One of best things about Lori is that she is willing to try things that she didn’t think that she would like.  Over the years that willingness has included things like eating pancakes, playing blackjack and poker, and eating Chinese food.  She actually likes Chinese food (much to her own surprise I think) and will suggest eating it from time to time.

Well on Sunday night of last trip, she wanted some Chinese.  Well seeing how we were staying at Paris I knew that we could walk next door to Planet Hollywood for some PF Chang’s.  Now my grandmother who is a first generation Chinese American from mainland China actually hates PF Chang’s.  She lives in Chinatown in Boston and basically thinks that any place that doesn’t give you orange slices at the end of the meal is clearly worthless.  However, Lori and I’s tastes are less discerning so head over.

There are a ton of people waiting so we just say first available and of course that lands us in their outside seating area.  Now it is 9pm Vegas time and it’s like 92 degrees out (down from the 112 degrees early in the day) so it’s safe to say that it’s not “comfortable” dining, but we manage.

During the meal I notice 4 people walking up and down the strip with what appears to be large boards on their backs.  It turns out they are human billboards for the Hooters casino around the corner. I couldn’t get my camera out in time for a decent shot, but I did find one from the LA Times Vegas blog.

Each sign was showing a slightly different ad, but all of the people wearing them looked the same, beat down tired.  I can’t imagine how long their shifts were, but the fact that its 9pm and still hot out and they are lugging what appears to be a very heavy digital sign on their back can’t be a good thing.

Outside of the random assortment 20 of so immigrants lined up side by side passing out pornographic playing cards, I have to say that this is the most unique people centric Vegas advertising yet.  No “flick, flick, flick” necessary.

Greetings!  Your ol’ pal Pittsburgh Gil is a man of many reputations.  One thing that I am certainly known for amongst my inner-circle is a tendency to be a little frugal.  Some would even say that I’m downright cheap.  Now I wouldn’t quite go that far, but sure, I do admit that I can be a little tight at times.  But, not too long ago I pinpointed this personal trait and now understand and embrace it.  I’ve learned that I am far from cheap/frugal when it comes to having great, fun experiences.  What I mean by this is that I’ll go all out on things that one does not get to do every day or have consistently easy access to.  Examples of these types of things would be traveling, going to a concert or theater performance, going whitewater rafting, checking out an amusement park or water park, etc.  However, where my penny-pinching comes into play is in regard to things of the complete opposite.  And by that I mean life’s nagging little necessities.  You know…clothing, food, hydration, etc. 

To quote Kenny Powers, “I have clothes like a fuckin’ dickhead”.  Yes, ’tis true.  I simply do not care to pour a lot of attention, effort, or money into my wardrobe.  I get by ok though, I’m not coming into work looking like Kevin Costner in Waterworld or anything…but you get the point.  When it comes to food though, I definitely do enjoy a fine meal and a tasty beverage.  However, I’ve always had trouble forking out $50+ for a simple meal.  No matter how good it might be, I’d rather just hit up a decent bar and get a good burger or pile of nachos for 1/5th of that cost.  After all, the end result is always the same.  You’re full and don’t have to worry about eating again for 5-7 hours.  Well, unless you’re a greedy, gluttonous sloth-like person.  Like Matthew Broderick.

This philosophy comes into play hardcore in Vegas.  You’re bombarded by luxury hotels and suites, high-priced restaurants by celebrity chefs, and fancy bars or clubs where a drink will run you over $10.  These things are great, but I don’t go to Vegas to eat and drink well.  Sure, that’s a fantastic byproduct of being in Vegas…but I’m there for the gaming, shows, and all the fun that comes along with that. 

So…here are Pittsburgh Gil’s tips to save a little green in Vegas, but not compromising any of the fun!

– Either start or end your trip on a Saturday.  I’ve always liked this and have done it several times.  Either go out to Vegas on a Saturday and stay 3-4 nights or go out on Tuesday or Wednesday and leave Saturday.  Why?  Well, for starters…hotels will be less.  We all know hotel rates triple on Fri and Sat nights, especially on the Strip. This way you only have to bother with 1 night of pricey accommodations and savor the $30-50 a night specials the other nights.  Killer.  Sundays are typically the most expensive day to fly as well.

