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.

Requiem for OTB in New York?

I'M NOT SURE HOW THEY managed this, but New York State's Off-Track Betting Corporation, set up in the 1970s to manage horse race wagering in and around NYC, may shut down in mid-June because it has achieved the dubious distinction of running a money-losing bookmaking operation.

My grandfather is probably cursing in his grave.

I know nothing about the art of handicapping Thoroughbreds, but my maternal grandfather had the touch. For a Hell-fearing Irish Catholic who survived the Depression, he had no qualms about betting on cards or the ponies. Before OTB, he would study the Daily Racing Form and call my "aunt" Lizzie to transmit bets to the bookie who lived on her apartment building's ground floor. The parlors opened just in time for his retirement, and he enjoyed his trips to the Castle Hill or Parkchester offices in the Bronx, even if they took a bigger bite out of his not infrequent exacta and daily double hits via the state-run pari-mutuel system.

Evidently, this vig was not enough to keep OTB solvent. New York's experiment in taking the race-betting business from the city's bookies and the Mob could end, barring sale of the operation to another manager or a renegotiation of the profit split among the city, state, and the association that runs NYC's tracks. And don't think the Mafia won't welcome the extra business. Hell, they never stopped booking race bets, OTB or not. Via a guy in my poker game, I could reach a bookie within two phone calls if I wanted to get some money down without hauling my ass over to the Meadowlands or into Manhattan.

Sadly, any horse betting on my part is strictly gonna be for fun and small potatoes. My grandfather slipped off to the big OTB parlor in the sky before passing along any of his handicapping secrets. I've only ever thought about betting on a horse when I worked in the city, and could walk two blocks to an office in Midtown to make a nominal bet on the odds leader during one of the Triple Crown races. I did experiment one year with boxing a couple of horses together, which, if I am correctly recalling the details, allows one to win, at a reduced rate, no matter what order your horses come up, as long as you pay for all the potential bets in that combo. I lacked the deep understanding to seal that sort of deal, and lost the $12 or so it cost me to conduct the experiment.

I have to verify the testimony of several commenters in this City Room piece: The environment and crowd at OTB offices is unique. I recall wandering through the crowd of regulars clustered outside the Midtown office, all sucking down cigarettes between races or while reading a Racing Form. Inside, sheets covered one wall, each one listing the individual races and horses at tracks across the country. The decor and seating was the same batch-bought low-bid generic quality as you'd find in a DMV office. Old TVs — no flat screens for this venerable parlor — hung from the ceilings or were set in the walls, so wherever you looked you could watch your financial fate unfold. And of course, dozens of bettors, slouching or sitting with foot-bobbing tension in their seats, chatting like Talmudic touts about some horse's prospects, waiting in line to make or cash in on a bet, from all realms of city life, were there to strive against the odds, play a hunch, or construct some elaborate system of bets across several races to bring home the long green.

Still, with comfy horse parlors in the Connecticut casinos, the Borgata in AC, and of course sharing the same space as the sports books in far greater luxury in Las Vegas, a few hours of two-buck longshots might be a nice side dish to a long day of poker or craps degeneracy with the gang. Just a bummer that I would have to travel so far to do so. As much as it might be worth funding New York's social services via some more reliable and transparent method, it will be a shame, and a piece of city history lost, should the green-and-white OTB signs cross their final finish line this coming June.