My trip was from Monday evening through Wednesday. We flew out of Vegas Wednesday night.

My first session was at Bally's, where we stayed. I was horribly tired, as it was pushing 9:00pm Vegas time, which was midnight EST (I'm from Ohio). I didn't know if playing was the best move for me here becuase of how I felt, but after I sat down, I was glad I did.

It was a $1-$2 blind NLH game. We were 8 handed most of the time. A couple of older guys, but mostly guys in their 20s or early 30s, I'd say. Two guys in particular--buddies--were quite the stereotypical new breed of players: book readers who think that you should fold every time they make a raise or bet at a pot. It seems like their philosophy is: If I bet that means I have a hand, therefore you should fold if you don't have the nuts on any given street. They were critical of others' calls to each other, but not to their opponent, which really showed me what kind of players they were.

I caught one of them trying to make a move on a pot, and one of them ended up doubling me up. He was UTG and raised to $6. I was two spots behind him with K-Q diamonds, so I called. Two others called. The flop came low all diamonds, 5-7-3. The guy bets $20. I just call, pretty confident I've got the best hand here. The other guys fold out. The turn is the Qs. Now I have top pair with a flopped flush. The guy looks over at my chips and asks how much I have left. His buddy helps him by peering at my stack, but I have it counted out before he can even make a guess. After the $20 call on the flop, I had $76 in chips. He proclaimed he was setting me all-in, after which I obliged by calling. He had pocket 5's with no diamonds. He was dead on the flop, but his unbridled aggression got him into trouble.

My session was only two hours long, as I simply couldn't stay alert enough to play well, so I walked with my $110 in profit and hit the sack.

The next day we hit the Rio to catch some of the pros. It would be better to say who we didn't see, rather than list all of those we did see. I didn't see: Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, or Gus Hansen. But literally everyone else we DID see, even Tobey MacGuire from Spiderman fame. We caught some of the taping of a final table that ESPN will air when they start showing the final tables in the fall. Daniel Negreanu was sitting one row in front of us, and we got his autograph. He really is a super nice guy, very cordial, very approachable, even though just an hour earlier or so he'd been knocked out of the $5000 NLH event.

I also got Erick Lindgren's autograph. He too was a nice guy. The only picture I got was with Howard Lederer. He was having a rough go at the start of the second break, but he was still nice enough to sign some autographs and pose for some pictures.

But it was truly amazing for anyone who loves poker to see all of these people walking around, being people. We were standing in a line in a store to buy a Sharpie for autographs, and flipping TJ Cloutier (who won the $5000 event) was standing right in front of us in line. His comp card or something wouldn't work to pay for his sandwiches or something. It was quite funny. He kind of turned around and looked at us and sort of rolled his eyes. You have to love stuff like that. I didn't ask for his autograph or anything, because I felt really torn between bothering these guys and trying to talk to them. Mostly, I just wanted to watch them play.

The only sour note of the trip was the two tournaments I played in and didn't win. The first was at the Flamingo, which I don't recommend. I think we started with $1000 in chips with blinds at $25-$50. That's not my kind of tournament. You can tell that more casinos want to offer tournaments, but the structures are so fast that they become crapshoots by the 4th blind level or so. Out of 30 or so, I finished 15th.

The other tournament was at the MGM. This is nice room. Nice tables. But the structure was pretty much the same, only you start with $1200 in chips, with the first blind level at $25-$25, then $25-$50. In my opinion, if you want your first level of blinds to be $25-$50, you should really start out with no less than $2000 in chips. Anyway, this tournament had around 90 or so. I finished about 30th or so, but never really had much of a chance to do anything. A combination of unplayable hands and quick, high blinds never bodes well for anyone.

The other cash session I played was at Excaliber. It was a short session for me again, just about an hour and a half, but it was profitable. I bought into a $1-$3 NLH game with $100 and walked with $240. This game was very soft. It helped that I was off my crappy run of hands, but the game was soft nonetheless. In my roughly 90 minutes of playing, I played probably 10 hands and won most of them. I hit trips once and double up and hit two pair and won another good pot, but other than that it was raise-preflop-bet-the-flop-win-the-hand kind of poker, which was fine for me, given my time constraints.

I've hand more profitble trips to Vegas, but this trip was the shortest I'd ever taken, and the one on which I played the least amount of cards. I think I did well for the time I had to play with, but I wish I could have hit that MGM tournament for some money. First place paid out over $1000 off of a $65 buy-in, so that would have been nice. But then again, I guess seeing all the pros that I saw was a great trade up for time at the tables.