Monday
There is a bunch of personal stuff that I can't really write about, so I'm going to put someone else's weekend experience here today. This is my friend Adam's weekend. He fired off an email to EVERYBODY to prevent telling the same anecdote over and over.

[I figure I'd forward this to everyone. It will keep me from re-telling the same stories over and over. My friend Kelly asked how our Las Vegas trip went. -Adam] Kelly Hawkins wrote: >How did the trip go? > The complete report: Left work around 2pm with Ken, Laurie and Robb (you've met him, may not remember him -- Dave's brother, our CFO). Got in to Las Vegas at 7pm. Checked into the Casino Monte Carlo (MC for short), which is on the strip next to Casino New York, New York. We tried to call David (the guy we went to see play in the World Series of Poker) but he was busy playing poker for cash. (An aside, he supposedly lost $1000 on a single hand that night.) Laurie, Ken, Robb and I all nagged at each other about what we would and wouldn't eat. Robb, it appears, is a meat and potatoes kinda guy. And not like you, Kelly, but really *just* meat and potatoes. Ken forced Robb to go to a Chinese noodle place, which was really good. Ken got honey shrimp and a sushi roll. Laurie got a vermicelli dish. Robb got General Tso's Chicken -- I begged Robb to try something that he couldn't order in Houston. He still ordered General Tso's Chicken, in spite of my protests. I got lemon scallops and two pieces of giant clam sushi. Robb's dish was the best. Robb didn't rub it in however. While Laurie and I went back to our room to get ready for a casino tour, Ken plunked down a bone on a 10$ craps table and proceeded to make $800 in about 15 minutes. That make can play craps. There is something about $10 craps tables that rub me wrong. I don't know why $10 craps is so hard to swallow compared with $5 craps, but it just is. I guess the fact that you can lose $100 in minutes on a $5 table kinda sets you on your heels at a $10 table. I don't know. But Robb and Laurie felt the same way. So Friday night we moseyed down to Excalibur and found some $5 tables. It seems that Robb has the entire strip mapped out in his mind and he knows where every table is everywhere. I swung up and down that night to the tune of $200 both ways. I played craps, down $100, then blackjack, down $100, then roulette, up $300, then craps, up $100. An aside, my whole reason for hitting the roulette table is so I could place your $1 bet on red, Kelly. I'll let you know that I put $5 on red. You can have the entire $5 bet if you want. Just let me know how much you want of the bet and then I'll tell you if you won or not. I dropped $5 on "28" at the roulette wheel and it hit. I love the numbers with 8s in them. That's how I made most of my $$ that night. Anyway, at this time Laurie is getting tired of gambling (she only watched all night) and wants to go to bed. It’s about 1am. So we shake it back to MC. Laurie goes up and Robb begs me to play poker with him. This is the second time he has tried to get to play poker -- the first time being in Casino Rishada (sp?). I got out of it the first time. This time I couldn't shake the Robb. For some reason casino poker rooms scare me. They are way too intense and when you play you have to actually interact with people other than dealers. There is something about it that intimidates me. Anyway Robb drags me to the MC poker room. I found out that during my play at Las Vegas that most (if not all) poker rooms are smoke free. Hell, I started playing poker from this point on just to get away from the ever-present second-hand smoke that fills that Las Vegas with a dingy, yellow musk. Ricardo once told me that time flies fast when you play casino poker. He related a story to me where he started play poker at midnight and look up at his watch and saw it was 6am. I have to say that losing track of time is easy to do in poker. Hours fly by. It’s a fairly engrossing game. And it keeps you awake with interest. So I buy $100 of chips and sit at a table with Robb and play 2-4 poker. This is the poker that Ed taught me to play years ago. First betting round: 2$, after flop 2$, turn 4$, river 4$. The odd thing was that there was only one blind of $2. I guess Las Vegas is making so much $$$ on poker that it can lessen the blinds. I don't know. In the beginning of the game I am up ~$200. I win some can't lose hands – this seems to be my pattern with poker for the rest of my stay. I play real conservative at first, get up ~$100, then play all loose and lose. The most notable hand of the night was one where Robb, a schmuck (Robb's term) who just sat down, and myself were in a hand. I had 9, A. Robb had 9, Q. On the flop: 8, 10, J. Robb was sitting on the straight. Betting was quiet on the turn. I know Robb is still kicking himself for not betting high and chasing us out. The turn rolled a Queen. His 5-card straight didn't look so good after the turn since it now only took a single 9 to straighten up. So after the turn, Robb, the schmuck and I were all betting & raising. The river came: Ace. We all bet like mad again. We all rolled our cards over and the schmuck had suited 9,A. So Robb, the schmuck and I all sighed waiting for a three-way pot split, when the dealer pilled the $$$ and pushed it over to the schmuck. Robb and I said a collective WTF and the dealer pointed out that the schmuck's suited cards hit the flush on the river. The schmuck was amazed and stated that if he couldn't read his card right, it was too late for him and he needed to go to bed. So he took our money and left. We ended the night around 3:30am and caught Ken coming from the craps/blackjack tables (he had been playing all that time). I lost $99.75 (casino poker plays with quarters -- go figure). Robb was up or down just a smidge. Ken claims to have won ~300$ on blackjack. I think Robb converted him over to the game since he never really played it on his own before. Its funny, Robb, who is so plain-jane when it comes to food, is so exploratory in casinos. That man will play *anything*. He got me to play a bunch of stuff I would never have tried before, that's for sure. We wake on Saturday and Laurie insists that we go to the Paris brunch