Vegas Take-2

This trip was complete mayham from before I left to when I got back.

I decide one afternoon that I want to go to Vegas for a few days so I hope online to book a place to stay. I want to play the 40/80 mixed game mostly which runs at the Bellagio so where better to stay than there. Their website mentions something about "you must be 21 or over to book a room" but whatever, I booked through a different site and figured I'd show up and give it a shot. What's the worse that could happen?

Fast forward 3 hours and I roll up to:



"Hi I'd like to check-in please".

"Sure, I'll just need your confirmation number and passport".

Uhhhh.

I have no idea what my confirmation number is. I tell the lovely lady who is about to ruin my trip this and give her my name + passport. She's looking it over.. and over. and over. About a minute later, "Sorry sir we can't find your reservation in our system, when did you book the room?". I tell her I booked it a few hours earlier through a website and she's like oh.. umm well I'll have to talk to the manager in the back. Ok sure, this isn't too bad.

"I'll be back with your passport in just a minute". Heheh.. heh.. heheh.. i'm dead aren't I. Yup totally screwed. You're forgetting at this point in time I was running hotter than god himself so obv she returns and is all peachy saying "We still can't find it but that's ok, we've got rooms, we'll just make another booking" dum de dum.. 2 minutes later I'm ordering room service.

I hadn't booked a return ticket and had no idea how long I was going to stay. The first few days were less than stellar with me breaking even then winning a bit then losing a bit more, probably being down 2k or so. I met up with Kenny and his married gf a couple of times and we had dinner/drinks/played some poker/lost some at pai gow. All fun and games really.

I should probably mention one of the most stupidest things i've ever done and gotten away with. I was sitting in the 40/80 game the day after I arrived and remembered hearing that there was a poker rate you can get to stay for cheaper. So I decide to try to get it. I ask one of the floor managers how to get it and they say I have to speak to the poker room manager in charge of those things so I go to her office behind the cage and ask her for the poker rate. Sure thing she says. "I'll just need your room number and passport". SO I HAND IT OVER, knowing full well that as soon as she opens it if she looks at my birth date she'll see i'm only 19. This is after having played for hours and already spending a night in the hotel. I basically risked getting kicked out of the room and possibly the hotel and maybe having my chips confiscated and a bunch of others problems, to get like $100/night off my room. I dunno if she let it slide cause of my ruggish good looks or if she was mesmorized by my charm but she put a couple of things into her computer and gave me my passport back and I was on my way!

Then it begins. I think it was the night of going out to dinner with them. They were going to see some live sex show and invited me along but not wanting to be declining an offer for a threesome several hours later I decided to go play some poker. Such a poor decision. I dropped something like $5k in the game if I remember correctly. I went to bed dejected and woke up the next day eager to make it back. Whoops nope we'll just lose another $3k! I was really low on cash but figured NP I'll just go to an ATM and withdraw $1k or so as that's my daily limit, and go back to San Diego or something. Card declined. Insufficient funds. Card Error. Please contact your bank. I contacted them and they said it would be working in a few days. WWWtf. I'm screwed.

Picture this. I'm staying at the Bellagio and have a room bill of about $1k that I need to pay when I check out. I can't pay this as I have no cash and my card isn't working for whatever reason. So I have to stay in the hotel, all the time spending like $300/day on the room + expenses. I'm basically TARPED with no way out.

Then the all-too-generous Xaston flies out to Vegas ALL BY HIMSELF (after having me write like a 1,000 word essay on what to do at the airport) and saves the day! We made a deal whereby he'd bring me a whole bunch of cash and I'd stake him in the WCOOP - a deal that ended very well for me. I also had Spank Her Pair give me some cash for online funds that same day so I ended up being ok. But boy was I shitting myself for a day or two.

The next night Xaston and I met up with Spank Her Pair for dinner at Delmonicos, the famous steakhouse at the Venetion. I'm not sure what it was but I didn't enjoy this meal as much as I feel that I should have. Maybe I wasn't hungry enough as I didn't finish my steak and left feeling bloated. I'd like to go back there though and give it another try.

