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Tr 5/31 - 6/4

Discussion in 'Vegas Trip Reports' started by themightydude, Jun 4, 2014.

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  1. themightydude

    themightydude High-Roller

    Joined:
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    Location:
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    My Trip Report

    I've tried to proofread this as much as possible, but I am going on limited sleep here so, sorry in advance for any grammatical errors.

    So little background on this trip. My last trip to Vegas was in Jan/Feb for the superbowl and wasn't really planning on coming back till the next superbowl due to my previous misplaced bets on the denver broncos.
    However, there was a disaster recovery / training conference happening this week at the Aria for one of the backup solutions that we use / sell. I had brought this up to my company a month or so ago and instead of sending me this they were sending one of our other engineers. To top it all off, the guy they were sending had never ever been to vegas before! I could not allow this to happen. This poor engineer was about to step into unfamiliar territory where if experienced wrongly could have life altering affects. After some crafty emails and selling my soul, I talked my company into sending me to Vegas as well. Victory!

    Ok so now onto the trip report part.

    I was booked on a direct United flight out of Houston which was scheduled to leave at 9:13 PM on 5/31(Sunday) and arrive at 10:45 PM. For Sunday night I was using a comp room at the quad. I was mainly doing this for 2 reasons. The first one being that my company wouldn’t cover rooms until Monday as I had requested to fly in a day early, and secondly I wanted to see if the rooms were decent there just in case I ever needed a cheap get away to vegas. For Monday – Wednesday I would be staying at the Aria. My work colleague would be arriving Monday morning at 8:30.

    Due to my previously mentioned blowout with the superbowl, I didn’t want to take that much to Vegas this time as I would like to keep some gambling cash in reserve for next year’s superbowl trip.
    I arrived at Bush intercontinental around 7:30 PM, zoomed through security thanks to TSA Precheck only to receive lovely text messages from United. Your flight is delayed 15 minutes. Your flight is delayed 30 minutes. Your flight is delayed 60 minutes. Finally they stopped adding more numbers once they reached a delay for 84 minutes. No big deal though, as I had upgraded my ticket for $150 to first class on the way to Vegas and thought I would just go to the united lounge and grab some drinks while I waited. However I was informed you don’t get lounge access with united on domestic first class tickets unless you are a united club member or you have a united first class international ticket. I normally am a Delta man myself and have club access with them, so this sucked. However, I am a survivor my friends and what do survivors do? We survive by finding somewhere else to get drinks…free drinks be damned.
    We finally boarded our flight at 10:45 PM and were off the ground shortly after that. And with that I took advantage of first class and consumed an unknown number of jack and cokes. We were on a new United 737-900 that had direct tv on it which was nice. I ended up watching a show on CNBC about David Siegel and his westgate resort / vegas fiasco. It was actually very interesting as it essentially followed him, and his wife around as they went through the financial issues they were facing. It amazed me that here they were facing foreclosures, losing properties, houses etc, yet they still were able to have nice parties. I laughed at the part where they said they had to go from 25 nannies / maids to only 5. Man..I’d like to just have 1 maid! Lol

    Ok continuing on here. Arrived in Vegas at 11:30 PM, and since I didn’t check bags I went straight to the cab line, and proceeded to the quad. Got checked in and the room was ok. Pretty sure I’d pick something else next time, but for a cheap room that you might only spend 4-6 hours in, it works. Kind of sad that you have a balcony but you can’t open the door to get out. Maybe next time I’ll bring a screw driver so I can screw that stop out they have at the bottom so I could at least check out the balcony. Room didn’t smell funny, though the bathroom had a slightly funky smell to it I could not quite narrow down.