– Spend a night downtown in Old Vegas.  I love to start my trip downtown.  The hotels are cheaper, the table games have lower limits, and you can find great meals for under $10.  I have stayed at both Fitzgerald’s and Binion’s on a Saturday for about $40 and had a blast.  Compare that to potential $150-200 a night rates on the Strip that very same date.  No-brainer.  The rooms aren’t fantastic, but who gives a damn, it’s your first night in Vegas and you’ll move up to bigger and better accommodations soon enough.  If you want to splurge a little, stay at The Golden Nugget.  It would fit in just fine on the Strip. 

Great dining options downtown include the 777 Brewpub at Main Street Station, the Main Street Station buffet, Magnolia’s at Four Queens ($8 prime rib dinner with club sign-up), Chicago Brewing Company at Four Queens, and Flame at El Cortez.  I forget the name, but Four Queens also has an awesome, retro steakhouse in the basement.  And I have to mention the 99 cent shrimp cocktail at Golden Gate. 

For shows, I’ve heard great things of the Rat Pack is Back show at The Plaza downtown and the Golden Nugget always has multiple entertainment offerings and a shark tank at their pool to boot.  For gaming, you can’t beat 24 hour a day quarter roulette and $2 blackjack at Cortez and pretty much any downtown casino will have the same…although possibly only during the daylight hours.  Another great thing about downtown is that all the casinos are lined up long a mere 4 blocks and the street is pedestrian-only.  It’s very quick and easy to casino-hop here, unlike the Strip.

– Always check what offers you have at casinos room-wise before you go.  I haven’t paid full price on the Strip in a long long time and never intend to ever again.  If you don’t have any play racked up, check out the casino’s websites and sign up for their email newsletters to receive specials on room rates.  Check sites like travelzoo.com as well for published specials.  If you know what you’re doing, you’ll always get a room discount in some shape or form.  For my upcoming Labor Day trek, I’m paying a grand total of $150 for 4 nights over a holiday weekend center-Strip at Harrah’s.  Can’t beat that with a rubber snake.

– Of course, always sign up the casino’s Player’s Club.  Always.  Just do it.  Even if you don’t foresee yourself playing there all that much, still do it.  Sometimes you’ll get a free gift just for taking 3 minutes to sign up.  I’ve gotten T-shirts, free slot play, decks of cards, and more.  It amazes me when I see people droppin’ cash in a casino but not bothering to sign up.  I have also heard, but have yet to try, that you can rack up 2 free buffets at The Wynn fairly easily based on your play in the first 24 hours after signing up for the club.

– Go to Casino Royale!  This is one of my favorites on the Strip for good, cheap gaming fun.  It’s right next to Harrah’s and quite small.  Sign up for their club and get coupons for free play and free drinks plus one that I always take advantage of.  They always have a coupon that will pay you $10 cash if you hit a spin of 40 credits or more while playing the Wheel of Fortune slots.  If you’re gonna play a few slots anyway, why not do this?  I’ve gotten it every time with minimal play.  There’s also one for $20 in cash if hitting 4-of-a-kind on video poker.  I’ve cashed in on that successfully as well.  Royale also has a lively atmosphere and plays good music. 

I will stop there for now kids!  But stay tuned for the sequel where I will outline even more ways to throwdown in Vegas for minimal coin.

Finally, I won a poker tourney.

That seems like such a small thing (and it is in the big scheme of things), but it’s something that I needed to do to know that this all has some meaning.  What I mean to say is I love poker.  I love the mental aspect of the game, the nuance, the possibilities.  I love the fact that guys always think that girls can’t play or that I am going to do this or that because of what they think that girls are capable of doing.  I could go on about this, but I think that I can best sum it up by saying yes; I finally won a poker tourney.

