I arrived in Vegas on Memorial day and took advantage of the cheaper room rates after the busy holiday weekend. I stayed at the San Remo which is being changed to a Hooters Hotel in February 2006. My brother arrived in Vegas that morning and he played the Aladdin breakfast tournament and a 3-6 limit game also at Aladdin while he waited for me to arrive. He busted out of the tournament well out of the money but was consoled with hitting a royal flush on a nickel VP machine and getting $200 for that earlier. He was down about $80 in the 3-6 when he had pocket kings and flopped the other two kings for a ~$399 high hand bonus! Keep in mind, the high hand bonuses have to build up to a ceiling, so if someone were lucky/unlucky enough to hit the SAME high hand right after someone else hit it, he'd only get about $50 or so. My brother got the max for his high hand. They had separate royal flush jackpots for each of the suits, so if someone hit a heart royal and then 2 minutes later someone hit a club RF, the one hitting the club wouldn't be affected by the earlier heart royal being hit. And I believe both of your pocket cards need to be involved in the hand for you to get the jackpot.

Anyway, I stayed at the San Remo as I said before. Some construction is going on but didn't interfere much with the stay. When they're done with the conversion, it should be nice (and I wouldn't mind seeing the cocktail waitresses walking around in the Hooters girl outfits). The room was not great but satisfied my needs-- about on par with a Super 8 or Motel 6. The fixtures were old and in need of replacing which I'm sure they will do as they progrees with the rebuild. But I only paid $30/night for a hotel room just off the strip and I knew I wouldn't spend much time in the room itself so I was pleased enough with the room at that price.

So, we headed out to check out the MGM poker room at about 5pm. The room is as described by others-- very nice, well separated from a lot of the typical hotel traffic and crowds and with the big TV waiting list so you could see how far away you were from the top. The list for a 2-4 LHE table was about 7 or 8 deep and we put our names on it. After 20 minutes we got tired of waiting so we left and went to Excalibur (the list had hardly moved. I didn't understand why they didn't just open up another 2-4 table; they could easily have had us playing and them raking our pots instead of us sitting on the rail watching others. Not enough dealers maybe? If so, I think that's bad staffing for the time of day).

Excalibur's poker room was decent enough-- tables were spaced out well, a couple of big screen TV's to watch between folds. Excalibur is a kind of kiddie themed place, so it kind of felt like playing poker at Disneyland. Cocktail service seemed good (I only had a cranberry juice and a beer over the 7 hours I played) and they brought out the free dinner buffet (hotdogs and hamburgers today) at about 6 or 7pm. The hamburgers were of low quality but I didn't care-- they were edible and free and I was hungry. The play at the 1-3 LHE table was quite loose. Only one $1 blind is posted each hand, something that confused some newcomers to the table. Many pots had 7-9 people involved which I actually prefer to the tight tables where you end up fighting just for the blinds. I like my pots big and juicy, even if it means I lose to someone playing 72o with 2 raises preflop. The dealers were overall good except one didn't have much of a personality and kind of brought the table down. Luckily, the dealers change very frequently (maybe every 20 minutes) so he wasn't there long. And the tables had shuffle machines so there wasn't a lot of downtime between hands. I finished the night up about $35.

The next day, we went to sign up for the Aladdin 10AM breakfast tournament. It's a $40 buy in (really, it's $35 + $5 for an add on, but since everybody gets the add on, there's not much point in calling it anything less than a $40 entry fee). We signed up at about 7am and there were only 14 other people on the list. We walked over to check out the Wynn and it's what you'd expect-- Bellagio version 2.0. The sportsbook was REALLY nice, super posh. I could see watching a football game in there would be a nice time. We went back to the Aladdin to get ready for the tourney and they'd sold out by then-- 100 entrants according to the host. They had coffee and donuts/muffins while we waited for the tourney to start as well as stacks of copies of the latest Bluff and Cardplayer magazines that you could take home. Blinds started at 50/25 and doubled every 15 mintues. I think you only get 2000 (1500 if you don't buy the add-on) in chips so if you don't double up early, you're in bad shape. Play was VERY tight. You'd be sticking your neck out to play anything less than AQs. I lasted about 45 minutes and didn't win a pot. The best hands that I had were AQo, 22, and 88. I was down to about 1200 in chips with the blinds at 200/100 in middle position and there was one early limper so I went all in with 88 hoping that I could scare out the people beind me out and make the limper think twice about calling as I had enough chips for it not to look like a desperation all-in (though it probably still did). The small blind called and so did the limper. The board was blanks all the way to the river. The SB had AKo and the limper had JJ. Tight, I tell ya. So that was it for me. I don't think I'd play it again; I didn't have much fun and would rather play 3 SNGs on Party Poker for less money. The room itself was really nice-- almost as good as the MGM as it was well separated from the rest of casino's noise and smoke. The room is smoke free and felt like it.

