Due to the number of requests and particularly the number of questions regarding a certain excursion to a certain topless bar, I am belatedly posting my BARGE trip report. I suppose I should just cut to the quick and get down to the business of telling what happened that fateful Friday night, but I think I’ll try to retain some level of mystery by not mentioning it until about the middle of my report, so you’ll have to scroll down to it, if that’s all you really care about. Be warned however, that if you do so, you might be missing out on some fun name-dropping as well as anecdotes that may actually relate to GAMBLING, which is, after all, why we read this stuff. Right?
Mike and I arrived Thurday morning, August 3rd, and immediately headed over to In ’n Out Burger to get our first fix. Those of you from Southern California should know what I’m talking about. French fries made from fresh potatoes, no extra charge for grilled onions…
>>BEST BURGER VALUE IN VEGAS : IN ‘N OUT BURGER<<
When I was a kid in Southern California everyone would get an In ’n Out Burger bumpersticker and cut off the “B” and “R” from “BURGER” so it would read “IN ‘N OUT URGE”. I swear to Buddha that for years I thought all these people just really loved those burgers. After all, I sure did. So while we were in Vegas, I hoped to pick up one of these classy bumperstickers but was disappointed to find that now they just say “In ’n Out, " without the word “Burger.” And I’ll bet bumpersticker sales are way down from what they used to be.
Our fat quotient satisfied for the afternoon, we headed over to Binion’s to check into our luxury tower room, and WHOA, what’s this? a BALCONY? in Vegas? You normally can’t even open the window at a hotel room in Vegas (some sort of suicide/bonehead precaution, I suppose), and here was Binion’s, just inviting us to step outside. And it was lovely, just lovely. Warm desert breeze, a fine view of Bob Stupak’s tower, the lure of the casinos below…
And so of course we didn’t hang about in our wonderful room, but headed down to check out some of that great single-deck blackjack, a definite plus to staying downtown. While we were sitting there doing our basic strategy thing, Jeff Sue walked over. Our first BARGEr! Was he happy to see us? Well, in a way. He needed a ride over to the DI tournament. Yeah, good to see you too, Jeff. On our way out of the Horseshoe, we ran into Steve Brecher who didn’t seem too interested in playing a tournament, but we said, “AW, c’mon! It’ll be fun! We’ll give you a ride!” so Steve shrugged his shoulders and came along with us. Now I’m no Tom McEvoy, but in retrospect I can give this advice for winning poker tournaments: if you see Steve Brecher on your way to a tournament, DON’T try to convince him to join the tournament with you, and DON’T give him a ride. The man is a ruthless tournament player and he will bust you at the first opportunity. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. The last time I was in a tournament with Steve, he stripped Mike Maurer of the chip lead, and launched himself into first place, sticking Mike with third. (Foreshadowing of BARGE tournament yet to come.)
I don’t remember much about the DI tournament other than that I played some horrible combination of weak-tight and bluffs-too-much, and everytime I looked to my right, Steve Brecher had more of my chips. Doh!
I volunteered Mike to drive some people and Mike volunteered to drive some people until there were six of us riding over to the Mirage in our four- passenger Mazda. Yeah, it was hot and crowded and probably would have been better if we had just walked, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere as much fun, now would it? And besides, I got to share the front seat with Conrad Lautenbacher, and who could pass that up?
The buffet at the Mirage was every bit as sumptuous as I had pictured. I tried the famous strawberry soup, and gosh, it tasted just like melted strawberry ice cream, which is okay, but I guess I prefer it frozen. I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet more people at dinner, but I guess I was too busy feeding my face.
