July 4th weekend Part 2

Wes Louie here. Thought I would do a little follow up on the whole club scene that Wald informed you all about. After the awesome night at Lavo (at the Palazzo) with Sam, Cassie and Brittnay, my cousin Jason and I had plans to go and earn some free rooms at the Venetian/Palazzo. The game plan on the night was to blow $500 playing $25 a hand. Jason had got a tip from someone saying that if you play 3 hours of blackjack betting a minimum of $25 a hand, that was enough to earn yourself the free room offer. I had no interest in investing finacially in this matter but I always love a good table game experience. I normally choose to get a little alcohol flowing, and by a little I mean a lot. Once I get pretty drunk, I start getting a little loose, a little loud, and quite frankly, easily the loudest person in the casino. So my cousin and I decided it would be a fun idea to have me play using his money that way I still get the gambling experience and he still earns his free room. Little did we know that at our table there would be a man who would appreciate the madness that a drunk Wes Louie brings to the table as well. This is the part of the story where I introduce you to our new friend Jay. Now Jay is a very special kind of man. He comes to Vegas like any other man to escape the stresses of life. Naturally, while his wife is sound asleep in bed, he sneaks away to the blackjack table. Lucky for us, he just so happen to choose our table to gamble his millions at. This blackjack session started off just like it should, losing. That 2.5% edge the house reserves for itself was getting the best of us. We were down to about our last $150, but still full of energy. For those of you who have never seen my "energy" at a blackjack table, it is essentially me attempting to will the cards I want from the dealer. I'm talking full on screaming and openly stating my disgust for the dealer if things don't go my way. Occasionally it becomes personal with the dealer, but most of the time, the screaming winds up working in our favor. After we finally start to rally a bit we get ourselves back to about $250 in chips. Our boy Jay on the other hand, is now sitting with about $1,000. He starts to raise his bet, as well as play 3 hands, so he now has about $300 riding on every hand he plays. The next hand we play, he winds up staying on all 3 of his hands, I hit on mine, and bust. But it just so happen that the hit I took, would have been the dealer's money card which would have made him a loser on the hand. Jay felt compelled to give us the bet back that we sacrificed in order to make him a winner. So Jay throws a $25 chip our way. We try to refuse because it seemed so ridiculous but he insisted that it was good karma. Like any intellligent person, if a stranger is going to force money on us, who are we to take this pleasure away from him right? Little did we know this would continue all night. Jay's other technique was throwing us 2-3 $5 chips which are red. He threw them to us before the bets were finalized and he wanted us to bet these chips on our bet as "putting the cherry on top". If we won, he wanted the original chips back that he gave us, and we kept the extra profti. So he allowed us to freeroll for $10-$15 additional dollars a hand every other 4 hands or so. So at this point Jason Scott and myself are all rooting for him to win almost more than ourselves. He is betting anywhere from $25-$400 a hand. When he was betting $100+ a hand on 3 different hands, we were screaming for dealer bust cards, celebrating when he pulled a triple winner, we celebrated it all. I also should have mentione that this was at about 4 in the morning. We started this madness at about 1am and after about 3 hours of this madness alongside Jay, we had collected $275 in handouts from Jay. Literally no risk was ever taken to collect this money, simply our energy and support was apparently worth $275 to this man. We kept the Jay donations separate from our other chips, but thankfully, we had run our stack up to about $700. Jay however was not so fortunate, at this point we had seen him go into pocket for a little over $3000. When things are going well, everyone is celebrating and screaming because of the easy money being won. However, when things started to go south for Jay, we went speechless. When things "go south" I mean he has $400 a hand out there and the dealer pulls a sick 21. Therefore, $400 a hand, playing 3 hands, the man is losing $1200 in a matter of seconds. When that happens a time or two in a row, you start to feel pretty awkward. Jay asks us how we're doing and we tell him we are up about $700 at this point. He wants to know why we aren't celebrating too much, but its because the man to our right is losing his shirt. It's a bit comical because of how much of a degenerate he is. It's 5am and he is reaching into his pocket to chase this money. Eventually we got so tired, and it got so awkward, we just had to call it a night. Thankfully Jay was in decent spirits upon our completion of the blackjack session. The final tally on the night was $275 donated from Jay and $745 won from actual blackjack. It was a perfect session, we got free drinks while playing, $275 in handouts, pending free rooms at the Venetian, and $745 for our time. Not a bad way to spend a couple hours in the middle of the night right?

I (Scott) will concluded this weekend that stetched into Tuesday. What Wes decided to leave out of the Jay story was at around 3:45 am a group of four girls approched the blackjack table that we were at. One of the girls takes out a few hundred dollars in chips and looks like she wants to play. While that is going on another girl in the group says "Hey Asian guys, what are your names?". Wes and Jason introduce themselves and the girl took a unique liking to Wes. She immediately started complementing Wes on his looks and spitted her most awkward game. She went from where are you guys from to are you a model!? Wes lets her know that he isn't a model, but she pushed on and said "Are you kidding me, your jacked! You have to be a model!". She then complemented his hair (in case you've never seen Wes he rocks a buzz cut) and a some other things. Wes flattered and a bit confused smiled, stayed pretty composed and thanked her for her complements. Once this girl got the clue that Wes wasn't interested she was ready to move on, so she sent the signal to her friend who was "their" to play blackjack (ended up playing only one hand and lost) and they were well on there way.

