Three Essential Las Vegas Guides

FOR SOME LAS VEGAS TIPS you won't find in any printed tourbook, I offer you three guides that may boost your fun, ease your losses, and keep you out of jail. Excerpts of each guide are included:

1. Dr. Pauly, Bloggers Invading Las Vegas Tips (scroll down to Nov. 19 entry)

The fifth version of this road map for the the world's poker bloggers as they gather periodically to donk it up in Sin City. Compiled by top poker journalist and kickass world-wandering writer Dr. Pauly, aka Pauly McGuire, who is combining both talents to cover the 2008 World Series of Poker on Tao of Poker in high style. Even those tips that are more inside-baseball for hardcore online hold'em addicts are worth scanning to see how a previously far-flung group of strangers bonded a few years ago via this crazy game and the Internet to become a community. An occasionally very, very drunk community.

10. Never underestimate the importance of a $20 tip.
Do you wanna get shit done in Vegas? Tip the hell out of every person you see. I'm from New York City and we tip everyone. In a town like Vegas, most of the people working in the service industry are not paid extravagantly. They rely on tips to supplement their wages. You would be surprised how much attention you can get with a simple $20 tip. Heck that's like one big bet for some of you. . . .

Now if you think $20 gets you a long way... try tipping $40 or $100.

2. Rands in Repose, The Rands Vegas System

My friend Matt brought this to my attention, and I declare this guide a solid addition to any Vegas warrior's stash of holy texts. Rands is a software-engineering manager, insightful tech-culture essayist, coiner of the term Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder — or NADD — and author of Managing Humans, which collects many of his most useful posts for helping managers treat their charges like people and not soulless 1s and 0s.

We’re all still laughing about the time when Vegas tried to convince the world that it was a family town. You remember this? This was back during the Internet boom, money was free, and Vegas was pretty full of itself as it’d as it had every instant multi-millionaire with huge amounts of disposible cash stumbling around the casinos literally bleeding cash.

With this new wad of cash, Vegas was wondering, What’s next? Where was the growth? Who were the new Vegas customers? What about families? In Sin City? Sure, why the hell not? If they can sell cat food on the Internet, why not get families to think of Vegas as Disneyland? Rollercoasters, yeah, that’s the ticket.

What a complete crock of shit.

3. AllVegasPoker.com, Drinking for Profit—Poker for the Casual Vegas Player

Not everyone totes sheaves of $100s to Vegas for the big hold'em tourneys or to score bottle service one table away from Jay-Z's posse. Some prefer to turn the city's poker rooms into a free-floating — and free-drinking — home game, and let Sin City serve them . . . until they can barely stand. Follow AllVegasPoker.com message board poster Grange95's detailed description (and sly parody of a zillion poker strategy books) to get the most top-shelf tipple for the smallest donation to waitresses and tablemates.

Introduction: The recent poker boom has brought forth a veritable cornucopia of books, manuals, treatises, and websites devoted to improving poker playing skills. These publications have fed the swarms of poker locusts who inhabit most Vegas poker rooms, stripping every last chip from the assorted donkeys, fish, sloths, wombats, platypi, and conventioneers who find themselves attracted to the olfactory siren song of cigarette breath, four day old underwear, and pieces of sandwiches putrefying in the fat rolls of the guy in the five—and six—seat.

But what about the casual poker player, the intrepid soul whose sole purpose for playing poker is that it seems like a “cool” way to get hammered while losing less money than playing $25 blackjack next to a tattoo-covered LA trust fund baby and looking more manly than playing nickel slots next to a chain-smoking granny? Although the poker-drinker is a common denizen of the Vegas poker scene, his (and he is male more than 98.62% of the time) unique poker strategies have not been subjected to rigorous mathematical and game theory analysis. The current poker-drinker is forced to live by his wits, learning by trial and error and the occasional “secret tip” from a degenerate fraternity brother.