I signed up for some 3-6 hold ’em afterwards, and found myself at a table with a bunch of other rec.gamblers. Can you say negative expectation? The BARGErs eventually spread out to other tables and some incredible fish sat down. Andy I-just-got-my-PhD (sorry, I can’t remember your last name) was on my left and Greg Wohletz was on my right. We were making a few bucks here and there but things didn’t get interesting until Dave Marshall aka Propdude sat down. I’d never met Dave before, but wow, I liked his playing style! An extremely lucky fish at our table kept doing live straddles and pulling stuff like JJ and AA out of his butt. Did Dave Marshall get mad? No! He started doing live straddles himself, and playing stuff like 85 suited and winning! I’m not sure how he did it, but the table started to go wild and I felt like I was back in California with the crazy Asians. AIYAH! In complete awe, I asked him his secret, and he said you just had to “visualize achievement” with your cards. What a guru. He must write inspirational corporate slogans for a living.
I decided to cash out while Dave Marshall was running over the table, (best to just get out of the way and let the master do his thing). I then popped on over to Mike’s Omaha table just in time to see him get a royal flush! He was surprisingly calm about it. When he asked if he got anything for his high hand, someone said, “Sure, you get a lighter!” and tossed him a book of matches. They’ve got live orchids in the atrium and they won’t even give him a lousy T-shirt.
>>WORST HIGH HAND VALUE IN VEGAS : THE MIRAGE POKER ROOM<<
For the ride back downtown I volunteered our car again and once again ended up with six people in a four-person car. The cool part is that I once again got to sit next to Conrad Lautenbacher, AND I had Kris Munn on my lap. (Way better than Glitter Gulch ANY day.)
Woke up late on Friday and went downstairs to play my morning blackjack. That’s what I love about Vegas, waking up and starting my day betting reds and knowing the day is just FULL of possibilities.
I did the DI tournament again, where I got to sit next to Nate Huang and we did our “Weak-Tight, Weak-Tight” mantra to get us in the swing. Things seemed to be going pretty well and everything seemed so comfortable and homey with Nate next to me. After Nate busted out though, I felt all cold and alone in my weak-tight universe and I just barely pulled through to the final table where me and another woman were busted out at number eight. Well, I didn’t feel too bad, that being the furthest I had ever gotten in a DI tournament, AND I had out-lasted Mike Maurer. We all have our measures of success; that’s mine.
Mason Malmuth’s talk that evening reminded me of an anecdote I once heard about John von Neumann (maybe it was someone else, perhaps someone who knows the story can correct me). Von Neumann was scheduled to give two talks on the same day, one to a gathering of scientists, and the other to a ladies’ garden club. Somehow or other, and being a bit socially clueless (aren’t we all?), he mixed up his papers and gave the highly technical talk to the ladies’ garden club and the simple, general overview lecture to the scientists. (I know this sounds utterly preposterous, and it may be completely apocryphal.) Anyways, I sometimes felt like Mason was giving the wrong talk given the group of people gathered, but there were occasional glimpses of issues that would have been genuinely interesting if he had approached them at greater depth.
Even so, I still think it was quite a coup for Mike Zimmers to get Mason Malmuth to give a talk to us. I’m sure that I got more out of it than Mason did. :)
And just to prove that we are all capable of bonehead moves, Derek and I got in a bidding war over Cliff Matthews in the Calcutta and it wasn’t until the price hit $70 that we turned to each other and said, “Hey, we could split it.” Doh! If that wasn’t bad enough, Cliff ends up busting out before I do in the BARGE tournament. Which of course makes Cliff:
>>WORST CALCUTTA VALUE IN VEGAS : DEADHEAD<<
(Like you could trust anyone with a nick like “deadhead”.)
Wait, let me re-think that statement. Derek bought me for thirty bucks in the Calcutta. Whoa. Now that’s a bad value. Like you could trust anyone who plays like she’s got a paperbag over her head.
(To make matters worse, I gave twenty-five bucks to Feldhouse to cover my share in Cliff. Instead of giving me change, he put the $1.66 he owed me into the bank for the keno team. I can’t knock that completely, though. For a while, that $1.66 looked like the best bet I had riding.)
After the symposium, I decided to lose my craps cherry. Unfortunately, I tried to rely on Mike to show me what to do, but he seemed fairly virginal in these matters. Luckily, Jim Feldhouse came along and showed me how it’s done, man of the world that he is.
