My trip to fabulous Las Vegas was from 9/22 - 9/26 of 2004. I had the opportunity to play low limits at a variety of rooms, here's what I thought of them.

Imperial Palace:

I played 2-4 at the IP. Its a decent room with some minor plusses, but some major minuses in my opinion. First the good news. The room is clean, nice brand new tables, the comps ($3 on hour with club card) are fantastic, snappy drink service, and they lay out snacks for the players. The other major plus is the play is atrocious. Lots of maniacs and chip spewers, incredible LAGGY game with some nice pots to be had. The minuses, 10% 4 dollar rake, which is a killer at 2-4. No cash for high hands, just weird dinner comps (uh, eat the buffet at your own risk, although a straight flush gets you a $75 dollar voucher for the nice restaurants upstairs). The worst part was their seemingly strange blinds rule. If a player leaves the table after playing their blinds and you are to the left of the player, the button doesn't move, it stays there and you are forced to pay BB (and SB next hand). The prior button gets to be the button again for that hand (or two hands if two players leave). What a ripoff. Online this does not occur, and as far as I know I've never seen this at another poker room. Other minor negatives, no auto shufflers, boring cheapie looking grey chips, slow dealers, and somewhat rude chip lady. Not a bad place to play for your first time, and its nice to play with the fishes, but I like other rooms much better.

Mandalay Bay:

I played 4-8 half kill with 1/2 blinds here. Nicest room I played at this trip. The tables are all brand new, the chips are fancy and clean, the tables have drink holders built in and a neat little wood like strip around the ring of the table to place your chips. They ran the room well too I thought, courteous floorman and chip people, and the dealers were friendly and professional. All 10 handed tables had autoshufflers. The rake was 10% 3$ max with a dollar jackpot drop. The jackpots were all high hand, no bad beat, and were quads or better to qualify. Some of the payouts were $100 for quad 2s, $500 for a heart RF, etc. Only negative in terms of service was the drink service, very slow, and they were not at all appreciative of tokes. Jeez, a quick "thanks" would be nice as long as I'm tipping at least a dollar per drink even with the snail like service. The play here was much better than at the IP, but it still wasn't all that great. Very aggressive and loose, but no one was really giving their money away. The comps were so-so, a $5 dollar food voucher after 4-5 hours of play, make sure to sign in for that at the chip buy desk or else they won't track your play. And you only get 1 comp every 24 hours, I played two 5 hour sessions within a 24 hour period and was told this when I tried to get another $5 comp. A very nice room in terms of amenities, good place to play if you have some poker skills.

Lastly, I played a session at Harrahs:

I played 4-8 with 2/4 blinds. The rake was 10% 4 max, which was a little steep I thought. No jackpot drop because there were no jackpots at all offered in the room. The room was nice, a totally closed off for real room, with tons of big screen TVs playing all kinds of sports. The tables were all brand new with autoshufflers, and the chips were fancy and new. The dealers were all very friendly and speedy. Drink service was snappy and friendly. The play was a bit tighter than than at the IP, but not as agressive as at Mandalay. I wouldn't quite say it was weak tight, just a little tighter than the usual low limit Vegas play. No comps at all were offered in the room, which I consider to be quite lame considering all the competition in town. You could order food from the coffee shop and get it delivered to your table, which was a nice touch. Even though it was a nice room, I'm probably not going to play there again, I like rooms with jackpots, comps, and microblinds, (1/2 on a 4/8 game).

I was up about 40BBs for the trip when I finished up, so I was happy with that, most of all, its just a blast to play live poker.