Confidence and love in Las Vegas
Like I always do when I travel, I took notes while in Vegas, reprinted here for your reading pleasure.

I hate to admit it, but Las Vegas is quickly becoming one of my favorite American cities. It has the same "melting pot" characteristics of New York or San Francisco, but the fact that everyone is melting together for just a few days at a time before heading back to the flyover states gives Vegas an electricity that no other city can match. I really enjoyed watching the baseball game at New York New York, surrounded by both Cardinals and Mets fans whooping and hollering and trying to outdo each other. When the game ended, everyone who had been cheering on the Mets started congratulating and buying drinks for the Cardinals fans, which I suspect is one of those things that only happens in Vegas (and sadly, stays in Vegas).

Plus, Vegas is the only place I know of where you can buy a purple velvet double-breasted tuxedo, rent a Ferrari 348 convertible, shoot an AR-15 automatic rifle, carry an open can of Icehouse in a taxi, ride in a helicopter, and hire a limo to take you to a brothel... all within the same city block!

"The buffet was excellent!"

Rumor has it that the best buffet on the Strip is at Bellagio, of all places, so being the intrepid hungry person that I was, I went to scope it out after the baseball game ended. Normally, I'm disgusted by buffets but this one was different. Let's recap my $29 eating adventure, keeping in mind that the only thing I'd eaten all day was a bowl of shredded wheat for breakfast and a bag of peanuts on the plane.

Round #1 (the "need food NOW" course):

1. Mixed green salad with a bleu cheese dressing
2. Herb-encrusted prime rib
3. Shrimp tortellini in a pesto/cream sauce
4. A dozen Alaskan king crab legs
5. A glass of what was advertised as white zinfandel but was actually a rose of some sort
6. Two hard rolls

Round #2 (the "gee, I ate so fast that I'm still hungry!" course):

1. Mixed green salad with a vinigrette dressing
2. Roasted turkey slices
3. Mashed potatoes & gravy
4. Two hard rolls

Round #3 (the "uh-oh, tomorrow is really gonna suck" course):

1. Soba noodles
2. Miso soup
3. 12 pieces of maguro sashimi
4. Something else Japanese with shrimp that I can't remember the name of

I suspect it goes without saying that I found the entire affair to be excellent, if lowbrow. I mean, I could drop $100 at Delmonico and have better food and wine, but for sheer quantity/quality balance, the Bellagio buffet is a winner.

But later, I felt the need to "walk it off" and spent most of the next day hiking my fat ass up and down the Strip. I don't think you're supposed to feel guilty in Vegas, but that was the most food I've eaten in one sitting in a very long time.

"I'm sorry I bet on baseball."

Today at Caesars Palace, I saw the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life: the great Pete Rose, wearing his Reds hat and jersey, sitting at a table no more than 10 feet away from me, whoring his signature for as little as $45 depending on the item you wanted him to sign. He looked angry. I can't imagine why. But if you want a living, breathing example of the dangers of gambling, just go take a look at that schmuck trying to con fratboys out of $100 in exchange his John Hancock to their baseball caps. I hate to say it, but I wish he'd just fess up and apologize, instead of acting like a little kid caught in a lie and making it worse with his chicanery. It's a crime that he isn't in the Hall of Fame but it is his own fault.

"A frush? What the f***'s a frush?"

Video poker mastery continues to elude me. Those machines are about as random as I am Chinese. However, I believe I have a strategy that allows me to maximize my playing time (ie. get the most free gin and tonics from a cocktail waitress wearing a unitard that simply CANNOT be comfortable and definitely precludes the casino from ever hiring a cocktail waiter if you catch my drift). The strategy involves determining the highest odds of getting ANY payout, whereas in the past, I played for the highest payout.

An explanation is probably needed here. With video poker, the lowest paying hand is a pair of jacks. A pair of 10s or lower is useless. However, the payout grows depending on the hand: two pair pays 2:1, so if you have a pair of 10s and a pair of jacks, that's good. Likewise, three of a kind pays 3:1, a flush pays 6:1, a straight pays 8:1 and so on until you get to a royal flush, which involves a lot of yelling and screaming and rushing to your room to snort some Lisinopril before your heart explodes. I've seen machines that pay 5000:1 on a royal flush plus a progressive bonus, so your 25-cent bet would pay off to the tune of $1250 plus whatever is in the bonus (usually $3-4K).

