Great thread, thanks for posting.

Hate to burst your bubble, but they did have a branch in central London and it was not very popular so it closed.

Whilst it's a good option in Vegas, London has many far better sandwich shops.

I did a 5 hour helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon. Best part by a mile was flying over the strip for 5 min at the end. We buzzed the MGM so close I coulda swore we were going to hit it. Go sunset if you can, and ABSOLUTELY pay extra to reserve the front seat.

No worries! Nope, Martin missed his flights so just a solo trip for me

Hahaha, maybe this will work actually. Thanks.

I did think this at first but I definitely remember the cashier saying "$502" which was correct but never actually counted the money when she gave me it. Would be surprised if she said the right amount and gave it to me $200 short though.

Have to agree with AzOTher on this one. Yep, San Fran does noticeably have alot of homeless but no more than Vegas imo. And compared to other big cities I've visited it seemed fairly clean. Overall I think San Fran is my favorite cities I've ever visited but more on this in the next post

Well bubble well and truly burst! I still challenge you to name a better sandwich in London though. I'm yet to find one

Nice! I'm starting to really look forward to this now! Good shout on the front seat, I'll ask them about a upgrade today.

San Francisco is one of the greatest cities in the world. Don't listen to Pig, he hates everything.

Thoroughly enjoyed your trip report. Loved the details and absolutely love the pictures!

It depends on where you are. You could be on a block with a hotel that has $500 a night rooms and literally the next block over there will be a human turd on the sidewalk. No exaggeration. It is my least favorite city that I've visited, or maybe I've just had extraordinarily bad luck in the half-dozen times I've been there.

Great TR so far Hutchy, more pics and degen required!

Re: San Francisco, I would say it's a great place to visit but I think living there is a totally different ball game. The contrast between prosperity and poverty there is like nowhere I've ever seen, I'll never forget some woman lying in the street one night howling in despair in a way a human just shouldn't be capable of. Then, on the other hand, the bars, coffee chops, people, setting, history, general vibe are really enjoyable. It's easy to overlook the unpleasantries when just visiting but I think living there and being confronted with it every single day would be tough.

Again, excellent TR, more please

Not to completely hijack, but SF isn't unique in that regard among major US cities. How it effects you likely has much to do with your own perspective, and you can choose to see the negative with or without the positive. I grew up in the Bay Area (haven't lived there for 2 decades though) and still consider SF to be home, and a truly great city in all the ways that make a city great. It certainly has its problems though. I live in LA now and it's no different in that poverty vs prosperity aspect.

Hey TwoPlusTwo,

So I hit the hay around midnight, my alarm set for 4:30am with the plan to get out of the hotel room around 5am to catch my 6:45 flight to San Fran! Unfortunately the jetlag is still playing havoc and even though I felt really tired when I went to sleep I wake up at 3am totally fresh and unable to get back to sleep. So with a hour to kill before my flight I head down to the poker room for an early morning preflight session, what else was I going to do I had somehow managed to forget to charge my phone the night before but luckily at the Venetian there are phone chargers under the Poker table. I’m busy talking to someone on the table and messing around with my charger and the plug under the table. I must have touched the metal bit at the wrong time because the next thing I know is I feel a huge thud in my arm like someone had punched me and I jump out of my chair. Somehow I managed to give myself a fairly big electric shock haha. At least I was fully awake now! When it comes to planning the San Fran trip I’ve been very unorganized and left it totally open, the only thing me and Martin had planned to do was a Alcatraz tour because this is something you have to book in advance but I wasn’t even sure how to get to this. I kind of mentioned that I was going to San Fran in a couple of hours to the table and it turned out that two of the guys playing on the table were from San Fran so they gave me some tips on what to do, where to go and where to eat etc. The poker session was fairly uneventful with no major hands to report so when 5am rolled around I cashed out my $235 profit out. I had not planned to play poker this morning and had only played an hour so this win made me feel much better about the $250 I had discovered the night before that I had seemingly missed placed at some point.