My brother lasted another 1/2 hour or so and then we went to Imperial Palace to check out their poker room. We signed up for the player's club because of the $3/hour you get for playing poker and we played from about 11am-4pm. The room was not very nice-- it's basically in a hallway and my seat was right up against the rope that they used to rope the room off from the hallway. The room is nonsmoking, but since you can smoke everywhere else on the floor and there is no wall separating the poker room from the hall, smoke wafts into the poker area. The cookie and sandwich tray was quite good so if you're on a strict budget, you could easily eat enough in sandwiches and cookies here for a meal. They only had a 3-6 LHE table going at 11am but said that a 2-4 table would open up in about 15 minutes. Play at the 2-4 LHE table was pretty soft, lots of limping in, not much aggression early on. There was a big tournament going on at IP so there were some pros and wives of pros playing the lower limits killing time. I ended up sitting next to the wife of one of the pros that I saw on a WPT final table. I think the tourney brought some better players than what the 2-4 game normally sees. I was up about $40 at one point but had that was gradually eaten down and then I was dumb and played A9o from middle position and caught the 9 on the flop and A on the turn and kept raising into the guy who had pocket 99. Stupid. Must've been tired. Anyway, play like that cost me about $16-20 more than it needed to and I ended the day about $40 down. Cocktail service was really good, BTW. The cocktail waitresses here were the most attractive ones I'd seen of any casino I was in this trip. They were all young and quite well endowed and the black leotard outfits displayed them nicely. No wonder they're called Palace Princesses. We went to dinner at Todai in Aladdin which was really great (my brother takes his family to a Todai in California. Wish they had one close to me). If you like sushi and Japanese food, this place is $26 for a sushi/Japanses buffet. Lots of amazing and fresh sushi, crab legs, sashimi, tempura. Dessert had small bite sized tiramisu and cheesecake pieces, fruit, jello, and ice cream (mango and green tea flavored) as well as freshly made crepes stuffed with your choice of filling. My brother left for the airport after dinner and I crashed my east coast timed ass at 9pm.

I woke up at 3am and couldn't fall back asleep so I went to the San Remo casino and played some blackjack. San Remo has a $3 minimum table but their rules are very different than most other casinos. They ONLY peek for blackjacks with an Ace showing. So if they have a 10 showing, you could be playing against a blackjack and not know it. That changes basic strategy, like do NOT DOUBLE DOWN 11 with a dealer 10 showing. I quit playing there and went to the Tropicana as last trip I was up about $200 from blackjack. The poker room was open but no action was going on (about 4am). I played some $5 blackjack and got whupped quite a bit. I was down to my last $20 and just put it all on one more bet. I got dealt 11 with a dealer 6 showing, so hell-- I pulled another $20 out of my wallet to double down, the dealer busted and I won $40 on that one bet (but I was still quite a bit down for my session). I left at about 7am to walk the strip a bit and head over to Imperial Palace to see how I could get my comp points redeemed for some lunch.

Note to all: You don't redeem poker time at the Promotions center. You need to talk to a host (to the left of the hotel registration area). Something weird happened when they totalled my time and the host had to call a few people to figure out what was going on and how much I had. She was very nice and polite and we waited for someone to call her back. After a couple of minutes, she asked my if I was going to do something. I said I was just going to use the points to get something to eat, and she said "Oh, would you like a voucher for the buffet? This may take some time." Sure! So, she gave me a voucher for the Emperor's Buffet (it's right next to the poker room on the 3rd floor) and I got to eat. It was breakfast time, so they had pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, bacon, fruit-- typical breakfast fare. It was on par with a Denny's and I was fine with the quality (as you can tell, I'm not too picky about rooms or food, so long as they're cheap/free. Your mileage may vary). I then played poker at IP again for the next 2 hours. I won a couple of decent sized pots but finished the session exactly even (I'd lost more money on blackjack than I expected, so I wasn't in the mood to lose much more). I walked around the north end of the strip and into Ceasar's Palace and some other places I hadn't checked out before and then headed back to the South end. I stopped at a 1/2 price show ticket place for a ticket to Showgirls of Magic. Part of the reason I stayed at the San Remo was so that I could see the show and then go to bed. I saw SoM last trip and really like the small theater act and how close to the stage you are. Oh, and it didn't hurt that the girls are gorgeous. I saw the Folies Bergere also last visit and didn't like how far away we sat. They show was kind of boring and SoM was by far the better show in my opinion.

So I killed time until 8pm for the show. There was a small group as it was mid-week right after a holiday weekend-- maybe 25 people in the 177 maximum showroom. They put on a great show, looked great doing it but it seemed like they cut it short. Maybe it was because I'd seen the show before and knew what was coming, but this show only lasted 1 hour (I checked my watch at the end to make sure I wasn't mistaken. Yup, out at 9:05). I hope this show can find a new home as I hear that Hooters won't be keeping it around once the conversion is complete. It's definitely one of the better value shows. So, after that I went to sleep and flew home the next day.