Strip Walk / Spring break at the Palms

Well then. Where were we?

Ok. This morning, Sarah and I took about a 7 hour walk. We had breakfast at the Palms around 8am, and then we proceeded to walk to the Strip (about 1 mile) and then down the Strip all the way to Mandalay Bay (about another mile), and then back. Obviously, we punctuated this with many stops at the various amazing casinios. Bad news is our camera is still broken. Good news is that I think I fixed it just a few minutes ago, so we'll be featuring photos again soon.

We toured: Ceaser's Palace, the Bellagio, New York New York, Monte Carlo, and Mandalay Bay. Quite fun, really. They are just so much larger than life, it's amazing. Makes even the best casinos in Atlantic City look like a bunch of roach motels, both in size and niceness. We went to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay, which is a monster aquarium tour with nothing but predatory fish. Very fun. We also played about an hour and a half of low-limit hold'em ($2/$4) at Luxor. I felt like sitting down for a bit before tomorrow, and Sarah was interested. I lost $12. She won $40.

On the way back in the late afternoon, we stopped at the Rio to watch some of the World Series, Day 1. Holy crap, i've never seen a poker scene like that. I'll get pictures and video tomorrow, but suffice it to say that it was unreal. 200+ tables playing, spectators 3 deep throughout the room, ESPN camera units everywhere, and, oh yeah, Scotty Wynn at the feature table. Drinking a Corona. I'm almost fell over when I saw that. Here's a picture from anothe blog:


That's "main street 2" in the tournament room, where you can walk as a spectator and watch from. There are four such "main streets" in the room, to give you a sense of the size. The following picture, however, does more justice to what it is like in the halls and tournament trying to move:


It's really a hassle. I have no idea how I'm going to go to the bathroom during the breaks tomorrow.

And the vendors. Good lord, the vendors. Every online poker site you've ever heard of, plus about 1000 others, have a dislay booth giving out free t-shirts, decks of cards, jewelry, sunglasses, jackets, hats, flip flops, poker chips, poker chip racks, and a whole bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with poker, like potholders. I think you could probably get about 50 t-shirts in one 20 minute walk through the hallway. But really it's the free booze that is most outrageous. Many of the online poker sites have set up bars in their hospitality suites. And i don't mean makeshift tables. I mean oak bars with beer taps. It was insane.

We got back to the Palms around 3:45 and decided to go down to the pool. I wish I had fixed my camera before we did this, as it was a scene straight out of Daytona. I was floored. It was more like a giant fraternity party at an outdoor pool bar than anything else. Sarah's quote: "Thank god we didn't bring those books down here we were going to read." We had a pina colodas (ordered at the swim up bar), and lounged around in the water listening to the pumping hip-hop and observing the twenty-something mayhew. I'll get pictures tomorrow.

Tonight we're going to Little Buddha for dinner. It's a pan-asian /sushi bar place. Needless to say I'm very excited.

I'll post again before I hit the WSOP tomorrow. I'm not nervous yet.