When the dice came to me I was feeling sweaty and tense and trying really, really hard not to mess up. Things were going fine until the boxman told me to get some more loft on the dice. Up the dice went, and smack into Andy Bloch. Now the one thing I know about craps is that you have to be very, very superstitious, and if something works once, you should not vary your strategy one iota. So my new strategy was to smack Andy Bloch with the dice each time before I actually rolled. Worked pretty well, too. Eventually I missed Andy Bloch and sevened out. See?
After losing thirty bucks on this craps experiment (feh, see if I try that again), I went over to visit my old friend, the video hold’em machine. Ming Lee was over there playing, but as soon as I sat down he started heckling my play. I quietly explained that the strategy I had read on rec.gambling stated that it was correct to play really really loose and that I had never posted a loss at video hold’em, so there. As Ming watched, the machine ate about forty bucks of my money, and it was difficult to sound so self- assured. Finally Ming took off for more interesting games to heckle and I fought my way up to just above my buy-in. Hah!
Feeling flush with money after this victory, I ran into Derek McLain and Rob Fagen. Derek seemed kind of bored and Rob seemed kind of pickled. After describing a great bar bet he knows to me and Derek and then to some random guy, Rob started flashing his Glitter Gulch V.I.P. card saying that he had “found” it somewhere and we should go check it out. (Later on I find out that they’re handing out these V.I.P. cards to anyone who walks by the place and they’ve all got fake names and signatures on them. Neat.) I mentioned an Australian all-male revue, which has the irresistible subtitle “Thunder from Down Under” (almost as good as “Wind of the Gods”, er “Winds of the Gods,” the show at the Luxor). Of course Derek and Rob voted me down 2-1 so we were off to Glitter Gulch.
I’d never been to a topless bar, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I figured it might be something like the topless bar interlude that happens in a lot of action movies when things get dull. I wasn’t too far off, although it was a bit more up close and personal than I had imagined or would care to imagine. Yikes.
We got seated at a booth and my eyes had just become accustomed to the darkness when these two giant mounds of silicone came over and introduced themselves as “Champagne”. I was thinking “NO thanks! I’d like to shop around a little first,” but Rob seemed to be in control of our little group and Champagne probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. Before I knew what’s what, I had two five-dollar screwdrivers in front of me that tasted like Tang with the word vodka whispered over them. I instinctively reached for the oriental snack mix in the bowl on the table and was immediately chastised by Derek. “NEVER eat the snacks in the bowl at a strip bar! What are you, crazy?” I then noticed what appeared to be a lap dance going on in the next booth and I said to Derek, “I don’t know if I want to be sitting in this booth considering what goes on in them.” Both of us then did a little sweep behind us, like checking for gum on the seat at a movie theater. Whew. Nothing.
In the meantime, Champagne was chatting up Rob and trying to get him off in a booth of his own so she could no doubt fleece him of a few twenties. Derek intervened and said she should go ahead and do her table dance for all three of us, right here. I was still thinking that there were plenty of other prettier, uh, fresher-looking women around the joint, and that maybe we could get one of them instead. But before I could say anything, Champagne had her left foot on the table and her right foot above Derek’s left shoulder and by the look on Derek’s face I would guess that he was probably wishing he had held out for something a little fresher too. Luckily, she concentrated on Derek and Rob and left me to figuring out when she started her shift and when she last took a shower.
Eventually Champagne moved on and Derek and I began to notice a lot more interesting women dancing on the stage. One in particular looked just a bit like Bridget Fonda and she could dance rather than just do calisthenics. I was wondering what our odds were at getting her to our table when Rob started chatting with another stripper. Her name was Rain (or some such nature name) and she had natural breasts and a diamond stud in her nose. The conversation went something like this:
Rob: Wommmanaorallypleazhure.
Rain: No touching allowed.
Derek: Can I stick my finger in your nose and feel your nose stud?