    It is now approximately midnight, and I venture out of the room and go check out the quad and see what kind of gambling trouble I get into. Wasn’t looking to do a whole lot tonight, just trying to get a few drinks and get that initial gambling jitters out of the way. I found a $15 BJ game and bought in for $200. I wish I could tell you all of some massive wins at this table, but unfortunately this table only lasted me 4 drinks or roughly 1 hour of play time. I would like to take the time to mention here that the drink system the quad has going is pretty fricking sweet. One lady comes around with an ipad just taking drink orders, then another lady follows her up a few minutes later with your drinks. Definitely one of the fastest drink services I’ve had in a while at a table game. Ok moving on here. So I played for an hour at this BJ table but could never make anything happen, played my $200 down to $50 and cashed out. Walked around exploring the casino / O’sheas a bit more and found a pretty nice beer VP bar. They had tons of beers and they even had tables just a bit away from the bar that had built in taps you could get them to turn on for you. So I decided to sit here and play for a bit and see what happens. Not the best Odds, but I just wanted the drinks. I was playing DDB @ $.25 denom and put $100 in the machine. Slow played it for a bit trying different beers ans was down to about $45 left in the machine when I hit a nice quad 3’s for $100 win. Unfortunately that was the best hand of the night, but I did hit a full house and a quad 10’s. Basically my high point at this game was having $265 in it when I only bought in for $100. I played it down to $200 and cashed out. By this time it was something like 3:00 Am and I was pretty tired, drunk and hungry. For the life of me I couldn’t find any food court place in the quad so I walked over to Flamingo where I drunkenly ordered 3 slices of Pizza (NY Slices), took it back to my room and devoured said pizza. Drank a bottle of water then hopped in bed. I believe this was about 4:00 AM.

    Woke up the next morning feeling surprisingly well considering I only had 4 hours of sleep, and drank a large unknown amount of alcohol the previous night. Packed my bags, checked out and cabbed it over to the Aria to meet my work buddy. Arrived at the Aria and got checked in. Just a standard aria room, but man when you go from the quad to the aria you feel like you won the jackpot in the room lottery..my room was floor 26 with a city view. Had a pretty good view of the Palms and Rio. Met my buddy downstairs, and had breakfast at the aria café. I had a Chillaquiles which were ok. Nothing impressive though. We had about an hour or so to kill before the introductory part of the conference so we decided to go put $100 in a VP bar that’s back by the escalators that go up to the promenade level. Had a weird experience here though. The bartender comped our first drinks…came by 10-15 minutes later to check on us. We asked for another round of drinks but he said he has to wait another 20 minutes or so before serving again as he can only comp 1 drink every 30 minutes. WTF was that? We had $100 in the machine and granted this was the aria, but I’ve definitely played at their other VP bars and had way more than 1 drink every 30 minutes. Anyway..after that we did the conference thing..I’ll spare you all the details.

    The company that was doing this conference had the top floor of margaritaville reserved for all of us at 7:30 for drinks and food. We hung out there for probably an hour and a half or so. Enjoyed a few margaritas, a few coconut shrimp before heading out. We proceeded to catch a cab and book it down to Fremont street. I figured if you’re in Vegas and have never been before you have to at least check out Fremont street. It definitely was not as packed down there as it normally is during the weekends but still enough action going on. We walked around..enjoyed gawking at the sites and consumed several $2 coronas. We didn’t do any gambling down here (Friends not much of a gambler), but that didn’t matter to me really. Just had a good time enjoying the atmosphere. We grabbed a cab around 12:00 AM or so back to the aria. My buddy went back to his room and I proceeded to find a craps table. Found a not so crowded $15 table and bought in for $200 here. Did decent here and probably played for about an hour or so. Was doing $15 don’t pass bets and backing it up with another $30 give or take a few bucks on the odds. People were constantly setting 6 and 8 as points which was scayr for me as a don’t pass player, but this time it worked out nicely with the point getting set, 1-2 more rolls then a 7 out. I should of bet larger. Walked away from here with $350 and decided to go ahead and get to the room since the conference starts at 8 am. However I did have to make 1 quick stop at a VP machine again just to see if I can break the virgin royal flusher title. I didn’t..the end.

    Next day conference / training was in full affect and I drank 2 gallons of coffee to try to stay awake, but all that accomplished was a couple hundred trips to the bathroom and shaky hands. Somehow I avoided passing out on one of the tables during some training sessions and made it through to 5:00. Quick trip to the room for 30-45 minutes to take care of a few things for a house we are buying, then grabbed my buddy out we went for round 2. I did make a quick stop with $200 at a $25 BJ table there at the aria. I played for maybe 30 minutes playing between $50 - $150 / hand and walked away with $475. Was a nice hit and run session and a little extra cash for the night. It’s funny how when I go on these $25 - $50 tables with way less money than what you should have but I’m just wanting to see if I can double or triple my money real quick that I usually win. But when I actually bring $800 or something to a $25 - $50 table to be able to play a while, I get my ass kicked. C’est la vie I suppose.