The tourney itself was a small one (about 80 people) with $60 buy-in with an additional add-on of $40 for a total of 4500 chips. The beginning started out like most tourneys for me, fairly slow, no real opportunities to do much and basically just trying to steal blinds when the opportunity arose. For the most part of the tourney I was fairly short handed. After the first hour I had the same amount of chips that I had started with, uggh. So not much excitement in the beginning. 

After the second hour Don and I ended up at the same table.  Now this would normally not be a good situation, however there are some advantages.   It would have been nice to of had a hand against each other, that way one of us doubles up, but no such luck. Both of us needed to make something happen at this point since we were both short stacked and struggling.  After some time Don decided to make a move all in with AQ, but ended up getting busted out when someone looked him up with Kings in the hole.  Not so good for him, but what can you do?  He looked across the table at me and headed of to the BJ tables.

In all honestly I was thinking I would be meeting him at those tables in short order.  Fortunately for me, things started to turn around the minute he left (coincidence? Haha).  I was able to go all-in a few times, survived and kept doubling up. It was great because I actually had a little breathing room for once. Plus this was a bounty tourney meaning for every person you knocked out you received $10 in casino chips. So now having some chips to play with I was able to take out a few small stacks. When the final table started I was doing ok; not great but ok. The payout started at 6th place, so I still had to survive a little longer for the money. Thankfully I was able to win some hands and before you knew it I was the chip leader!  It was a weird feeling in that I can’t ever remember a time before in a tourney when I had so many more chips then the next guy. Once the table got to about 8 players, people started talking about chopping. They wanted to just split the prize money amongst all of us. Seeing how I was the chip leader by a considerable amount I was not really liking this idea too much. Thankfully there were other players that didn’t like that either. Once we got to the money, conversation about chopping came up again. A few people really wanted to chop and not play it out. At one point someone even suggested that they just declare me the winner because I had so many more chips and the remaining prize pool be split among the remaining players. Craziness. Of course I am not going to say no to that, but that didn’t happen so we played it out. Only about 3 of them were willing to chop so basically no deal.  Since everyone needed to agree, we played on.  Finally we get down to heads up between me and this other guy (I was not a big fan as he thought he was the shit and caused so many problems during the tourney). He did ask if I wanted to chop, but at this point I wanted to play it out and just kick his butt. I don’t have very much experience at playing heads up, but I have seen Don do it and we have talked about it at great length. I am sure that it was obvious that neither of us knew what we were doing because it took a lot longer to finish then it should have. Chips were moving back and forth between us and I got lucky a few times where I had laid down my hand and he showed me some monsters.  While heads up he had AA and QQ along with some other killer hands.  As Phil Helmuth said, “I can dodge bullets baby!”

We finally get to the last hand where he goes all in with Q6 off suit and I call with 87 off suit.  The flop comes out with a bunch of blanks and then a 7 hits on the turn.  That pairs me and the river gives him nothing.  Winner Winner!  I am definitely glad to have finally won one, but I have a few more to win to catch up to the Donald.  I think that I made him proud, actually I know I did. 

It’s been awhile since we have had a general tips post.  Here are some odds and ends that we thought of that I know could benefit some of our fellow Vegas travelers.  So here they are in no particular order:

-If you are mainly a table game player and rarely play slots, you should consider changing it up a bit.  The rating systems are slanted even more heavily towards slot players now than ever before and unless you are sitting down with over $500 per session of blackjack and willing to bet at least $25 per hand, don’t expect much notice from the pit boss.  So now what?  Well what you can do is play the $1 Wheel Of Fortune.  It’s the most popular slot machine by far and you will get the biggest bang for your buck.  The key is to, “pimp them and leave”.  Lori calls it that as you basically take whatever winnings that you come to at any point and just leave.  For example; you put in $100 and play for a bit and you get a wheel spin.  Congratulations, this is what EVERYONE wants.  So you get $35 on the spin and you hear the clapping soundtrack, yeah!  Now you have done some winning (and some losing) on the session, but that spin of the wheel puts you to $128 on your total credits. Great, now leave.  I know that you are thinking that it’s just $28 of profit, but the point is not to win a ton; it’s not to lose any while you are trying to get rated.  Only in Vegas would $28 not seem like much of anything, because if you were at home and you saw $28 on the floor you would pick it up.  Now do the same thing here.  Use it for cab fare, or tipping (as you know I am all about), food, whatever.  What normally happens is that people just want to keep playing and playing and eventually they will lose all of their initial money.  So don’t let that happen to you.  Just take your winnings and go to the next stop, do what you do and play again later.  You won’t always win, but you will come out way ahead in the long run.