I get to the airport, check in and board the plane with no real issues. I was flying with Southwest airlines and they have a policy that you don’t get given a seat number which is something I’d never encountered before. I get on the plane which was fairly empty and head to the back and take the second to back row window seat with the whole row empty so happy days. The flight was delayed by about 20 minutes and we were still sat at the gate in Vegas. After the scheduled takeoff time two fairly large women got on the plane sweating and red, they’d obviously being running to catch the flight and were lucky that we were late taking off. I watch them as they walked down the plane, past empty seat after empty seat and in my head I’m thinking “no no please no” as they edge closer to my row. My flight runbad continues as they literally walk past a half empty plane and finally decide to sit down next to me haha. So now crammed into my seat with no arm room but it’s only a 1 hour flight so not the end of the world. As we’re taking off I see the beautiful Las Vegas sun rise for second day in a row.







We landed in San Fran which was a little grey and gloomy. When I had checked the weather forecast the week before it said that it would be raining on this Thursday and then pretty much sun all the rest of the days but the closer we got to the day the weather improved and now it was saying it would be cloudy but no rain which I took as some run good. Like I said before I had no clue where to go when I arrived but knew that I needed to be at pier 33 by 10:30am for the Alcatraz tour. I asked at the information desk and the lady gave me a map and pointed in the direction of the train station. I needed to take the BART line into the city and get off at Embarcadero station and then walk from there to Pier 33. Once I had figured out how to buy a ticket the train part was fairly simple, I arrived at Embarcadero within 30 minutes with no issues. I walk out of Embarcadero station and you’re in the heart of the city, business people walking to work, taxis whizzing past, tram noises etc. A few people have mentioned this already in this thread but the homelessness is certainly noticeable in San Fran but imo it isn’t any worse than Vegas or any other major US city from what I’ve heard. As I said before, I live in Georgia which compared to the US is a super super poor country and Georgia also has a homeless issue but the US is worst from what I can see. I don’t want to say this in the wrong way but one thing I’ve also noticed is that in the US you see a lot more homeless with clear mental illness issues. I saw people talking to themselves, screaming at trees and chasing Chinese tourists with a stick for example. This is something I only see in the US, I guess places like the UK and even Georgia just have better health care to look after such people.

I’d actually been to San Fran once before for a day trip but this had been mainly work-related and I’d not done many of the tourist activities, I had totally loved the bits of the city I had seen though. Obviously a very small sample size and I have heard that San Diego is even more GTO but for me San Fran would be a top three place to live on my list. It feels like a nice and welcoming city, it has the sea and fairly importantly, only one hour away from Vegas for weekend trips Anyway, after a quick subway sandwich, which didn’t even get close to the level of Earl I walk along the piers, following my map towards pier 33.



Because we had to book this tour so far in advance for some reason I thought that it would be a small group tour with like me and max 10 other people along with a tour guide. I get to pier 33 and I’m greeted with a queue of at least 300 people getting onto these big Alcatraz tour boats haha. I had a small worry at this point because Martin had booked the tickets which had his name on them and they did say that you needed to show the person who booked them ID. Luckily after joining the back of the mile long queue of people, I queue for 30 mins and get onto one of the boats without having to show any IDs.



The boat was packed so I headed up to the top deck and managed to find a seat there. And we finally set off to the notorious Alcatraz! One thing I always laugh at when I observe is people taking photos of things they’re heading towards. Within 30 seconds of setting off there was a stampede of people taking pictures of Alcatraz Island which at this point was still a fairly small dot in the distance. We’re heading towards it, give it 15 mins and you’ll actually get a decent photo I thought as the front of the ship is 5 people deep trying to take pictures. It made me think back to Malta where you would see tourists taking pictures through a dirty tour bus window of the tourist attraction they’re headed too!



(Guess I can hardly talk about picture taking with half the boat in mine)



We arrive at Alcatraz and get off the boat. I noticed straight away that the prison and island is a lot more rundown than I expected, I thought they would have done it up for the tourists but it appeared that it was exactly the same as when it was left which I liked.





