This was my first visit to Vegas in 3.5 years, so I was definitely excited to get some poker in during what was primarily a business trip.

I started the trip from the UK, where I had traveled the week before on business, so I had to endure 13 hours of airplane time until I safely landed in Vegas at about 7PM on a Saturday night. I made my way via rental car from the airport to Treasure Island, and was able to get upgraded to a top floor deluxe room, (unfortunately no view though) via the $20 trick. Not bad for a Saturday night 8PM check-in. I met a friend who had flown in earlier, and we made our way into the insanity of the strip on a Sat night.

My friend plays poker, but only in low buy-in tournies or home games, so he wasn't comfortable getting into a cash game, so that night we just cruised the strip, drank, and played some craps at Bill's Gambling Hall and O'Shea's - finishing a little bit ahead after my buddy rolled 7 points in a row at O'Sheas.

Next morning, I played about 1/2 hour of unnotable $2/$4 limit hold'em at TI before meeting my friend for the 9AM crap-shoot/donkament at Excalibur. I had taken 2nd in this tourney back in 2006, so I was looking forward to it - and also wanted to give them some love for seeing the light and eliminating the horrid electronic tables.

However, the structure, which was bad then, is even more ridiculous now. 3000 in starting chips (if you get the $10/1000 chip add-on at the start) and blinds that start at 100-200 and double every 15 min is insane. However, I do think this tourney can be profitable for two reasons - #1 is the terrible play that you see and #2 is the almost comical way that people will rebuy for the first hour. No lie, I saw at least 4 people rebuy for 2000 in chips at the 400-800 level. At any rate, I finished in 8th after losing most of my chips pushing late position first in with 9-7 suited and getting called/out-flopped by a slightly shorter stack in the BB with QJ, while my buddy went on to finish 3rd for $150.

The rest of the day was spent betting/watching football (7 for 8 including a 5-game teaser parley win for $75 profit), strolling the strip, and taking short losing stabs at craps and the machines.

I dropped my buddy at the airport for his redeye flight home at about 8:30 and made my way immediately to Mirage for $3/$6 limit - which I would end up playing each night on Sun-Wed. I found this game to be very beatable, and finished ahead $70 (over 11 BB) after about 7 hours total of play there. The players were a good mix of tourists and obvious locals. Once the locals figured out that I could play, they generally stayed out of my way and I stayed out of theirs.

The only thing I didn't like about the Mirage was the couple of hyper-aggressive/rude locals that I saw there. Hyper-aggressive is OK, and rude is just annoying, but the combo of hyper-aggro and rude can drive fish out of the game - and I saw it happen repeatedly. Most memorable was some incredibly annoying asian woman who would raise and re-raise any hand she played and then say "No shame in folding" and "Get used to this" while mockingly pretending to throw her hand in the muck. Luckily she didn't stick around too long.

On Monday night, I played the $45 Pot Limit Omaha Hi-Lo tourney at Green Valley Ranch. This was a pretty decent structure, with 3000 in starting chips at 20 minute levels, but I went pretty card dead and ended up knocked out about 18th out of 30 or so players. Never had either the nut hi or lo the whole time.

On Wednesday afternoon, I played for about 1.5 hours at O'Shea's in their $1-$5 spread limit hold'em game. Bottom line is that this game is probably profitable on a Friday or Saturday night when drunks stumble in off the strip (the tables are just inside the door). However, on a Wednesday afternoon the table I played was manned with 8 rocks that all knew each other. With a single $1 blind, most hands were played with almost no action whatsoever, and most raises or post-flop bets were met with immediate folds. Seems almost like most of these guys sit around drinking the free drinks, bs-ing with their friends, and waiting for their AA or KK to get cracked so that they win the bonus ($50 for AA cracked and $25 for KK cracked). Every time anyone had AA it was limped, and then the locals would make some type of comment like "I need to get the pot to $20", whereby the players who knew each other would then bet enough to get $20 in there (the pot must have at least $20 for he bonus to be paid) then check it down to see if they could get cracked. I think in 1.5 hours of play I only saw one pot get over $40 in it. I left at that point with a meager $2 profit.

After that waste of time, I made my way back to Treasure Island and played the afternoon $65 NLHE tourney. This is a pretty good tourney, with 3000 starting chips and 20 min blinds starting at 25-50 - a pretty decent amount of play. I played decently, and finished at the final table in 9th out of 28 starting players.

After a quick bite, I made the trip back out to GVR for the 7PM HORSE tourney. A pretty decent structure with 2000 starting chips, with blinds starting at 25-25 (bets at 25-50), and going up every 20 minutes from there. I had an interesting hand at Omaha Hi-Lo where I made the wheel with A-4-J-Q against a 2-3-5-6-x board against a nice older lady who also had the wheel with A-4-x-x. After the pot was split and the next hand was being dealt, one of the players not in the hand said that he thought she had a 6 high straight for a better high in addition to the wheel low. I wasn't sure as I had forgotten her cards, but after the hand I asked the dealer what I would have owed her, which he said was 150, so I shipped it over to her for karma purposes without being prompted to. This earned me some repect from the mostly locals at the table that would pay off later in the tourney.

I managed to again make the final table, but for a change had the chip lead once we combined. However, I promptly went card dead through an entire round of O8 and Razz, to take me all the way down to 6th or 7th in chips when I finally won a couple of small pots to allow me to stay about even, but short, through the stud and stud-8 rounds. When we made it back to hold'em at 500-1000 blinds, I was very short-stacked with just 3500 in chips when I looked down at QQ in late position. I raised, got reraised and then was able to ship it all in only to see the player on the button flip up AA. I stated that "I guess I need to get super, super lucky", and then proceeded to spike Q on the turn and Q on the river for quads. Everyone agreed that it would have just been a set of Q's if I had said just "super lucky" instead of "super-super lucky".

My double up allowed me to make it through until we had just 5 players left, when my karma paid off. One of the players who had seen me pay off the old lady when I didn't have to made a suggestion that we do a save for the bubble of $50, so that the bubble would still get paid. Everyone agreed despite the fact that I - the extreme short stack - was not one of the locals. I firmly believe that if I hadn't paid that old lady off they would have tried to get me out instead of gifting me $50 like that - proving that karma can sometimes be something you control yourself by just doing the right thing.

Overall Trip Stats:

Poker Tournaments: $-$140 ($50 in cashes - $190 in buy-ins) Tourney finishes: 8th/18th/9th/5th
Poker Cash Games: +$50 at $3/$6 Mirage plus a little bit of $2/$4 and $1-$5 at other spots
Video Poker: -$80
Craps: -$60
Football Bets: $ +$75
Baseball Bet: $ +$8

Overall Results: $-147

Summary: Could have easily shown a nice profit with one more tourney cash and avoidance of the craps and video poker. Perhaps next time I will set up my karma on the beginning of my trip instead of the last night. Also need to avoid the leak of big house edge games.

Thanks for reading...