Life and Times of A Degenerate - Las Vegas - March, 2008...Part 2/2 - Look Mom, It's Nelly Amongst the Degenerates!

(Originally published March 31, 2008)
(Pictured: The Bellagio, aka my home-away from home while in the classless heart of America, Lost Wages [or as some call it Las Vegas])

The morning of March 27, I woke up bright and early (by my standards at least) and made my way over to the MGM Grand to play their 11:00am $65 craps tournament, errr poker tournament. These tourneys are a joke, as they have next to no play and the skill level is borderline non-existent. Anyways, I managed to go pretty deep, finishing 11th/84 people, but as Momma once told me “that don’t pay the bills fool”! I hung around for a bit, playing a little $1-2 NL Hold’em, again nothing really brewing and I took a small loss of about $20. I decided to make my way over to the sports book to place some coin on that night’s NCAA Sweet 16 games. I bet $100 on a 4 game parlay. I bet on Western Kentucky (+12), Xavier (+1), and also Louisville and North Carolina to win outright. I watched the early games and won both of them, but then we HAD to go and watch Carrot Top. Anybody who knows Carrot Top knows that this guy is the master of prop comedy, and rather bizarrely he’s quite muscular. Makes for a weird combination to say the least! Either way, the red-mopped comedian put on a good show, although I’m not too sure it was worth the $60, but then again nothing in Vegas is worth what you pay for it. When we emerged from Carrot Top, I booked it straight to the Sports Book to find out the results of the late games. Turns out, I hit all 4 games and my bet paid out a nice $698. That means one thing, keep on gambling! I wasted away the rest of the night in the Luxor Poker Room, and won $105 playing $1-2 NL Hold’em, but promptly lost it as I blanked in a $65 and $55 tournaments. Can only mean one thing....time to go back to Bellagio tomorrow!

Friday was to be our last full day in Vegas, so I had to take full advantage as far as getting my money into action! I slept in late, and made my way over to Bellagio around noon and sat down at the $15-30 Limit Hold’em. I caught some hot cards early, and was up over $1000 at one point in under 2 hours at the tables. Eventually, Jon came to get me around 3:30 to go out for breakfast/lunch/dinner and I cashed out ahead about $740 for the afternoon. As we were leaving Bellagio, Slim noticed that none other than Nelly was sitting in at a poker table like 2 away from mine. While he was wearing a ridiculous hat, he was sadly not sporting a band-aid, although it may have been in his 6’10”, 600 lb. bodyguard’s pocket! That afternoon, Slim reported that he had also seen Criss Angel walking through the poker room at the Luxor. Then he disappeared. Goulet. So Super Slim and I made our way over to Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville for some food, and well margaritas! We both slightly over-indulged from a food standpoint and had trouble getting back to the hotel as we both felt violently ill! We managed to make it back, albeit barely and I put another $100 on a 2 game parlay, where I bet on Kansas (-12.5) and Memphis (-5) before retreating to my bed to recover for a couple of hours. Both games hit again for me and it paid out $360. So in true Brent Moreau fashion, I took the dough over to Bellagio and lost $540 playing $15-30 Limit Hold’em in less than 2 hours. Should’ve stayed in damn it! After, I went back to Luxor and played some drunk $1-2 NL Hold’Em with my homeboy and dumped off $250 playing really bad poker until the wee hours of the morning.

Saturday was pretty uneventful, involved me flying home and contemplating my life. God, I’m such a deep person. Cough, cough. Anyways, for the whole trip I booked a ridiculously small all-around gambling profit of around a couple hundred dollars (thanks NCAA, boo poker). Guess I can’t quit my day job just yet!

Stay easy peoples, and keep on truckin`!

Life and Times of A Degenerate - Las Vegas - March, 2008...Part 1/2 - Hey hooker give me a room key!

(Originally published March 31, 2008)
(Pictured: Damn it feels good to be a gangster. How tough do I look holding that Uzi? Bitches beware!)

So....It's been a while since my last trip report, as I've been living the dream and working construction outdoors in balmy southern Ontario all winter. God I love the weather here. Anyways, Slim and I decided to head on out to Vegas for 5 nights to do some gambling, drinking, and more gambling. This is my 3rd trip to the great state of Nevada but it would be Super Slim’s virgin voyage.