I picked up the audio tour and walked into the jail for the first time. I thought the audio tour and generally the whole set up was great. I love history that you can see and touch and that’s exactly what this was. The audio tour takes you section by section telling stories read by real prisoners and using the prison sounds to bring the place even more alive. It was a little eerie seeing the exact cell that I think three guards were executed in by the prisoners during one of the escapes.









After an hour walking around I finished the audio tour and walk through the gift shop. I thought the gift shop was a little odd / distasteful, selling handcuffs, Alcatraz ‘keys’ and even photos of the prisoners. But I guess the money mostly goes towards the prison upkeep. There was an older guy sat at a table signing books. As I got closer I noticed that it said on his table that he used to be a prison guard at Alcatraz. It must be weird to either be a guard or prisoner here, this was your life and I guess fairly normal and then after some years you’re back in the same prison selling signed books sat in a massive gift shop with endless tourists taking pictures of you.

I had another hour on the island walking around on my own exploring some of the other buildings before I decided it was time to catch one of the boats back to San Fran. I get back to San Fran and as I didn’t really have any other plans I decide just to start walking down the piers to see if I could find anything interesting. The weather had really started picking up now, the sun was out and it had turned out to be a beautiful day.

Unfortunately I’d not been able to charge my phone that much in the morning at the poker table and due to listening to music on the flight and the amount of pictures I had taken so far my phone totally ran out of battery. I needed my phone to take more pictures and I had partly arranged to meet a friend from Malta who was also in San Fran, so I found the nearest restaurant and asked them if they had a plug to charge my phone. The waitress said sure and I took a seat next to a plug socket. The restaurant looked like it had last been decorated in the 80s and not somewhere I would have normally picked if I was desperately looking for iPhone juice. I felt a little forced to eat as I didn’t want to come into this pretty empty restaurant and just sit there for a hour while my phone charges. So even though I’d had my footlong sub just a few hours before I ordered another sandwich which wasn’t great and which I ended up leaving most of. After my phone had got to a reasonable level which should see me through the day I ask the waitress how long it would take to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge from where we were. She said “45 minutes to one hour max”. So with the sun still shining and now two sandwiches in my belly I decide to head for a walk along the sea front with the plan to get to the Golden Gate Bridge and even hopefully walk across it. I’m walking for maybe 30 minutes after the restaurant when I notice a sign ‘Golden Gate Bridge – 3.7 miles’! 45 minutes my ass. The weather was becoming a little greyer again but the walk along the sea front was really nice. With the bridge the distance and on my left I had lots of parks and green areas with cyclists, couples in love and children playing with kites and on my right the sea, sailing boats and the odd seal or two.







Nearly there!



Fairly depressing but while walking I think back to documentary I watched called ‘The Bridge’ about people committing suicide off the very bridge I was looking at. The documentary is very hard hitting, shocking and powerful but I would recommend watching if you haven’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnsj7mwXnLY The walk took a lot longer than expected though so when I finally get fairly close I decided to get back into the city.

As close as we got:



My flight was at 21:35 and at this point it was around 17:00 and not being sure exactly how long the trip back to the airport would take I decided to go into a café and ask them for a taxi number. The taxi eventually arrived and took me back to a Starbucks near Embarcadero station. After three hours sleep, early start and all the walking I was feeling a little dead. In Starbucks I checked my 21:35 flight and noticed that Southwest was also flying two more flights to Vegas before mine, one at 19:00 and one at 20:00 and with the guy I was planning to meet on the other side of town and no other plans I decide that if I get to the airport now I’ll most likely be able to get on one of the earlier flights and get back to get some more poker in before the end of the day. So I took the train back to the airport and arrive there around 18:30. My plane runbad continues as I’m told it’s too late for me to swap for the 19:00 flight now and that the 20:00 flight has been delayed to 21:20 due to the fog so there isn’t much point me changing onto this flight either. So I’d arrived for my flight three hours early but not a huge issue, I go through security and wait in the departures area. It gets to around 20:30 and I notice that my flight is no longer on the departures board which is a little worrying. I queue up at the Southwest information desk in the departures area, the woman at the desk tells me that due to the bad weather in San Fran my flight is now being delayed to 23:55! With not much I can do I go back to a seat. After what feels like a lifetime it finally gets to 23:30 but my flight still hasn’t been called for boarding. Getting a little concerned again I queue up once again at the Southwest info desk, the queue was getting longer and longer as more angry people were wanting to find out what was going on. I get to the front of the queue and I’m told by the lady that she isn’t sure that my flight will run now but if it does then the new departure time for my flight is 2:45am…… At this point I’d already been at the airport for five hours, I was totally knackered and just wanted to get back to the Venetian and my bed. She explained that due to the weather a lot of flights are being cancelled and she doesn’t know if my flight will be or not. I can either wait till 2:45am and gamble that it’ll run or I can book into a hotel and fly the next day but the earliest flight from San Fran would be 13:00. I asked her if Southwest would be providing the hotel but apparently if it’s weather related it’s not something Southwest offers. As it was meant to be just a one day trip I had no spare clothes or toothbrush etc. So with no hotel or way of getting back into the city I’m left with pretty much only one option which was to wait another 3 hours and pray that the flight actually runs. Plane runbad continues.

