Vegas Baby!

Yes, it was a good weekend. As you may or may not know, we have a yearly guys Super Bowl excursion to Vegas. This year was one that will be told to generations upon generations. I ended up a couple hundred up, which was pretty good considering I had a track record of losing my shirt every trip there. However, this story isn't about me and my measly two little bills. It's about a guy name Matt, or more commonly know by the name Lucky Bastard (LB or DLB).

We had a group of about 12 guys total this year, which divided up into half LB's friends and half his Dad's friends. We all get in on Friday at some point in the day. I got in pretty early and met up with Nate and Mike and hung around most of the morning and hit the daily noon poker tournament. Nate and I were knocked out, but Mike made it to the 10 spot, so he ended up getting a payout, which was cool. The rest of the afternoon was pretty nice for me. Craps was by far the most generous that day to me since I was up $400 after a couple hours of play. Generally I was always up during the course of the weekend with a couple times falling back down to even. I played mostly craps and blackjack, but a few spins of the roulette wheel and a couple poker tournaments rounded out the weekend nicely. It's about 9 when LB finally gets in from Dallas with Tracy and Klaus to follow. The rest of the night is spent at various table games. Some of us get to sleep early (around 2) and a couple (LB included) make up some lost time since their planes got in late and pretty much stay up all night. We're awaken at 7am by a DLB (Drunken Lucky Bastard) who stumbles in and declares "I hope you don't mind me putting my huge fricken pile o' money on the floor" as he pulls stacks and stacks out of his pockets and makes a big pile in the middle of the suite. All told the first night he was up around $8K. Not bad for someone so drunk he fell a few times in the hallway coming back to the room! Since we were all staying at the Rio, which is fairly isolated from the strip, they have you at their mercy as far as table limits. They definitely jacked them all up this weekend. There wasn't a $5 game in the house and I only saw 2 tables at $10. So most of the time we had to hit the $15/$25 tables. Normally this would tend to cause larger than normal losses, however, as you can see it was quite the opposite fate for DLB. He started out at the normal rate of $25 a hand and managed to get an early lead and just kept bumping the bets up accordingly... $50, $100, $200, $400, $600... After leaving his big pile o' money on the floor we felt it necessary to at least get one good incriminating pic of him...



The next day was a day of up and down and back to even for me. The one highlight was the full house I hit in Caribbean Stud which paid close to $400. That evening was a completely different story for DLB. I would say LB, but I think he woke up still drunk, so he kept going with the DLB moniker. The evening wore on and his stack kept growing at an amazing pace. Some of us went clubbing to give our up and down funds some stability, if only for a while. In the meantime DLB stuck to the tables to keep the bankroll going. At the end of the night (aka 8am) DLB stumbled in with 20 large. That's right, that DDLB (Damn Drunken Lucky Bastard) just more than doubled his stake in the casino's profits and couldn't even see straight. Toward the end of that night before heading up, he tried to make it over to the restrooms to give back a portion of the Dewar's that he had so generously taken off the Casino's hands, but didn't quite make it. Luckily a trashcan was on the way, so one quick blast from the gut in the trashcan and he was on his way back to the tables. What a trooper!

Superbowl Sunday. The day we came to Vegas for. And ironically we didn't have any Super Bowl party tickets. We had tried various times during the weekend to get reservations, but everything always seemed booked. That is until DLB sat down at a table an hour before Kickoff time. He pulled his stack of hondo's out and started the hands out with 3 bills. Yup, won the first hand. And the second. Split the third and won them both. Doubled down on the forth and got the 10 to double up. All told he won the first 12 hands and 19 out of the first 20. That brought his total up past the $25K that was the highpoint of the weekend. He was well known by the dealers and pit bosses by this point in the weekend and had done something that his Dad hasn't done yet in countless trips to Vegas. Earn Diamond status at the Casino. It is a shiny bright card, which stands out against the dim Gold Status cards that the rest of us had. So right before the Super Bowl he manages (with the help of the real big roller Jim) to get the remaining 4 of us that didn't have tickets yet to a party, some tickets to an open-bar, all-you-can-eat party, with huge wall sized projection screen TVs and a lot of rowdy fans. Not bad. Not bad at all.

And that takes us to a kick ass Super Bowl! It came complete with text wars with Slick (see K's blog below) over who would win the game. Of course the first one I received was simply "Bears". And the first one he got back was "Suck". Not much later he received "Colts" and I got back the "Suck" texts. The exchange was typically done after one side scored. Of course I had to send a couple "Send Griese In" and "Go Grossman" after a superbly timed interception ;-) And with the Colts win, the hated Bears were exposed as wannabes and their fans were united in hating Grossman. Ah, a season well done. Of course we can't leave out that the Packers must have shattered the Bears spirits just enough during the crushing last game of the season, that the Bears knew that they were pretenders all along.

I won 7 out of 8 bets on the game, so I was pretty happy. The Colts won, there was more than 3.5 field goals, more than 1.5 interceptions, the game ended with an even score, the first team that scored lost, there were no safeties, and there was no overtime. The only one I lost was that there were not over 4.5 sacks.

Sunday night was a drunken blur of gambling, clubbing, and only getting an hour of sleep before we had to take off for the airport. All told it was a damn good weekend. All 6 of us left ahead, which is unheard of. It's nice to see the Rio so accommodating in giving us their money when they gave the impression that they wanted to take it all with such high table minimums! The phrase "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" luckily didn't apply to DLB's big pile o' cash.

I got home at around 3pm on Monday and didn't get out of bed until 6am Tuesday Morning. That's definitely a sign that you've just been to Vegas!

Ah, Vegas Baby!

--S