Rain: No way!
Derek: Aw, c’mon!
Rain: Not even!
Derek: I’ll pay you.
Rain: (thinking)
Rob: Ummanagarble
Me: Why are you wearing two G-strings?
Rain: Oh! That’s required at a topless place where they serve liquor. Isn’t that silly?
Me: It is. What about places where the women are totally nude?
Rain: Well, they can’t serve liquor.
Me: Hmm.
Derek: How about if he pleasures you and we watch?
Rob: Mngahaplezhure.
Rain: Just watch? Really? (Looks at me.)
Me: Whatever. (Shrug my shoulders. I don’t really know these guys.)
Derek: How much?
Rob: Hummanababy.
Rain: Well, I don’t. But some of the girls here…
It was around this point that I started to get nervous that Rob and Derek might actually succeed in convincing someone or we would end up getting our butts bounced outta there, and the game of “real or fake” was growing tiresome, even with Derek. Fueled with a story for our trip reports, Derek and I left Rob at Glitter Gulch, still in negotiation with other half-naked double-G-stringed women. Oh, and I almost forgot:
>>WORST DRINK VALUE IN VEGAS : GLITTER GULCH<<
Naturally, everything after this is going to be anticlimactic. Go ahead and hit N to see the next article.
Saturday morning, the day of the big tournament, we got down to breakfast just in time and sat with Aaron and Jennifer Packman, Bob Herlien, and J. Mike Hammond. Mike Maurer was wearing his Curious George T-shirt for the event, because he thought it implied poor poker play. You know, it’s his curiousity that gets George in trouble. “Curious George had pocket threes under the gun and it was raised all-in behind him. George knew he shouldn’t call, but what was in that flop? George got curious. (Uh-oh.) He just HAD to call.” Not to mention the fact that Curious George has no poker face. “Curious George gets rockets!” And who could forget “Curious George goes to see a loanshark named Sal”?
Breakfast was fantastic by the way. What a deal! I love free stuff.
Once again, the tournament was something of a blur. I realized I was seriously out-classed as soon as I sat down, with John Reed and Jim Albrecht at my table. I managed to bust Monte Christensen early on, but then slowly bled it all away, busting out somewhere in the middle.
It wasn’t until after I busted out of the tournament that I made my serious error: I sat down at the video hold’em machines again. This time there was no winning it back. It was heart-breaking.
In the end, I was playing nickel video keno with Conrad Lautenbacher. We tried various strategies, like selecting our numbers and then going one up or one down or one sideways, but nothing seemed to work. We must have blown two dollars. It was at this point, that a lovely cocktail waitress in the form of Cliff Matthews came up and gave us both Heinekens. Beer has never tasted so sweet.
>>BEST BEER VALUE IN VEGAS : CLIFF MATTHEWS<<
At this point, I think I should clear up a story that has certainly become inflated in the telling by certain parties. I was standing around watching the pot-limit game when Jim Feldhouse noticed a nickel on the edge of the ashcan. He asked me if it was mine and I said, “No, I like to retain some dignity.” Derek heard this and thought it was pretty funny, then to test me he started throwing coins into the sand of the ashcan. Well I didn’t bite, but Jim Feldhouse started picking them out. When he had a few quarters he sat down at a Red White & Blue slot machine. On the third quarter, wouldn’t you know it, but the machine started spitting out quarters, not a lot, but enough to make that winning sound. Well, something must have cracked inside me, ‘cause i went in after the coins that were left in the sand, but too deep for Feldhouse’s tender sensibilities. Obviously, these were lucky coins. Yes, I washed my hands afterwards. I wash my hands frequently in Vegas.
Well, they WERE lucky coins, because Feldhouse then went and told people that I was fishing nickels out of the ashtrays and Ed Baker gave him FIVE DOLLARS to give to me. Now THAT’s a good return. Thanks Ed!