buffet. By the time we get out of our room, Ken and Robb have already been gambling for an hour. I think they broke even or lost some that morn. We stand in line at the Paris buffet for an hour and then take our sweet time eating there. That has to be the best buffet in town. I have only had two better buffets ever, one at the Four Seasons in Austin, the other on top of the Deer Valley ski resort in Salt Lake City. Even then, the Paris buffet had a better selection. We hook up with Dave at the Rio after lunch (its about 1pm now). We go to the playroom at the World Series of poker to watch. Once again, smoke free! I see three famous people playing: the young black guy (names escape me right now), some obnoxious guy, and James Woods. Dave has survived the first wave of poker where they condense ~6000 players down to ~2000. He has ~$16000 of chips which is bad because the average stack size going into the second wave is $35000. He says he has to get lucky early to have a chance in the second wave. Blinds and antes eat you alive in the subsequent rounds. Its my bad luck that Laurie and I never got to see Dave actually play, since that is the impetus for us going to Vegas in the first place. He played his first wave on Thursday. We got to Vegas Friday. Laurie and I left Vegas Sunday morning, and Dave played his second wave Sunday afternoon. Laurie and I didn't have it in us to delay our departure any, otherwise we would have stayed and watched him a little. We tried to catch a game at the Rio, which is normally a cheap-O casino since it is off the strip. Well, hosting the world series of poker upped all the tables into the ionosphere. So we hitched a cab to Balley's and gambled there. Laurie just can't gamble if I'm gambling. She assumes that both of us are going to lose, and can't stand the idea of us losing money at a double rate. So at Balley's I lost $200 at the craps table, fast. I was hating gambling at this point – so I moseyed over to Robb and Dave. They were playing PaiGow poker, which is some crazy game that takes forever to win or lose money at. So something like 5 hours later, I was up $200. The dealers were actually fussing us at because we were at the table for so long. Robb kept trying to get comped a meal at the steakhouse, but the dealers said we were playing the wrong game for compensations. Laurie actually sat down and gambled at PaiGow and made $100 from $20. She loved it. We hooked it to the Venetian and ate at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant. I was trying to eat at a restaurant I ate at before, but I think it changed owners. I'll miss those mixed-green salads at the old place; they were one-of-a-kind. Still, the food was good. Dave looked like he was running on empty and left to go to bed. We all trekked back to MC and went to nap in our rooms at 9pm. A fire alarm went off at 11pm that roused us out of bed. There was no fire. I think I have been in Las Vegas before where a fire alarm went off at about the same time. I wonder if it is some scam perpetrated by the casino owners to get people out of their rooms and on the casino floor. Whatever the reason, it worked. Except on Laurie. She went up to her room and went to bed after the alarm. Robb forced us all over to Excalibur again. Ken and I hit the craps table. I finally adopted the Ken-method of playing craps this time. It paid off; I was up $200 on that table. I rolled the dice twice. Both times I have amazing runs. On the first run I hit something like 5 points. On the second I hit about the same, I think I rolled 5 four times on one point. I got on the table after Ken did, and missed some lady that hit 9 points. Ken walked away with $800, and I left with $300. I was mimicking Ken almost to the bet, so most of that $500 difference was what Ken made on that 9-pt woman early on. Still I couldn't complain. My winnings put me about $20 up for the entire trip. It was 1am when Robb summoned me back to the poker room. We played 1-3 poker. But the table was entirely different than in the MC. In the MC, good cards always won the games. At the Excalibur, half the pots were taken with junk. Everyone was drunk and bluffing. Robb bought his son Gavin a wizard hat. Every time Robb got a good hand, he would put the hat on and try to get people to fold. After all, he has the hat on and has a good hand. No one folded. It kinda pissed him off that the hat didn't scare anyone. But it was 1-3 poker, not terribly high stakes. My end of the table was chatty. To my left was a really young mortgage accountant that claimed to have won $20000 at the Belagio earlier playing no-limit poker. I asked him why the hell he was playing at the cheap table and he said he's trying to relax and calm down so he could go to sleep. The guy to my right was a drunken real-estate adjuster from Los Angeles. What is it with financial people and gambling? I swear most of the people I talked with were accountants of some kind. Its kind of creepy if you think about it. The drunk was real funny and would call a hand with the crappiest cards I have ever seen. He threw in 9$ to call a hand with unsuited 2-3. The guy to my left thought that was just the dumbest thing he had ever seen. It really disturbed him that someone would throw away $9 with unsuited 2-3. Hell, it bothered him that the guy wasted $1 to see the flop with that hand. What is funny about it, is there was another guy that raised the bet to 9$ and he had a 2-3 too. The up-cards were something like 4, 5, 5, 9, 10 absolute junk. The third person in that hand won because they paired up on the 10s. Ridiculous. The most notable hand of the evening was when Robb set up with pocket nuts, in layperson terms he had 3 aces. A woman, who spent all night gambling on junk, hit a flush the river. Robb was wearing the wizard hat at the time. He was so pissed that he lost that hand. The hat mystique was sullied ever after. We left the poker table at 4am. I had gone up $150 at one point, but at 4am I was down $30 to $70. The next day, Laurie and I tallied all our monies and I think, for the entire trip, were down ~40$. Not bad, since we probably had $40 in cab fares, so technically, we broke even. And that's a good trip. -Adam

Thanks Adam.