After dinner we went to meet up with Kenny to have some drinks and play some table games. We begin by playing some video poker at the rate of 50 or 100 games at a time. I ran hot obv and hit a royal flush within no time. Quickly getting bored of this though we went to try to play some blackjack or pai gow, but every time we try to sit down we get carded and I obviously am screwed at this point. I pull everything out of my pockets and am all "oh, shit, where the hell is my ID? Geez sir, I'm really sorry, I must have left it in my room. I'll just be going now and getting that, mmk?". In the end we went to Treasure Island (I think?) and just sat down and had a few drinks. We decided to get a pack of cards and play some chinese poker which soon degraded into randomly dealing out stud hands to the tune of 13 cards each and seeing who won. The loser of these hands had to pay for the next round of drinks. It was beautiful because Xaston and I never had to pay once, and the broke-at-the-time Kenny had to pay the most. By the end of it Xaston was drunk and almost fell over when he stood up, and we left soon after to go back and sleep. A pretty fun night all in all.

In the end I played a little more 40/80 and I think I won? Then Xaston was leaving after a day or two and I flew back with him to go to Foxwoods for Shamdonk's 21st birthday shindig and ended up getting kicked out of that casino for being underage after playing the 5/10 game there for a while. The next day I flew back to San Diego and so ended one of the craziest 2-week periods of my life.

edited to add the last night in Vegas.

That was an exciting story but I was sure you were getting arrested at some point or having sexytime with the poker manager.

weakish

god

u know karmas gonna be a bitch when u get aids or something right?

thats pretty weak, i want my hundo

So one of the stops I made while in Europe last year was to Holland, land of the tommyhawk! I was with my friend Phil and we arrived in Amsterdam. Our hotel was pretty nice but a bit out of the way, about a 10 minute bus ride into the middle of the city. Still, not bad. The weather while we were there was pretty miserable, cold and overcast/rainy most of the time.

Anyway, the day we arrived we only got to the hotel around 5-6pm so we decided to stay in that night and explore the next day. We woke up and took a bus into the city. We wanted to go check out the sex museum so we go to some information booth and ask for directions. He tells us it's just accross the river and on the first street over there so we're on our way. We get to the other side and can't seem to find the place. Phil says we should look at a map, I reckon we should just wing it and see where we get. Even if we don't find it straight away/get lost, we'll get to see a lot of the city. So, FIVE HOURS LATER, we're utterly lost and come to a park type thing which has a map of the city. We take a look and we're literally on the OTHER side of the city. Thankfully it's a small place and only takes us about 20 minutes to walk to the museum from there.

The museum was.. interesting. It's hard to explain without seeing it for yourself but there were works of art and pieces of historical sex-type-things all over the place. It was kinda interesting/funny but I really think we should've been high to fully enjoy the experience.

Walking through the city a bit longer we see some pretty interesting shops. By FAR the best was this window:



The next day we come back into the city and go to the Grasshopper coffee shop. 20 minutes later we're walking down some streets absolutely laughing our heads off at absolutely nothing. Good times. We go back and I get another space cake to eat on our way home. We get back and are hungry so we go eat at the restaurant at the hotel. I remember ordering their set-menu with wine pairings. I took one sip of the wine and about 3 minutes later was basically sprinting back to the room, we opened the door and i pushed phil aside and ran to the bathroom. I guess the alcohol didn't mix too well? i then fell asleep for like 12 hours.

The next night we went back into the city and went to check out the Red Light District. We'd passed by during the day when we got lost our first day there but wanted to see how it was at night. We're walking down a side street and pass by a shop window and I remember seeing a hot manikin out of the corner of my eye and thinking "wow that's hot". Yeah, NOT a manikin. The RLD is basically a whole bunch of small windows in buildings on the sides of the roads with girls wearing lingerie trying to entice everyone walking by to choose them. While neither of us took them up we did see one old man coming out of one of the buildings looking VERY pleased with himself. The half an hour or so we spent there and walked up and down the street we must've been invited to at least 4 different live sex shows in theatres nearby. Definitely one of the most awesome places in the world.

