My Wife Like Person (WLP) and I arrived around 11:30 on Saturday, January 23rd. We checked into the Monte Carlo (much more about this later), grabbed something to eat and took a nap. It is a bad idea to play poker when you’re hungry and tired. Plus, we love to eat and sleep just as much as we love to play poker. We got up from our nap and headed over to the Aria poker room. It is a nice enough room but I think the Venetian room is still the nicest room on the strip.

We both played 1/3 NL and I went on a great run of making bad decision after bad decision. I’d flop two pair and be up against a better two pair or a flopped straight. I’d start my bad decision making by playing a hand like KJ or KQ out of position. I’d follow that up by making bad calls after the flop or the turn against solid players that don’t put a lot of money into a pot unless they have a strong hand. I managed to stay afloat by winning some big hands against a few players that were actually making worse decisions than I was. After losing my $300 buy-in I decided not to reload until I pulled my head out of my backside. So I took a walk while my WLP continued to play. She managed to make a few dollars to put a dent in the hole I created and we were done with poker for the evening.

The only pet peeve I have playing poker is when someone’s wife/girlfriend sits behind them at the table. Seriously, it looks stupid. The only thing worse is when the insipid little partner pulls her chair up to the table and sits between her husband/boyfriend and his friend. It gets very crowded at a 10 handed table. So my main complaint about the Aria poker room is that when this happened the dealers didn’t make the 11th “player” move back so the people who were playing would have adequate room. They even dealt to the woman a couple of times.

Sunday morning I headed over to MGM where I managed to play fairly solid poker and won back 120 of my 300 losses. Nothing too interesting happened. There were only 3 tables going when I got there and after a couple of hours the room had grown by 3 or 4 more tables. It was close to noon so I headed over to meet the WLP who was going to play in the Aria tournament at 1. After she busted out there was more eating and more napping.

We played 2 afternoon sessions at MGM and I managed to completely erase my Saturday losses with a $194 win over the two evening sessions. The WLP won her Aria buy-in back and we decided to move on. We went back to the Aria where the 1/3 games were playing like 2/5 – opening raises of $20 and multiple callers and flop and turn bets in the $100-200 plus range. Pots grew to 400 to 800 each. The WLP sat down and left once the blinds got to her. If we wanted to play 2/5 we’d go play 2/5. So the Aria turned out to be a nice room but the games can get a little wild and it may be hard to find a table that doesn’t open for 7 big blinds on some nights. Saturday wasn’t crazy at all so…

We ended our trip playing in the Monte Carlo room for a couple of hours. I played the 2/4 limit game and walked away up $70 after a couple of hours. It was very loose and very passive and you’d get paid off by 3 or 4 people on the river. Awesome game.

Now, let me tell you about my experience at the Monte Carlo. Check in was great. The casino is nice enough. The food we had at the Café was good. But… Wow, I will never stay there again – ever! I expect much better from an MGM property. We get to our room to take a nap. We go to the bathroom to wash up and we have a dirty hand towel. OK, so what, toss it on the floor and grab a clean one. We go to jump into bed for a nap and one of the pillowcases is filthy. It isn’t dirt from a previous guest, it is literally dirt. It looked like it had fallen off a cart in a dirty warehouse and had been kicked around before it got picked up and put back with the clean linens. We toss the pillow in the corner and grab the extra pillow from the closet. It’s off to sleep.

Later on during our stay we pull back the bedspread and notice a bunch of yellow stains on it. How disgusting is that? The bedspread needs to be thrown away. It looked like it had been washed and the stains looked like they’d been around a while but it was still enough to make us seriously consider leaving and going to another hotel. I’ve stayed at a Motel 6 in Vacaville CA and it was cleaner than this place and the room there was only 29.99 a night with no resort fee.

The Do Not Disturb sign fell off our door and the cleaning people came in and cleaned the room. Another dirty towel but the pillows seemed to be clean. Normally, we don’t have the room cleaned after just one or two nights and we didn’t intend for them to clean the room but I’m glad they did. Now I know it wasn’t just a fluke.

I have a suggestion to the Monte Carlo – take 5 or 6 million dollars and refresh all your rooms a little bit. Here is my short list:
1. Replace all the bedspreads – they are disgusting. If you make Motel 6 look clean you’re doing something terribly wrong!
2. Replace the fixtures in the bathrooms and clean up some of the grout, etc. The shower curtains were clean and bathroom was clean but the faucets and other fixtures were quite worn and dirty in places where housekeeping can’t clean.
3. Add some insulation to your walls. We could hear everything in the rooms next to us and I can’t imagine how our neighbors got any sleep – my girlfriend’s snoring probably terrorized them all night.

And finally check out time. We were second in our line with 4 or 5 stations open and each with a line of 2 or 3 people. OK, that’s pretty good. Lines started to grow and another station opened up. Well, by the time we got to the desk all the other lines had just about cycled through which is very frustrating when you’re standing in line and you see all the other lines move at about twice the speed as yours. That’s why banks use a single queue – to keep people from getting too annoyed with the pace of line. An attendant even showed up and was moving some people around – maybe she just didn’t notice that our line was the only one not moving (the clerk was NOT the problem, he had guests that needed more time – he processed us in about 30 seconds). I also saw the attendant tell a guy that these lines were just for check out and told him to come back after 11! A lot of the people in line and getting helped were checking in! Wow!

And finally, we went up to the business center to check in for our flight and the internet access was so slow we gave up after about 10 minutes.

I will never ever stay at the Monte Carlo again. I love the location but I just don’t want to stay someplace that is so dirty and frustrating.