So, let's say you hit the "deal" button and you get five cards. In that five card hand, you've got a pair of 3s and a king. My previous idea was to hold the 3s and draw in hopes of getting two pair or three/four of a kind because those were the highest payouts. And as my father will attest having witnessed this genius strategy in action, it doesn't work. You end up with a worthless pair of 3s.

My new plan is to hold the king. The justification is that I get four new cards instead of three, which increases the odds of getting a paying hand since I already have one of the cards needed to pay 1:1.

Based on rigorous experimentation, this new strategy is...well, let's not call it a "winner" but let's just say that I've been able to sit at a single 25-cent machine for four hours on $1, which is a significant improvement over my 30 minutes and out from last time.

"Oh crap."

In theory, craps is a simple game. You place a $5 "pass bet". Some dude (or better, some chick) you don't know rolls two dice. If he/she rolls a seven or an eleven, you win $5. If he/she rolls a 2, 3, or 12, you lose your $5 bet. If he/she rolls anything else, it is called the "point" and the fun begins.

Let's say the shooter rolls a 6 for the point. You've got a $5 pass bet down. Now, you bet on whether or not the shooter will roll the point (a 6, in this example) again before rolling a seven ("crapping out"). If he/she does roll the point again, you win $5. If he/she rolls a seven before rolling the point, you lose.

But there is one other trick to craps: the casinos offer "odds" on pass bets. If you put down an odds bet AND the shooter rolls the point before rolling a seven, you win $5 plus the odds payout. The odds payout, in any reputable casino, is the "true odds" of rolling that particular number--in other words, the casino has no advantage on the odds bets! The trick is to find the casinos that allow you to maximize your odds bet versus your initial bet (low minimum bet with high odds). The Casino Royale is notorious/famous for offering 100X odds--you can place a $3 minimum "pass bet" and a $300 odds bet on the same roll!

Maybe a better explanation: there are 36 possible ways to roll a pair of six-sided dice. On the initial roll, there are eight ways to win (eight different combinations of seven or eleven), four ways to lose (2, 3, or 12) and 24 ways to make a point. The odds of making the point are the ratio of the number of ways to make a 7 to the number of ways to make the point. For example, there are five ways to make a 6, so the odds of making a point of 6 are 6-5. Therefore, an odds bet of $5 on 6 pays out $6, so your total winnings are $11 ($5 from your pass bet and $6 from the odds bet).

Anyway, enough theory. I decided to give craps a whirl and it is my new favorite casino game. Not only do you actually have a reasonable chance of winning relative to the other games, the camaraderie around the craps table (especially when there is a hot shooter) is unbeatable. It is a lot of fun, although it is difficult to watch everyone else place more complex bets that have a significant house advantage (ie. not like the pass and odds bets I described above). You can have a lot of fun playing craps knowing just the pass and odds bets.

In fact, I won enough with craps that I was able to hit the blackjack tables and lose it all again in about an hour. Cursed blackjack...I am really starting to hate that stupid game.

Other notes from Sin City

I saw Justin Timberlake. He was in the process of bringing sexy back. As he predicted, I did not know how to act. I turned around, and he picked up the slack...and took 'em to the bridge, chorus, etc.

I ate a $48 bone-in rib steak at Delmonico that was worth every penny. It was decidedly un-Emeril, as it was called simply "Bone in rib steak" on the menu. Compare and contrast with my "fresh hearts of romaine and creamy bleu cheese dressing with crispy pancetta and buttermilk fried onion crisps" salad from the same menu.

I saw a pretty good Jimi Hendrix impersonator performing outside the Flamingo with two go-go dancers. It took me awhile to figure out that they were hawking Hendrix branded vodka, which pretty much blows away the definition of "irony" as far as I'm concerned. I am, sadly, not making this up. http://www.houseofhendrix.com/.

I saw a drunken Irishman (no, really) win a bet with his pals that he couldn't randomly grab the ass of another male passerby on the Strip unnoticed. Thankfully, I was not the victim.

All told, it was a fun trip. And now, back to the real world!