The rest of the trip was pretty mundane, we only had like 4 days total there anyway before we either had to leave or find a new Hotel to stay in. I start talking to Tommy online and he suggests we take a train up to Utrecht which is a smaller town about half an hour away, it's where the casino he works in is and he said he'd meet up with us. We arrive and he's there waiting for us. We buy some tickets to Zurich for the next night and go to our hotel right near the train station to drop our bags and stuff. Tommy took us into the city where we went to have a nice dinner. Here's Tommy and I on the way there:



At dinner I decided to try some snails in some sort of garlic butter sauce and it was DELICIOUS. We also had a pretty nice beer that I've forgotten the name of. Here's Tommy drinking:



We walked around for a little while afterwards and I took a couple of random photos. The city was so peaceful and laid back, it was a really awesome place to walk around in.











Anyway after dinner Tommy had to get to work so Phil and I decided to go with him to check Holland Casino out. We got there and normally we'd have to pay an entry fee but Tommy got us in for free. The place was pretty nice, definitely much better than the casino in London. I put my name on the list to play some 5e/5e NLHE and got on as soon as the game started up after not too long. It was an interesting experience playing in a game where the rest of the table was speaking a different language to me. The players were fairly poor on average with a couple of decent guys who I assumed were regulars/internet players. I didn't feel like staying for too long though as live poker kinda bores me so I left after an hour or so not up or down anything significant. Tommy was still working so Phil and I gambled a little on table games and called it a night.

The next day Tommy generously invited us to have dinner at his house in a smaller town about half an hour outside of Utrecht called Schoonhaven (did I get that right Tommy? :p). He picked us up in the afternoon and took us into the center of Schoonhaven where he had to pick up a couple of things for dinner that night (he was cooking). While we were there there was a caravan/minibus type thing set up as a shop that was selling cooked fish and other snacks:



Tommy suggested we get something called 'kibbling' which was basically small pieces of fried fish that you'd dip in what I think was tartar sauce but it wasn't as strong as the tartar sauce i've had in the past. Whatever it all was, it was PHENOMONAL. Each bite was incredibly flavourful and delicious. Tommy and Phil decide to get seconds:



Meanwhile I went for a short walk around the town. Here's a nice shot of the canal flowing down the middle of the town:



Right next to where we were eating kibbling, there was this musical stand type thing that was just playing some sort of melody/song and people were coming up and dancing in the middle of the streets. There was this one pair with what looked like a young girl no older than 4 and her grandma of probably 70 who just walked up, started dancing/laughing/having a really great time, then left. Not something you'd ever see in Australia/America but it was pretty awesome:



After about an hour in town we went back to Tommy's house which wasn't far away. We got to meet his family and they were really nice and welcoming to us. Of course within 5 minutes we are upstairs playing poker on his laptop lol, first tommy played for a while and I watched then we swapped and I was playing while he watched. Half an hour or so after that he had to start making dinner so we went downstairs and watched some TV / I played some 2-7 TD on his laptop.

Tommy made a really delicious dish which IIRC was chicken with an orange type of sauce and these small round things that I can't remember the name of, but they were soft and very tasty. Maybe Tommy can remember and post it. Either way the homecooked meal was VERY much appreciated by both Phil and I and it was one of the highlights of the trip.

We couldn't stay too long as we had a train to catch so Tommy drove us to the station after dinner and we were off again. The whole trip was very fun and it was so great to see/experience a new culture. It's definitely one of my favourite places of the world out of everywhere I've been and I'll certainly be back before too long

Oh, one other thing about Holland, HOLY BIKES BATMAN:



It's not the best photo and I could've gotten much better ones in Amsterdam but forgot at the time.

So there you have it everyone. TWO trip reports written, with pics, within one week. Now you can all stop hassling me and trying to make me procrastinate. It's amazing how many messages I got on AIM or MSN within the last 24 hours of people eager for their money lol.

Note: I missed out one of the Vegas stories in my TR so I've edited it back in.

good stuff