My new home:



Maybe an hour later I’m sat with all the other fed up customers who decided to wait when a voice comes on the tannoy “We have really great news, we’ve been able to find a plane and a pilot who will kindly take you to Vegas with the departure time of 45 minutes from now”. Thank you, thank you, thank you I thought! I like how they manage to just find a plane and pilot waiting around though. We got on the plane with no more delays and took off back to Vegas! Actually the take off and maybe the first 10 minutes of the flight were bumpier and more scary than landing in the hurricane in Dublin. I fly a lot but I still always get the “this is GG then” when going through bad turbulence. We get to Vegas within hour and I’m greeted with the city and the strip looming out of the blackness of the desert.





Landing in Vegas at night time is definitely the way to go. Get into the taxi “Venetian no tunnel please, actually scrap that, Planet Hollywood no tunnel please” gotta get that 3am Earl in

Overall a good and needed trip to break up Vegas madness. Still think San Fran is one of my favorite cities and has a great vibe. But now I’m back on the strip I’m looking forward to the week of fun ahead. And sorry for some of the depressing topics discussed in this post, not sure it's what people really want to read but less homelessness, murder and suicide talk in the next post.

Till next time, thanks.

Love those photos of LV from the sky at night. It's one amazing view.
You're not getting much air travel run good lately are you?

great tr so far, but damn, you runbad on planes

Yeah, Vegas at night is amazing. I'm doing the helicopter night trip soon so that should be great. Could be running better with flights for sure

Bloobird! Great to have you on board again, I wondered when you'd be popping up I've got 4 flights to get back to Georgia so hopefully no more runbad left.

No kidding about the plane runbad, especially with the two fat women. It's happened to me too. How can that happen? I've been tempted to get up and sit in one of the other rows, but that's too rude.

I lived in SF Bay area for over 25 years and never got to Alcatraz. Tried to once, saw the wait line same as you, and gave up. I don't like waiting in lines.

FYI if you find yourself at the SF airport in a similar situation, I believe BART also runs to the Oakland airport, where weather is always much nicer. You would've had to pay extra for a short-notice ticket, but on Southwest you would've gotten credit for your unused ticket. Glad it worked out, at any rate.

yes, indeed. s.f. excellent choice for vegas side-trip.

Hey TwoPlusTwo,

So after my delayed San Fran flights and an early morning Earl I get back to my room around 3:30am and head straight to sleep. Next thing I know is I hear my phone ringing, I pick it and see 6 missed calls from work and a bunch of messages from different work people. This was at 6am and slightly annoying because the calls weren’t really that urgent. But I was awake now and couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and did some work for a couple of hours. I’d woken up with a killer headache out of know where as well. After finishing off some work I headed down to the bakery in the Venetian and had some breakfast and got some extra strong painkillers for the headache. If these painkillers were extra strong by American standards then I might be in trouble haha but I gobbled two down and almost instantly felt better. I headed back to the room and took it easy for a few hours and wrote a previous TR post. The jetlag this trip is really worse than normal, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m living in Georgia now and Georgia possibly couldn’t be further away from Vegas but I always seem be feeling tired but can’t sleep and then when I do go to sleep it’s for 3 hours and I’m wide awake again.