    We headed down to NYNY and went to the nine fine Irishmen and grabbed one of those tables with the beer taps on it. A group of 3 older gentlemen (could have been my grandpas) joined us at the table as they were wanting to try out the tap thing and it was only myself and my buddy at a table for like 6 or 8. A good time was had by all. The crazy thing was though that these guys picked up the tab..including the food we had ordered. Was something like a $140 bill of which $60 of that was ours. Great guys who had a ton of great stories.

    Ok going to try to wrap this up now. From there we headed over to the MGM Grand and put in $100 into the lions share progressive ($2.38 million now). Had a few times where we got 1 lions head but never got all three. When we initially got to the MGM grand and found the lions share machine, there was a guy there playing it..he had about 85 credits in the machine. We waited for about 2 minutes or so but this guy never played. I asked him if he was playing or what and he said yeah he was. Said he was playing 1 hand then doing a few tweets. Basically he was just an asshole. This guy was basically waiting about 2 minutes between spins. Sometimes he would doe 2-3 in succession but usually not. He just sat there..feet propped up on the other chair playing on his phone. A floor supervisor came over and started talking to him (I’d like to point out we didn’t do this..we were just waiting patiently, though if he kept doing this for much longer I probably would have asked someone about this). This guy told the floor supervisor that for the $100 he put in the machine, he should be able to take his time playing at that level. Wasn't really much the floor supervisor could do really and then this guy asks the floor supervisor if she could send a cocktail waitress over lol. Anyway, the supervisor came over to us and was apologizing about the situation and made sure the cocktail waitress took a drink order from us as well so that was nice of her. 45 minutes later this dudes finally off the machine and we jump on. Like I said before..nothing really happened and we lost the $100. However about halfway through the guy that was slow playing the machine earlier came by to see if we were doing any good, then another group of 4 guys stopped as they wanted to play after we were done. Funny part with all this was one of the guys looked at the slow paying asshole and said “If you were still here slow playing this fucking machine, I was going to kick your ass. I lost $1,400 because you were taking forever to play this machine” Apparently he went to go play blackjack or something since this dude was slow playing and he lost $1,400 lol. Anyway..we didn’t slow play. $100 gone in about 10 minutes. That's about right..though I've lost $100 quicker lol.

    Alright almost done with everything now. Last part of the trip. After the MGM grand deal my buddy wanted to learn how to play blackjack. All MGM grand had was $15 tables and I was trying to find him a $10 or $5 table but couldn’t. We went to Ballsy thinking they would have $5 tables on a Tuesday night but all they had was $10 (crappy rules too). We went ahead and played at Ballys though..probably played for 1.5 hours. I bought in for $100 and he had $50. Ended the blackjack session with myself up $80 and my buddy up $50. There was a good hand I was trying to get him to split and then double down on. Had a dealer 6 and my friend had a pair of 7’s. I managed to talk him into splitting those and he drew a 2 and a 4. I told him you gotta double down these splits..you gotta do it! You got a dealer bust and your sitting pretty with a 9 and an 11. He didn’t do it though $40 on the table was a good bit of dough. So he just hit the cards. Got a 10 on the 9 for 19 and drew a 10 on the 11 for 21…dealer busted. That would have been a solid win right there and he was kicking himself after that one. But you know he had fun learning and he won some money doing it so all was good. I still can't believe I played at a 6:5 table, but had fun none the less.

    We left ballys and went back to Aria and retired for the night. I had a 6:54 Am flight out the next morning (Would not recommend doing this ever again). I had thought about going back to play some more $25 blackjack but decided against it.

    Overall, I ended up down $135 for the trip..a few times I was down $300 - $400 but had a few nice wins here and there to help. Not a whole lot of gambling on this trip, but I probably got around 6-8 hours of gambling in.

