of Interstate 15, ten simple black and while signs, each bearing one of the Ten Commandments, are nailed into the ground. I don't know who put them there, but I've whipped past them at 85 MPH more times that I can count. Every time I do, I wonder how many of those Commandments I'll break on this trip.

After an uneventful four-hour haul across the desert, we pulled up to our temporary new home-- a two-story vaguely Spanish-style tract house in Summerlin, where poker power couple John "Schecky" Caldwell and Jen Leo currently reside . For our purposes this summer, we're calling the digs "Scheckytown." Right now it looks like it will be the two of them, the two of us, and one of Full Tilt Poker's red pros living under its roof.

"God, it looks like Agrestic" Pauly said, humming the theme song from Weeds as we drove past all the identical houses.

Once we hauled all our stuff upstairs, we tried out the pool, which was a tad cool for a dip. That didn't stop Pauly from jumping in almost immediately, even though the temperature outside barely cracked 85 yesterday. Our digs here are by far the nicest we've had for a WSOP stay. The pool even has a fountain and is flanked by little sculptures of frogs that spit water back into the pool.

We had dinner at Nora's Wine Bar and Osteria, which was only a few blocks away. Before digging into three kinds of pasta, we had sweet & sour Sicilian meatballs and fried risotto balls to whet our appetite. Sublime. Sure beats those Asian chicken wraps at the Rio I know will practically become a food group for me over the next seven weeks.

After dinner, it was back to Scheckytown, where John set up Guitar Hero III and we all took turns. It was only my second time trying the game and I'm totally hooked. John was by far the best at it, usually scoring somewhere in the 90-95th percentile, while Jen and I managed to hit the high seventies-low eighties in terms of accuracy. Pauly had never played before and got booed off the stage on his first try.

I crashed early, after nodding off during an episode of World's Deadliest Catch. Pauly was ridden with insomnia and decided to go tilt the locals at a $1-2 NL game at Red Rock while I slept. Today is full of shopping and errands, before we're sucked into a string of pre-WSOP meetings on Thursday. Hopefully I'll get a few hands of poker in before I disappear into the void of the Rio.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What food group does "chicken wrap" exactly belong to anyway?

Irongirl01 said...

Did you tell Pauly that everyone is boo'd off the stage the first time they play Guitar Hero? Or did you make him suffer?. That's what Riggstad and Carson told me up in Toronto but I didnt take a turn