To get the Venetian poker room rate I need to put six hours of poker a day which means after playing no poker on day one and only one hour yesterday before San Fran I'm way behind my hour targets. So I head down to the poker room around 4pm to get in some hours in. I’m faced with probably the busiest I have ever seen the Venetian poker room with every single table taken up with either cash players hunting for the bad beat jackpot or a $300 tourney. I put my name on the 30+ long waiting list.



Potato the notable legend on this list. “Final call for Potato $1/$2 no limit Holdem”

I would have normally just fobbed this off and gone to a different room but as I need to put the hours in at Venetian I waited the hour or so before I was able to actually sit down at a table. Very first hand I sit down I get 88 in the CO and call a $10 raise from a MP woman. Flop is 24J and I call her $20 cbet to see what happens on the turn. What happens on the turn is gold as we peel the 8 and she bets $30, I click it back to $100 which she calls with a confused look on her face. River brings 2 which for a split second I thought was a really bad river until I noticed it paired the board. She checks over to me and I ship. She tanks for a couple of minutes before eventually folding KJ face up. I actually think the 2 did cost me there. But I won the pot and by going all in on the very first hand the session most likely have the whole table thinking I'm a aggro mad man. Not many more notable hands this session apart from when a fairly tight but good player raised from EP to $10. There are two callers, I’m in the BB with J8 and decide it’s worth a peel. Flop comes J35, our man cbets $30 and even though he’s betting into three players and seems fairly strong I don’t think it’s right to just snap fold our hand so when the other two players fold I decide to call and we see a turn card which comes 8. I check over to him and he bets $60. I elect to raise and flick an extra $101 into the pot to make it $161 total and he calls pretty quickly. River is 2, I ship my remaining stack and he snap folds. I guess he had turned a backdoor flush draw with AK etc because I can’t think of too many hands which call the turn and then fold to river shoves. Anyway, this was a session of magic 8s on the turn

I’ve been coming to Venetian now for four years and this is my seventh trip and while the players I play against every year are almost always new the dealers rarely change and most of them were dealing on my first ever trip, Art, Jay and Shirley to name a few. One reason I come back to the Venetian is because I think the dealers and just the poker room staff in general are very good and it seems like a very well run room. I’m always a little disappointed when I return the next year and sit at a table with a dealer I recognise and who I speak with every year and they clearly have no clue who I am, for them I am a totally new face so the first conversation is always abit like groundhog day “So where are you from?” “England, you have asked me this the last 7 trips ” Understandably I don’t expect them to recongise or remember me with the most likely 30,000 different faces they see and deal too every year but I always find it funny.

On my table was a middle aged German guy who said he’d won the greencard lottery and was living in Vegas grinding poker (Still so tilted I can’t take part in the greencard lottery being from the UK ). Anyway, I was in a big pot and had abit of my hood covering my mouth. Covering my mouth with my hand, sleeve or hood is just something I’ve always pretty much done when I play poker as I feel more comfortable sat like this for some reason, I even do it in the office at work sometimes. Anyway this German guy shouts pretty loudly mid hand “Why is he covering his mouth? Do you think he’s a professional? HAHA” I mean whatever but don’t speak about me during a big pot and this German guy was sat there with his headphones on, hood up and one of those backpacks you only see ‘pros’ carrying around with them to the poker room and later he even took out some massive sunglasses. Talk about a hypocrite wanna be pro.

One thing I’ve also noticed this trip which made me a little proud is how much the Americans love British music. I’m not sure if the Venetian Poker room even has none British music on, Pink Floyd, Queen, Beatles, The Who, Rolling Stones, Elton John and more on repeat. I love this type of music so couldn’t ask for a better playlist while grinding.