    Sorry I didn't take many pictures on this one, but here's a few
    Quick pic of the Quad Room. This was tower 5 I believe (whichever one is by the front desk)
    photo 11.JPG

    Someone modified the sign on the sliding door to the balcony lol.
    photo 22.JPG

    My Quad 3 hit at the quad.
    photo 3.JPG

    Fremont street never ceases to amaze me. It seems that there are nearly more almost naked men now than there are girls. :thumbsdown:
    photo 2.JPG

    Last but not least. Peach bellini at the aria cafe with breakfast. Vegas is the only place where I can get away with these "fru fru" drinks lol
    photo 1.JPG
     
  2. Suekel

    Suekel VIP Whale

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    Great TR! I've always wished I could get my company to send me to Vegas on their dime. Down $135 is pretty dang good in my book.
     
  3. VegasDave

    VegasDave Addicted

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    Great report, sounds like a pretty good work event if it is in Vegas!
     
  4. kevstf

    kevstf Low-Roller

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    Regarding the drinks,I read in another thread there's a new policy at the Aria, which indeed says 1 comped drink every 30 mins..
     
  5. themightydude

    themightydude High-Roller

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    Yeah I just read that TR that stated that as well. Seems like a pretty shitty policy if you ask me. Especially when you can go to other casinos and not have to worry about it.
     
  6. Joe

    Joe VIP Whale

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    Nice report! 6:40 AM flight out, hell even 8 AM is too early for me.
     
  7. Second_To_None

    Second_To_None Low-Roller

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    Great report - down $135 in Vegas is a win in my book!!!! I can't believe the "1 drink every 30 mins policy"... Stupid things like this - started by 1 casino - usually trickles to all the others... I truly hope that is NOT the case here!!!!
     
  8. themightydude

    themightydude High-Roller

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    Yeah..I would never of picked a 6:45 Am flight, but it's what my company booked and I didn't want to push my luck by asking for a later flight. Normally when I book my flights, it's a 1:30 PM departure lol.

    I hope that 1 drink every 30min stays there or goes away completely..maybe it's their way of trying to get people to spend more money by just going to the lounges and buying drinks like regular people? I don't know, but I do know that means I'm not playing VP at a bar that has that policy.
     
  9. breanna61

    breanna61 Super Moderator

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    Sounds like a great quick getaway even though you had to fit some work in there. I did a 6:00 a.m. Flight home last fall, never again! Someone warned about the new Aria VP at the bar drink rule...not as bad as Wynncore but who knows when that will start.
     
  10. Mandiferous

    Mandiferous Tourist

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    Thanks for the great TR! Trying to work up the guts to play blackjack on my next trip. I've been practicing, but I think I might head to Ellis Island for their $5 3:2 tables.
     
  11. themightydude

    themightydude High-Roller

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  12. Suekel

    Suekel VIP Whale

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    My BJ strategy card was a HUGE help to me when I was learning to play. Most places don't mind if you have it out and consult it, as long as you aren't slowing the game down by doing so.

    Ellis Island would be a good place to get your feet wet.
     
  13. tringlomane

    tringlomane STP Addicted Beer Snob

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    Nice report! And definitely looking forward to trying out TAG lounge at Quad!
     
  14. VegasCandy72

    VegasCandy72 Tourist

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    Thanks for the cool trip report!
     
  15. JosieCat

    JosieCat VIP Whale

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    Nice trip report! I just got back from the MGM Grand last Wednesday. I played the Lion's Share on Tuesday - never saw slow play guy - but what a dick. Amazingly enough, I tried to get to it really early 2 mornings in a row and it was taken (5:00 a.m.) and the one time I actually came across it was during the day - no one playing it. Sound like you packed a lot in even though you were there for a conference :)
     
  16. mbarra

    mbarra Tourist

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    Great trip report! I constantly try to talk my company into a Vegas trip as well using the flimsiest logic I can find. ("Look, a doorknob convention. We have doorknobs all over this building!") So far, it's only worked once, but that doesn't slow me down.

    We shall stay far away from the Aria on our upcoming trip. Once every 30 minutes is pretty damn penny-wise and pound-foolish if you ask me.
     
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