-Water.  A no brainer here, but still it has to be said.  Drink water all the time.  Too often people don’t and it can get ugly.  Especially in the summer months with 100+ degree temps.

-Use your points/comps on your trip.  A lot of times the play that you have done over the course of the trip has afforded you some comps in the form of discounts of just free crap.  Use them on the trip that you are on because they start to expire the moment you leave.  One thing that a casino host told me is that at the end of your trip you should go to casino marketing and have them apply whatever you have earned toward your hotel charges.  You have to go to casino marketing though, because the two systems are not connected and it doesn’t happen automatically.  Take what they give you, because they are definitely going to take from you!

-Have a plan, however loose.  The worse thing to do is to be wandering around aimlessly without a destination.  It’s too hot and things are too far apart to be doing that.  Plus random cab rides add up, so have an idea of what you want to do and plan around it.  Seeing a show? Great, plan dinner at or near that location. Want to watch some sporting event? Realize that you are on the West Coast and there might be a time change (like Sunday Night Baseball at 5 pm, what’s up with that?)

-Call your bank before going and tell them that you are traveling to Vegas.  There is a lot of fraud and if you have a bank like mine (Bank of America), they have a huge fraud department that works almost too well.  This is only really an issue if you need to go to the ATM, especially inside a casino because this may trigger something in their network to shut your debit card down.  Don’t let this happen to you.

-If you have to get money out of an ATM, don’t do it in the casino.  Recently the casinos have jacked up their fees to some crazy levels.  Our flight attendant on the way out actually made an announcement to that affect.  So we checked, and sure enough they had to the tune of $22+.  There are ATMs (Bank of America) in The Forum Shops @ Caesars (3 I believe), there is one on the 3rd or 4th Floor of the M&M store down by MGM and ATM at Casino Royale has a fee of only $1.00. Plus there are ATMS at all monorail stations (Bank of Nevada).  These are normal ATMs with normal fees.

-Ask for matches.  They seem to be the only things that are actually free, i.e. you don’t have to gamble anything to get them.  I actually saw a no money exchange for matches at a sundries shop in Ceasars.  I don’t even smoke and I almost asked for some.

More tips as they come up, but this should get you going in the right direction. Viva Las Vegas indeed!

And now for a break from our regularly scheduled program, I present to you Pittsburgh Gil! 

Greetings fellow degenerates!  It’s your ol’ pal Pittsburgh Gil here to spread the good word.  You all doing ok?  Fantastic!  So anyway, Donnie Boy and I took a little impromptu trip to the Gulf Coast a couple of weeks back and the world simply must hear our harrowing tale.  And by “the world”, I mean the 12 of you that read this blog. 

The backstory of this trip was rooted in uncertainty.  But that uncertainty soon turned to triumph.  Your’s truly was admittedly a little on the fence about doing this trip at first due to financial matters.  I have an adventure approaching in Italy which is certainly not as cheap as say…not going to Italy…so I had to conserve.  Throw in the fact that we could not find a room at a casino for under $200…and apprehension set in.  But fear not good readers.  After some deep introspective thought whilst bathing in an 82 degree bubblebath at home two nights before the trip, I had an epiphany.  An epiphany of fun.  I was all-in baby!

Donnie Baseball and I pulled anchor in Atlanta mid-day Friday and started the arduous journey to our 5-star hotel…the Quality Inn on Washington Avenue off exit 97.  This turned out to be our best lodging option because I utilized my 20% off at Choice Hotels ASCAP discount to get the room for just $60 a night.  What is ASCAP you might ask?  The American Society of Composers, Artists, and Publishers.  I’m a published songwriter.  A brilliant one.  Deal with it. 

