My wife and I came to Vegas on 9/13 for the Hawaii/UNLV football game. We stayed at the Golden Nugget for 3 nights. First time there and I must say that we really liked this hotel a lot. Good quality restaurants and quite reasonably priced. The whole hotel is very classy and seems to be well run. Pool area is awesome and the Poker Room is very nicely appointed. My only problem with the Poker Room at the Nugget is that it's a bit cramped.

Sent my wife to the Golden Nugget Spa (which she really liked) and the Outlet Mall (which she also liked) and I met a couple of friends from Hawaii at Caeasars on Friday. They played in the $330 buy in Noon tourney. The poker room at Caesars is very nicely done. The staff was very friendly and answered all of my questions. As an aspiring intermediate level player, I thought the 330 tourney was a little over my level. Instead I sat down to play 1-2 NL. Nothing really interesting happened to me except that I lost $600 in the next 3 hours. Don't hear a lot of losing trip reports on this excellent site but I played poorly for the most part with marginal cards. Bought in for $200 each time. The first thing I learned is that $200 is NOT enough of a buy in for these games. If you call some preflop raises and then miss the flop and fold, you're in essence a short stack in short order! I got some poor cards for the most part but I really feel I screwed up with only buying in for $200. My thinking was that if I screwed up and get felted then i'm only out 200. Instead it doomed me to not being able to have enough chips to play with. One older maniac player would bet out $15.00 on 2 out of every 5 hands and then like clockwork push for $100 + from early position after the flop. The entire table was waiting for a hand to felt him. Unfortunately it came to a guy 3 seats to my left who smooth called Old Man Maniac on the flop, checked his made flush on the turn and called OMM's push on the river. Easy $400 for him. My cash experience was capped when, after buying in for the 3rd time for $200 (different table) I was up to about $260 and flopped a set of 3's. Turn gave me a boat and the villain a set and the river hit his kicker for a bigger boat. After losing that $600 pot it was time for a late lunch. I came back to play in the 3 pm Caeasars $65 tourney capped at 50 players. Really enjoyed this well run tourney and played ok. The blinds move up every 30 minutes and I got to the 6th level with a below average stack. Went out in 19th place (paid top 5) when I had to push with almost ATC as the blinds were about to take 3/4 of my meager stack.

After being bummed out about my pitiful performance on Friday, I had a good saturday winning a little money at blackjack and then about 300 at craps before I went to the football game. Bet on 4 college games and won 3 out of 4 (Louisville -5.5 WTF!!!) Hawaii won and covered so that was cool as well. Was tired after getting back to the Nugget but since I was leaving Sunday afternoon I wanted one more crack at Poker. Bought in for $300 at the Nugget and got sat at a table that immediately gave off a fishy smell. Several guys were there to have fun and were half drunk. Ran my $300 up to about $950 in about 3 hours. The drunk guys left and a local semi-pro sat down to my left with aboug $1k in front of him and a drunk agressive maniac sat down with about $600 across the table from me. After treading water for the next hour I cased out for $880 to make up for most of my cash loss at Caesars. Yeah!

Overall a great trip to Vegas. We'll definitely stay at the Nugget again and this was a great learning experience for my game. Moral of my story is two-fold. Buy in for enough chips to compete and don't let being card-dead for a while make you overplay the first half way decent hand you get.