By 9pm I was getting hungry having not eaten since about 10am. On one of my numerous trips to Earl I had noticed that an In & Out Burger had opened on the strip next to Linq. On my very first trip one of the guys I was with being so siked about In & Out Burger that we literally got a taxi to the nearest In & Out Burger outlet off the strip, took the taxi through the drive thru and then took the food back to our hotel room to eat it. I remember it living up to the effort of getting it as well. I decide to leave the Venetian Poker room with $310 profit for the session with the intention to keep grinding after my food as I’d only played 4 hours today. It was Friday night and the strip was totally rammed and it took quite a while to get to and order the burger.



In & Out Burger was also very busy so I decided to take it back to room and eat the burger there. Unfortunately I underestimated how long it would take on the busy Friday night and by the time I had got back to my room the food was pretty cold and didn’t taste all that great tbh, milkshake was pretty amazing though.



Even though I had the intention to go back down to grind the poker after the burger and lack of sleep I was entering hibernation mode so called it a fairly early uneventful day.

As is now the standard here I got up around 4am the next morning when it’s still dark outside. Feeling fairly fresh I decide to get some more hours put into the poker room. I’d only put in 4 hours the previous day which now means I have to average 9 hours a day to get the poker room rate so today I’m going to grind until I’m blind to try and give myself a little bit of a cushion. I head down to the poker room and sit down at a table with people who’d been clearly there all night. The first thing a guy says to me is “Jesus, did you just wake up and have a shower? I’ve not been asleep for 2 days” haha. The session started off well and I was up a nice amount pretty quickly, so far this trip I’ve actually not had one session where I’ve been over $50 down at any point. May be running bad with planes but seem to be running well at poker for sure. I was playing for a couple of hours when a guy who had been nursing a short stack for an hour shoves in EP for $20. I’m in the BB and slowly squeeze an Ace followed by another Ace and obvs snap. He turns over KK and we hold. I mean I’m not complaining to the Poker gods but I was thinking if you’re going to cooler someone in my favor then in the future please make sure they have over 10 BBs haha. Unusually the Poker gods actually listened and not long after I stacked a guy’s $120 stack with my QQ vs his 77 on Q7x (Q turn and 7 River one time for the bad beat jackpot!) but alas the board ran out in our favor and we won a nice little pot.

A bit later in the session I encountered probably one of the weirdest things I have ever seen at a poker table. So I’m in the BB and a middle aged guy to my left who is UTG tells me to watch his cards as the dealer is dealing, he doesn’t look at the cards and says “all in blind, I’ve got somewhere to be and don’t want to cash chips in” and ships his $290 stack into the middle of the table?? A few players ask him if he’s actually blind to which he asks me to confirm that he didn’t look at this cards. Everyone folds to me in the BB, time to take some free money I think before squeezing out J5 and folding. Very next hand the blind shover is now in the BB. There are five limpers and I decide to limp Q8 from the SB pretty sure I know what’s coming next though. And like I had predicted the guy ships all in again blind! I had been keeping an eye on him and he was definitely blind. An old guy in shades who had limped UTG jumps out of his chair and snap calls and puts his $250 stack across the line. Everyone else folds and the board runs out Qxxxx. UTG limper guy turns over AK for Ace high and the blind shover turns over his first card which is a Q to bust the older guy and take his $250 stack. Blind shover plays two more hands where he folds his SB and BTN and then gets up to leave the table. As he’s leaving he throws the dealer a $30 tip and then takes $250 from his stack and slides it back across the table to the old guy in shades who he’d won it from moments before. “Here this is yours, I just wanted to have some fun” before walking out with the chips he already had. Pretty nice gesture but super odd as well haha.

After 5 hours of grinding I decide to call it a morning session and grab some lunch. Finished the session $348 in the green and as I’d not been to Earl for over 24 hours decided to grab a Holiday Turkey for a change. On my way out I head past CUT in the Palazzo to book a seat on Tuesday for a post Elton John stake.







Having always come to Vegas in either February, March or late October this is certainly the hottest I’ve encountered Vegas. It is a Saturday, the strip is rammed and it’s boiling. Might have to start rethinking making these Earl trips twice a day haha.