So Monday morning rolled around, and I was up bright and early to catch my flight to Vegas. Slim would be travelling separate and not arriving until late at night as I was travelling Air Canada and he with West Jet. Anyways, I made it into Vegas by about 10:30am local time (after another flight with a non-functioning TV) and dropped my bags off at the Luxor (big pyramid hotel for you CSI people!). By 12:00pm I had made my way over to the beautiful confines of the Venetian poker room. I promptly lost $200 playing $1-2 NL Hold’em and $4-8 Pot-Limit Omaha (lots of poker talk in this story. For those not interested in poker/gambling, when you start to see numbers, skip ahead!). Not the greatest start to the trip, so I decided to try my luck over at the Mirage. Turns out the Mirage tigers were not there (renovations) and neither was any decent action in the poker room. This left me to turn to the comfy confines of the Bellagio, my favourite! Bellagio has always been my favourite place to play in Vegas for a couple of reasons: 1) higher stakes action 2) great poker room 3) possible celebrity sightings 4) It’s Bellagio come on! Anyways I saddled into an $8-16 Limit Hold’em table and proceeded to make $600 over the next 12 hours playing drunk poker (common theme throughout my trip, the drunk part, not the making money part!). By 2:30am when the game finally broke, it was me and 9 Asian guys at the table. Who says Asians aren’t degenerate gamblers? Not this guy! So I stumbled back to the hotel and was supposed to meet Slim at midnight, but was 3 hours late. When I couldn’t find him, I asked this skinny white dude who was with this big black hooker if they could swipe their room card into the elevator for me to get up to my room. They told me to politely fuck off. Eventually I found my Ukrainian counterpart and promptly crashed. Happy times in Sin City!

Tuesday morning I woke up and discovered that I had fallen asleep in a shallow (albeit very shallow) pool of $100 bills. I had always dreamed of doing this since Uncle Scrooge had that swimming pool full of money on Duck Tales. Slim Jim and I made our way over to the MGM Grand for a $65 tourney at 11:00am and were both promptly eliminated. On the positive side, we had fired up the beer train during the tourney! I spent the next few hours playing $2-5 NL Hold’em at MGM but couldn’t get anything going other than beers down my throat. I ended up down $75 for the session, which was a big disappointment considering there was this old, rich dude at my table who dumped off over $3000 to the other players. All I can say, is at least he had a hot, younger wife! God Bless America and all it stands for! That afternoon I put $100 on a parlay bet for the Maple Leafs to beat the Boston Bruins and for the total goals to be over 5.5. Slim and I made our way over to the ESPN Zone restaurant to watch the Leafs game, but turned out they were showing every NBA and NHL game except for that one. We stayed anyways for some pints and grub and found out the final score was 6-2 for Boston, and the Leafs were eliminated from the playoffs. My day of hard boozing and gambling made me tired and I KO’ed by like 8pm. Shit’s weak.

Wednesday started very early for me, as I woke up at midnight from my nap. Slim was fast asleep so I left his sorry ass and cabbed it down to the Bellagio for some late night/early morning action. I sat down in a $15-30 Limit Hold’em Game. I took some pretty sick beats, including a guy flopping a straight flush on me, while I turned an Ace high flush, which equalled a nice payoff for the other dude. I ended the session a $407 loser, but on a more positive note, I did get a chance to see Men ‘the Master’ Nguyen playing that night. For those of you who are ill informed, he is one of the greatest poker players of all-time and has won more ‘Player of the Year’ awards than anybody. Period. After my not so stellar session I stumbled my ass back to the Luxor and crashed by about 6:00am before re-awakening at about 11:00am. That afternoon, Slim and I went to check out this place called ‘The Gun Shop’ where they let you fire guns. It’s pretty weird. You go in and basically just pick a gun off the wall (everything from pistols to rifles to machine guns, etc) and then you get your ammo and pick out a target (we both took the picture of Osama, seemed to be the overwhelming favourite amongst the gun-loving masses there). I chose to fire an Uzi, while Slim chose the M16. I definitely felt like more of a man after the experience. Kids, if you want to make a lot of money, open a gun shop in Nevada, place was crazy busy. That afternoon, I played some $1-2 NL Hold’em at the Luxor and dumped off $200 playing really-bad-drunk poker. That evening, Slim and I decided to check out the Comedy show at the Tropicana, which was a good deal, as it featured 3 comedians for $20 and a free drink. It wasn’t quite as good a deal though as the $7 steaks and $2.50 beers we had beforehand at Excalibur. Mmm Mmm good! Anyways the comedy show was funny (not influenced by alcohol at all by this point) and the beer was cold. After the show, I decided I needed to buy a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and consume as many as I could on the spot. Six donuts later, and let’s just say our toilet didn’t like me too much the next morning. Is the box half-empty or half-full?! I don’t know, but you have a better chance of guessing how the porcelain was! Haha!