After 5 1/2 hours and two bags of peanut M&Ms, we reached our amazing hotel, had a Johnny Walker, and promptly hit the IP for gaming galore.  Our first night can be summed up with 3 words:  City, Of, and Champions.  It was here where I was privileged enough to watch my Penguins upset the Detroit Red Wings on the road to win the Stanley Cup.  All this while enjoying a bucket of 5 beers at a discounted price!  With Pittsburgh officially now being The City of Champions, it was time to celebrate.  Don and I hit the BJ tables hardcore-style.  Several hours, beers, and Maker’s later….we were doing well.  It was nearing 1AM and I was plunging deeper into a drunken stupor so we decided to end the night soon.  But not before hitting some nice hands and ending the evening slightly up.  I’ll take that any night!  Then we stopped so Don could purchase a 3 gallon jug of water.  Then to bed.

Day 2 began ominously.  The Denny’s that we wanted to patron for lunch was closed for remodeling.  We ended up at a Waffle House.  Don ordered every breakfast item known to man and I got a chicken sandwich.  Don made the right choice.

Back to the IP for my first ever real poker tournament!  I’m somewhat new to poker but am learning at a frenetic pace.  I was apprehensive about this as well but I decided to just roll with it.  We bought in for $60 but got like $2500 worth of chips.  I honestly didn’t even know tourneys worked that way.  I ended up getting assigned to the most boring table ever.  Old, quiet, steely-eyed men were on special that day.  And they were all at my table.  Despite liking poker, this is one of my reservations with the game in a casino.  It can be kind of boring and not all that fun depending on who you’re playing with.  Oh well though, I was in this for the learning experience.  Well….I did pretty well.  I won 3 hands, played for about 90 minutes, and outlasted 5 others at my table.  It wasn’t until this tiny, crazy, loud Asian dude bought in that things started to go downhill.  He sat right next to me and talked my ear off…perhaps threw me off my game a little.  He was good though and sounded like Khan on King of the Hill so at least I was thoroughly entertained.

At this point, I bowed out gracefully and headed down to the casino to wait for Don.  He didn’t last too much longer than me and we were soon on another BJ table.  Don took this table by storm and quickly won about a grand.  Hedge economics works, people.  Stellar.

We decided to head out for a bit and cruised the ocean strip and downtown Gulfport.  Downtown Gulfport is about as exciting as my grandmother’s backyard….unfortunately.  Then it was off to a BBQ joint called The Shed that I’ve heard about but never had the chance to visit.  If you’re ever in the area and even remotely like BBQ……GO!  All I have to say, just do it.  And don’t eat anything for 3 days leading up to it.

Back to the IP one last time.  We decide to play some dollar Wheel of Fortune slots and I hit wins of 160, 300, and then a spin for 400 in about a 5 minute spin.  AMAZING!!  I cashed out $775 from my $100 buy-in.  This was my single best session in personal gambling history and I was flying high.  To celebrate, we went for a quick drink at the IP pool bar.  The IP’s pool area is quite nice with a good bar, food, and a giant TV overlooking the pool. 

We then had a couple more decent BJ sessions, was frightened by a redneck in a wife-beater who for some reason stored his pack of Marlboro Reds down his shirt in his wife-beater as opposed to his pocket or simply resting them on the table, and then called it a trip.  

Final Thoughts:

– Don did very well, a true BlackJack ace

– I had my first ever trip where I came home with more money then I went with, including all food, gas, entertainment, etc.

– the drive down to Biloxi is just bearable enough.  Not too long, but an hour longer would be rough.  Very do-able.

– The Shed rules

– the IP has an awesome comp system

– Matthew Broderick was wrong.  There were no “Blues” had by Don and I in Biloxi this weekend!

– F YOU MATTHEW BRODERICK!!  Your wife is weird looking.