Vegas, Part I

We finally broke down and decided to pay for the internet for a day. I'm still against it on principle alone.

Jacob and I came in to Vegas Monday morning. We planned to stop at McDonald's for an early lunch, but we crossed into Pacific time. Our 11:00 turned into 10:00, so they were still serving breakfast. This whole time change thing is quite burdensome. At any rate, it was to set a tone for the day. We heard about a promotion to get free buffets if you sign up for a player's card at the Wynn (if you earn 25 points). They give you $10 in free slot play, so Jake and I could have each gotten the points for the buffet with $4 left over from the free play by playing video roulette. I'll save you the math in this particular instance, but suffice it to say that they would have been paying us each $4 to eat their buffet. However, they changed their promotion for Memorial Day. We did get $10 free slot play, which we used to make $25 net profit playing video poker. That came only after Jacob had lost $268 playing $1/$2 at the Venetian. After dinner we returned to MGM, and Jacob played some more $1/$2. While he was making back $236 of what he lost earlier, I was trying to get back in the room. It turns out the battery in the card-swiper on our room door was dead, but I only figured that out after going down to have the keys changed twice. Then I had to wait for security to come up, who the front desk person told me could "override" the dead battery with his master key. It doesn't take a genius to know that's not right, so then I had to wait for the locksmith to come up. Great day...

Tuesday morning I went to the front desk to complain about the door, and they gave us free buffets for MGM's buffet. We got the free meals after all. Jake wanted to play a tournament, so we called around to find a good structure. Treasure Island has a 2pm tournament with 3500 starting chips, blinds at 25-50 (going up every 20 minutes). They also had sweet tea, which Jake only told me once the tournament was over. The buy-in was $65, and we both played. Jake lost, and I made it to the final four. We were all close in chips and the blinds were really high, so we agreed to divide up the prize pool evenly and not play it out. It's called a "chop" in poker lingo. My take was $360, and I left $20 for the dealers. Once you take away the $130 combined buy-in from the $340 net payout, we had a net profit of $210. Jake proceeded to lose another $250 at $1/$2 at MGM later that night.

We decided to play another tournament on Wednesday. Jake wanted to play at Caesar's, so that's what we did. The buy-in was $70, so we were in for $140. I lost, but Jake won the tournament for a payout of $950. He left $30 for the dealers, which gave us a net profit of $780 for the tournament. One old guy asked the dealer to check Jake's ID, but the dealer told him that had already been done. We had our celebratory meal at Denny's, and Jake was ticked that we forgot the coupon for $5 off a purchase of at least $15. After dinner, we went to Planet Hollywood to take advantage of their promotion for player's card signup. We each got $10 free slot play that we had to play through once before we could cash out. I made $10.75 net profit, and Jake made $10 net profit playing video poker. They also gave us a coupon for a casino match of one bet at a table game up to $25. That means we could bet $25 on red at roulette, and a winning bet would pay $50 instead of $25. The odds of hitting a red are 47.37%, and the odds of not are 52.63%. The math is as follows: [(47.37% * $50)-(52.67% * $25)] = $10.5175. What that all means is that with the bonus bet our average net profit will be $10.5175 every time we make that bet. We each put it on red and both won. That gave us a net profit of $100, which exceeded our expected value by about 400%.

Our total poker take from Indiana, Iowa, and Vegas is $999 up to this point. When you factor in the promotions we've taken advantage of, it takes us up to about $1200 net profit. I may post some pictures tonight or tomorrow morning, but I really don't have anything that impressive (at least not in comparison to what's already been posted). My favorite casino is Caesar's, but the statues there have a fair number of naked women. Since I'm not sure who's seeing this, I don't think it's appropriate to post those. I'm out.

Later,
Matt