>>BEST PERSON TO HIT UP FOR A FIVER IN VEGAS : ED BAKER<<
On Sunday we barely made it over to the Gold Coast Tournament after Mike busted out of the Blackjack tournament. In retrospect, I don’t see why we were all so stoked to get over there. None of the BARGE contingent finished anywhere near in the money. But we all seemed to be having a good time. “Too much fun,” one dealer called it. I’m proud that we seemed to be spreading joy and goodwill wherever we went. No really. Over the course of the weekend, several dealers and poker room persons remarked on what a pleasant group of people we all were. I think we should congratulate ourselves on projecting such a good image. Maybe we’ll get invited somewhere nice next year.
That evening Mike and I checked into the Rio for two free nights. I mention this because it relates to last year’s BARGE. If you read my trip report last year, you may remember that I took my spare quarters from the poker table and plunked them into a 4-of-a-kind bonus video poker machine which I wound up playing all day and coming out ahead $200. Well, the Luxor tracked me and I must have got on the “Plays a hell of a lot of video poker” list. Some months later I received a letter from a casino host at the Rio inviting me to stay there free for two nights. Now this was completely puzzling to me as the only thing I had ever done at the Rio was eat at the buffet. “We’ve noticed that you eat A LOT, and we’d like to get some of that eating action,” just didn’t seem likely. So I put two and two together and when I asked, sure enough, the casino host at the Rio had just left the Luxor. Wow. What a score!
And wow, the room was ultra-deluxe, swanky, and absolutely worth every penny I did not spend.
>>BEST ROOM VALUE IN VEGAS : THE RIO<<
Another good thing about the Rio is that they have a video poker machine called “Second Chance”. It’s like a regular 9-6 machine with a 4000 coin pay-out for a royal flush, but after the draw, if you have a hand that could improve to a straight or better with the addition of one card, you have the option of paying to see one more card, and you are paid the true odds if it hits (rounded down, if it doesn’t work out even). The fun part is that there’s a progressive jackpot on each individual machine for hitting the royal flush on the second chance with maximum coins bet. And even if you only bet one quarter on your initial draw, on your second chance you can bet the maximum number of coins! The best machine I saw had about a $200 royal flush jackpot on the second chance. And for reasons that only the players themselves can understand, I noticed people using the other machines even when the highest jackpot machine was free.
So no, I didn’t hit the jackpot. But I did have a lot of fun and I’m hoping the Rio will invite me back. :) So there are only four of these twenty-five cent Second Chance machines, and there are two dollar Second Chance machines. They are hidden over by Toscano’s Deli if you’re interested.
Which makes me wonder, why are all the restaurant’s Italian-themed at the Rio if the hotel is supposedly Brazilian-themed? Mike says it’s because a lot of dorks think Italian is spoken in Brazil. Maybe.
And on the recommendation of the cigar-smoker crowd, Mike and I had an amazing dinner at Fiore. I couldn’t believe it when they brought out the sorbet before the entree and then doused it with Dom Perignon. Holy moley! Everything was absolutely fantastic. (But lose the elevator music! Geez!) So it was a little expensive, but I’m from Palo Alto and menu prices don’t bother me anymore, and at least this time, I felt like I got what I paid for.
Of course, the best dinner value in Vegas actually goes to Lee Jones who treated me and the Mau-man at Seasons restaurant in Bally’s. Thanks Lee! Mike Zimmers held this distinction last year for treating at Binion’s Steakhouse. Who will receive this honor next? I am already considering applications for my next visit to Vegas.
>>BEST DINNER VALUE IN VEGAS : LEE JONES<<
Thanks to everyone for making this year’s BARGE a total success. I’d especially like to thank Mike Zimmers, Chuck Weinstock, Frank Irwin, Andy Latto, Dave Hughes, Keith Fichtemaier, Jim Albrecht, and every single one of you who showed up and made the event what it was.
Happy gambling!
Connie Kellers
P.S. My apologies to Rob Fagen, who was certainly a lot more eloquent at Glitter Gulch then I made him out to be.