Background: I'm going to Vegas in June to play Colossus/Colostomy III (
previously, Colostomy III: This tournament's in the bag!®), maybe a daily at Wynn, and to play $2/$5 and some $5/$10 cash. I normally go with my wife and grind low-limit pokers and free gins and tonic (
previously), so I've never toted more than $5000 before.
I've read and searched about wire transfers and cashiers checks (example
the first,
the second,
the third), and I called the cage supervisors at Bellagio and Aria, and everyone says the same thing: The money stays in your account at the cage. To play at B or Aria or any MGM property, you sit down and have the poker room supervisor go get your chips at the cage. You can't use your account money, understandably, to play at Wynn or any other non-MGM property.
There are some old threads lying around about people bringing (verified) cashiers checks, just getting a dump of yellow chips and flags at the cage and doing whatever they want. Literally every first-party source I find says that isn't allowed, because money laundering (?).
So, I guess bringing some $5k in cash (to play at non-MGM properties) and the rest wired to B/Aria sounds okay, but I'd love to know...
- This sounds like some hassle at the time of play, during a time when rooms are going to be really busy. Any experience about how long it takes, how salty the floor gets having to deal with it for non-nosebleed games, and so on?
- In practice, if I have the floor get $2000 out of my account, and I get up from the poker table with $2200 or $1700 or whatever, are they going to give me a hard time about just keeping/cashing the chips? It'd make life a lot easier.
- Lots of people here have to be toting much more than this in and out of Vegas. Is there some awesome option I'm missing?
Bringing more than $10k cash through a TSA checkpoint seems LOL-terrible to me, but I'm willing to believe it if the consensus is that that's the least-bad option on balance.
For the benefit of searchers from the future finding this thread, checks and wire transfers seem to be functionally equivalent as front money,
as long as you fax or email a copy of the check to the cage a few days early so they can verify the funds before your arrival.