16 June 2010

While the Baglady was getting her hair done and Switzerland was beating Italy, I went for a walk down to the Venetian. I hadn’t had a proper look round last year so I wanted to take a few pics. They certainly had fun building this place! Here’s a detail from the outside…

And here’s an extravagant ceiling near the entrance to the shopping mall. It’s hard to capture in a picture, but you can get an idea of the scale from the man standing bottom right…

Back to the room, Bag was really pleased with her hairdo. And rightly so, it looks tons better than when the local Crawley hairdresser does it. Mind you, Crawley is cheaper…

I felt it was time to pop my Vegas cash cherry, so the Baglady came with me as we headed down to Mandalay Bay where I had seen a pretty juicy $1-$2 cash game last year. So we took the monorail to the Grand, where the lion was holding court:

walked over to the fairy-tale palace that is the Excalibur:

and caught the tram to Mandalay Bay.

This is where the Baglady left me and went off to explore on her own.

There were 2 full games of $1-$2 on the go in the Mandalay Bay card room, both looked pretty good and it wasn’t long before I was sat down. It was a pretty good table: mixture of passive fish, TAGs and a couple of LAGs as well.

Unfortunately I was at probably the worst seat at the table: the LAG table captain to my immediate left with a big stack. My stay didn’t last long. At the end of the third orbit of watching the LAG on my left take down a succession of pots without showing, I managed to get the stack in against him via a turn checkraise TPTK. Unfortunately he had flopped a set and it was rebuy or stand up. I had my wallet out then decided not to. I’ve been in this position online and it often ends in tears.

So instead I headed back to meet up with the Baglady. She’d gone hunting for a low-stakes Pai Gow Poker table to play, but given up the search and settled down at the Excalibur. That is where I met up with her getting stuck into the complimentary G&Ts while playing the pokie at the bar. I joined her for a quick $10 but was running bad at that too so we left.

After stopping by to look into the Tropicana – a disappointment, nothing to see – we took the monorail back to Harrah’s and caught the free bus to the Rio to buy shirts. I got a nice purple Rio shirt ready for the next PPP meet-up (I’m in Rio house). The Bag had learnt from Twitter that Kara Scott was playing in the Amazon room so we went there to rail. Sadly she had bust out by the time we got there and we missed her by 6 minutes! Oh well, we’ll just have to catch up with her next year.

Still there were some slebs to see in Amazon today. Here’s the old school crowd…

and here’s the younger contingent (Hmm, not sure, maybe Ivey is old school as well these days?)

We sat to watch the TV table being filmed, but Bag wasn’t feeling so good so we went back to the room for a cup of tea, room service and an early night. There’s another day tomorrow!