Picture dump incoming.
From my post about the Mirage tournament that chopped before I could agree - there were about 750k chips in play. Here's a pic I took after I flopped quads but before I bullied the other two players before the break:
These next two pics will be followed by a story:
They were taken on the night of the Knights' last pre-season game in 2017 - October 1, to be exact. The game got out around 7:45. After a not so quick walk to my spot in the MGM garage (what a mistake that was), I drove home. The wife went to bed and I was meeting Joboo at TI to run the 10pm tournament. It didn't go, so we went and hung out on the roof of the parking garage for a few before heading to our respective homes. I saw some confusing posts on social media about Las Vegas, and got tagged by a friend of mine in Pahrump to check in and make sure I was okay. That prompted me to turn on the TV and see what was going on. And it was a lot.
I share these two pics because it was kind of a sense of normalcy before absolute chaos and misery, followed by what can only be described as an overwhelmingly positive response to the events of that day. When the Knights came back home on October 10 to play their first home game, it was surreal. They removed all the ads on the boards to be replaced with "Vegas Strong":
And if you've followed this team at all, you'd see that giving up any advertising time or space is not in their nature.
The introduction of each player was followed by an introduction of a 1 October hero. The Coyotes skated behind both the Knights and the heroes for a moment of silence that was an actual moment of silence. I'm sure you've all seen it. A big arena or stadium has called for a moment of silence and some jackass in the back screams "Woo!" or "(other team) SUCKS!". But at this game, in this moment, it was truly silent. For 58 seconds, one for each victim of 1 October, the arena was silent. Not gonna lie, it definitely brought a tear to my eye. It was moving.
In less depressing events, they had a big NHL history exhibit in front of the arena prior to that game. I forgot this team existed!
My wife grew up Quaker so I kinda want to grab one of these reproductions sometime.
Shot from the roof of the South Point garage:
Was waiting for a random Santa Fe station tournament to start one Saturday and decided to sit at a video poker machine right outside the poker room:
Binions poker room is a sad story. What they claim to essentially be the birthplace of Vegas poker has been relegated to a few tables off the end of the pit. The long-time poker room, the nice separated space away from the casino floor, is now home to a bunch of machines and slots. They still run (ran?) nightly tournaments. I believe it was a $65 buy-in for like 20k in chips, but holy **** is this structure clownish. I know most <$100 tournaments are going to be somewhere between awful and semi-bad, but I had hoped with 20k in chips it would fall towards semi-bad. Nope. Just pure **** you mode, all turbo garbage that is absolutely not worth playing.
I love Vegas. I do. But there are some things we don't do well here. And our reaction to stand up comedy is probably amongst our weakest traits. I've seen a bunch of comics with hardcore fans around here, like Doug Stanhope, Jim Norton, and Colin Kane, and none of them got the reaction they should have.
Norton's show was especially telling. Room was about 70% sold so they moved all of us from the back closer to the front. Jim started talking to some lady in the front row who is on some reality show about building fish tanks (???). Jim was doing his usual shtick and his act was great, but for someone who has fans as psychotic as Norton, the response just wasn't there. It was very odd.
Some lady in my office REALLY likes Halloween:
Anyone remember Doug Mirabelli? He was the backup catcher on the Red Sox for a number of years, and caught Tim Wakefield's knuckle ball. He's actually from Vegas, and I found this hanging in a pizza shop not too far from my new house:
Speaking of the house, two stories coming up about that. Gonna put that in a new post so this one isn't so huge.