Doing some research before arriving (a lot on this site) encouraged us to stay at the Luxor - with a good internet special going on for their rooms, a poker room rate, some good comps and a reportedly fishy clientele, it sounded like the perfect fit.

I've only started playing B&M live poker recently in Atlantic City but never on my previous two trips to Vegas. So this was going to be my initiation.

I arrived and checked in about 2.5 hours before the rest of my group was coming so I figured I'd sit down at the $2/$4 table. On my fourth hand, I'm dealt 3-3 and it's the first hand I play. The flop is 3-3-10 and the turn is a 10 and thankfully some guy with 10's full now is actually raising me! We bet and raise and cap and show and I take down a healthy pot for $2/$4 and got the $20 4-of-a-kind high-hand bonus. Unfortunately the whole trip was downhill from that moment on.

I spent some time playing limit, no-limit and two tournaments. I played a long limit game on Friday morning but had a long run of not catching anything. Then I played in the $30 buy-in tournament for $250 of tournament chips, 3$ add-on for $50 in chips - a must! It starts at $15/$30 blinds. Not thinking I called a couple of blinds with marginal hands I was calling all morning in the limit game, only to see nothing hit and all of a sudden, 40% of my stack is gone. It quickly occurred to me that each big blind I called was 10% of my entire stack and that you'd either have to hit early or play super-conservative for that right hand just to have enough to outlast the blinds when they raised in 15 minutes. Too little too late. I went in with a different strategy the second day and lasted until the last three tables were dwindling (roughly 20th or so) but still no luck.

Then I tried no-limit and started another string of not catching anything...and then to have weak draw hands that I would wisely (statistically) fold only to have them hit on the turn/river. Very discouraging. Then a series of bad beats where I had pocket 8's, pocket 10's and pocket 8's on successive hands, catching a set on each one...only to be busted by a flush, a straight and a higher boat each time. This killed my confidence and I later didn't make some calls I otherwise would've which cost me a good bit, as well.

But enough of my bad beat stories. The room, itself, is more than decent. It's clean and fairly well managed. Cocktail service is decent, but not great. It's too the side of the lounge and sometimes the music can get a bit loud and distracting. And while you can't smoke at in the poker 'room', itself, there's nothing to stop people from doing so just on the other side of the railing. Not pleasant. But their comps were good - they gave me a 4 night poker room rate with only 15 hours playing (should need 20). They hand out 4$ buffet passes if you ask nicely. The high-hand jackpots are nice and always there (20$ for 4 of a kind, 50$ for SF, 100$ for RF). And they even have an additional jackpot that they run occasionally (Monday mornings usually but they also happened to be running on Friday morning - some guy caught A-A-A-A-10 and won 500$). They even serve free donuts in the mornings (donuts come at roughly 9:30am). So you can get free breakfast, discounted dinner and hotel rooms.

I won't embarass myself by telling you how much I lost. Maybe I'm a fish and don't know it. I chalk it up to inexperience. I'd do it again, though.