Being stalked down the strip



After Earl I headed back to the Venetian Poker room. I had decided at the start of the day that if I had any chance to do the Poker room rate then I would need to put in a decent amount of hours today and gave myself the goal of 12.5 hours of poker which with 5 hours already done in the morning would mean I need to have a 7.5 hour session. As I said before, I’ve not had a session where I’ve been over $50 down at any point, however this would all change during this session.

Sometimes fairly early on in a session you can get a feeling of how it’ll go and I had generally bad vibes about this one pretty early on. I’m stuck only about $100 pretty quickly and I’m dealt QQ in MP. A fish had limped UTG and expecting him to call most raises I make it $11 (should of done more). Fish calls and the flop comes 522, I cbet $24 and he quickly raises to $70 with $150 behind. I don’t think I can really fold to a fish in this spot who could just be going nuts with any two cards really so I flick the whole stack in, he turbo snaps so when a A came on the turn and a J on the river I knew it wasn’t looking great. He slowrolls the 52 and just like that I’m stuck $320 on the session. It takes me around 5 hours of solid grinding to get back to even for the session when I’m dealt AA in the BB. An Australian woman had raised to $11 UTG, I 3bet to $41 from the BB and she quickly shoves her $200 stack over the line. I call and she turns over QQ tbh I wasn’t super surprised when the board ran out 8893… Q. Sometimes the Poker gods just like testing you I think. Tilting is one area of my game I think I have really improved in and compared to the average $1/$2 player I think this is where I have one the biggest advantages. Obviously after grinding 5 hours to get back to even I would have preferred the queen hadn’t come on the river but now that it did I accepted I was back in the hole again but was confident I’d be back out again. It wasn’t long before I managed to get a guy all in with my 99 vs his 66 on 874Tr for a decent amount. Got max value with my AQ v Q5 on xxxQx and a few hours after AA v QQ I was about $400 in the green after being stuck.



There was a friendly older Asian man on the table who was wearing lots of jewelry. The guy next to him had noticed that one of the Asian guys rings said 'Craps Champion'. They got speaking about it and the Asian guy explained that after years of training he won the Craps Championship in 2012 or something. Half the table spent the next 30 minutes discussing the skill side of craps and how placing the dice in a certain way gives you an advantage etc haha. Now knowing this I need to stop practicing the skill side of Roulette and focus on Craps

Craps Champ 2012:



I lost a little back but after I had clocked my 7.5 hours for the session I decided to get some food ending the session $304 up.

Poker sessions so far:

• 5hrs - $503
• 3hrs - $202
• 1hrs - $235
• 4hrs - $310
• 5hrs - $348
• 7.5hrs - $304

Total: $1,904

For food I decide it’s time to try out Buns and Shakes in Cosmo. I’ve been to Buns and Shakes on previous trips and it never disappoints. I walk down the Saturday night busy strip and get into Buns and Shakes. Order the choc shake and Golden Standard burger. Service is great and the food comes out super-fast, tastes awesome and isn’t that expensive. I actually think it took me longer to walk down the strip to and from Cosmo than it took to order and eat the burger. Buns and Shakes is right next to a big club in Cosmo (forget the name) and with the Saturday night club queue right outside it also gave me great views as I was eating my burger



After all the Craps skill talk I quite fancied a Craps session at this point to mix things up a little but the three craps tables in Cosmo were rammed and the minimum bet was $25 or $50 which is abit out of what I wanted to gamble. Craps will have to wait for another day. I head back down the strip, past the famous Bellagio fountains and head to bed around midnight.



Thanks for reading!

Haha, I actually couldn't believe it when they started putting their bags away in the overhead of my row and sat down If it had been a longer flight I would of moved I think.

Yeah, they did mention something about Oakland but they said the airport was over an hour away and no clue how to get their and wasn't even if the train was running that late at night.

If you want to be craps champion 2017 skip on Earl twice and hit Taco Bell.

Hahaha!

i wonder which is more impressive--craps champion or lotto winner.

Nice TR, at least you're making the most of it even as a solo. Interesting read for me as someone who's considering making the solo trip next year as an add-on to a work trip.

Quote above sounds like PK (Pokerkraut), wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it was.

Does not sound at all like PK.