Me and Wes wake up Monday morning just after 1:00 pm and go to the Aria buffett. Sam Wright and Nick Bernardi were on the way to Vegas from LA. We met them at Aria and no later than 10 minutes of being in our room the first beers were cracked open. We took Nick and Sam to the Aria cafe for a late lunch then went to the Aria pool. By the time we got back from the pool it was 6:00 pm and Nick and Sam were looking for some drunken gambling. We decided to start favorite drinking game of all, drunken 1-3 no limit at Aria. Me, Wes, Wald, Nick and Sam put our names on the list a got a couple of drinks while waiting. Wes and Wald got seats pretty quickly while Sam, Nick and I had to wait much longer. Luckily the wait was well worth it as they opened a new 1-3 table. One of the best poker players in the world, Annette Obrestad, was sitting at my table. I saw her sit down a freaked out a little bit. I frantically searched for Wes and Wald in the poker room to tell them that Annette is sitting at my table. I found Wald first, and interrupted a hand he was playing to tell him to move to my table. Without hesitation Wald tells me to lock a seat up. I eventually relay the message to Wes who joins us about an hour in. A player of Annette's skill level would never play a 1-3 game normally but she was around Aria and the friend she was with wanted to play so she did. In the brief time we played with her you could see how good she was, she was essentailly soul reading everyone at the table and especially Wald who lost a few pots to her early on. Wald stayed composed (keep in mind we were ordering drinks throughout the 2 hours we played with her) and won a big pot off her. Wald had pocket aces (the best starting hand in hold'em) and they got all the money in before the flop and Wald won. I completed the job a few hands later by winning a big pot off and taking all of her chips. That is probably our proudest poker moment (winning a big pot off a well-known and very well respected professional). We left the poker room giddy and pretty drunk

One of the only requests that Nick and Sam had was to get a Nathan's hotdog from New York, New York, clearly inspired from the Nathan's hotdog eating contest the day before. So we went to New York, New York a got some hotdogs. The hotdogs very dissappointing and we headed down the strip and went to Planet Hollywood. On the way there we saw a women who was no younger than 35, sitting up righgt and completely passed out on a bench outside of Paris. We obviously found this funny and tried taking a picture with her. Unfortunately, the one got was too dark and blurry. We got to Planet Hollywood and wandered the casino floor until we ran into "The Pleasure Pit", which is just normal table games with half naked girls as dealers. We were unimpressed and moved on down the strip towards the Flamingo. Nick expressed an interest in playing craps somewhere on the strip, so right when we entered the Flamingo Nick bolted for the craps table. He won and moved onto Casino Royal. Casino Royal is without a doubt one of the worst casino's on the strip, it looks like a fun house from the outside and is a fun house inside with mirrors on the ceiling and crazy dealers. We do go there because they offer cheap table games and even cheaper drinks ($1 margaritas and $1 Michelob everyday). Nick also played some craps there. Sam and I started a UDub chant when Nick got the dice to roll and let's just say the other players at the table and employees didn't approve. Nick won again and we moved on the Wynn. Nick played another round of craps at the Wynn and kept his winning streak alive. We called it a night after the Wynn.

We woke up the next day and went to the Bellagio buffet for breakfast/lunch. Nick and Sam played Keno during the meal, turing into degenerates before my very eyes. Sam broke even and Nick lost $2.00. After the meal we met up with Sam Croffut and Cassie and went to the Vdara pool. Wald and Wes joined and to my surprise I found out Wald was going to attempt the watermelon prop bet (For those who are too lazy to look up past posts the bet is eating an entire costco watermelon in an hour for $20 USD). Wald had prepped earlier in the day with a run, some tanning and consuming as little water as possible to get dehyrated. He started at 3:30pm and wasted no time, he killed the first 1/4 of the melon in the first eight minutes. The watermelon started to have its way with Wald after that as he struggled to get the next fourth down. By 4:15pm Wald still had between 1/4-1/3 left and he gracefully conceded.

Wes, Nick, Sam and I headed to Aria to play some Pai Gow and we said goodbye to Cassie and Ms. Croffut. It was a positive first experience for Sam and Nick with Pai Gow because they both won. After a very short craps session for Nick at Aria it was time for Sam and Nick to leave. They were only in Vegas for 30 hours, but they did a lot in those 30 hours.

Since this post is so long I will save the details for the next post, but Jamie successfully completed day 1 of the main event, along with Tom and Matt Affleck (who played Tuesday).

We are looking forward to the arrival of Jake "your boy" Schweikl, Ryan Warbis and Colin (my favorite) Perez tomorrow. We'll have more stories to share with this group in town.