Tao of Pauly

Las Vegas Rounders

Besides hitting up strip club, Grubby and I have been doing other random stuff too. He's a professional poker player and gambler so he's always playing poker either online or in a casino.

On Monday, I spent a lot of time at Mandalay Bay. I usually play in their $4/8 game with a 1/2 Kill, but instead I sat in their NL game. I won a few dollars and that covered Sunday's losses.

On Tuesday, Grubby and I headed to Terrible's for dinner. He loves the $4.99 half chicken dinner. I got the spicy chicken strips and a cheese quesadilla. We had a weird waiter and we think he was a special needs person. He kept saying, "Great!" after we'd say anything.

"I'll have an iced tea."

"Great!"

It was more weird than funny and it would have made an interesting Saturday Night Live sketch. Afterwards we headed to Tuscany since they just opened up their new poker room. After we sat down we realized that everyone there was affiliated with Tuscany. The poker room manger was playing. Two dealers in their uniforms were playing. And two off duty dealers were also there. Finally a group of three tourists sat down and made the table even better casino workers and tourists.

I dropped $100 mostly on two river suckouts and a hand I should have folded. Grubby was enamored by one of the poker dealers. She looked a lot like Claire Danes. "If she was a stripper, I'd get a lap dance from her," Grubby mentioned to me on our way out to the parking lot. The room is OK but it's a Smoking Room. I guess they are going to cater to locals who like to smoke. They offered up some freerolls this week but I dunno if I'll ever go back.

We still wanted to play cards so we drove over to Palms. I've only played there once before. Actually twice including a tournament. Grubby lost his entire stack with A-A, when a guy with A-10s rivered a flush on him. He decided to leave.

I was seated at the back table with a few characters. There was Grumpy Old Man in Seat 9 who refused to chop the blinds if it was folded around. He drank Bailey's and Coffee like it was water. There was California Hipster with a sideways hat in Seat 5 slurping Red Bulls. There was the coked up chick in Seat 3. She looked like Catherine Zeta Jones and would sneak off to the bathroom every fifteen minutes for a bump. She'd miss half the hands during an orbit and it seemed like she was constantly posting her missed blinds. She would stumble out of the bathroom with a shit eating grin on her face and her swollen nose looked like she could audition for the role of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

In the second orbit I found A-A. It was a kill pot and the rounds were $6/12. I got three callers preflop. I flopped an ace and turned quads! I won the medium sized pot and won a high hand jackpot for $117. I tipped the dealer $25 and he seemed thrilled. Later on another girl at my table won with Quad 10s. I also missed an open-ended straight flush draw with Jc-10c. I had so many outs that I chased all the way to the river and missed everything.

Minh Ly wandered through the poker room. He was talking to a dealer at the adjacent table. He spotted me and we shook hands. It felt good that someone of his level of play remembered talking to me on previous occasions. Sad to say that the majority of people on the room had no idea one of the best players in the world was standing there talking to me. He kept saying that he was waiting for Mike Matusow to play him to that $1 Million heas up freezeout. Matusow talked shit and Minh Ly called him on it.

I was sitting at a real juicy table with the hipster doing multiple rebuys and the old man on tilt. I eventually left after the cokehead chick pissed away two racks worth of chips. Just another night at Palms, eh? By the way, Palms has some of the hottest cocktail waitresses in Las Vegas. I fell in love with one Romanian chick with flowing blonde hair. I kept ordering beers just so she's tap me on the shoulder to hand it to me. Maybe it's the fishnet stocking and latex mini skirts? I'm a sucker for blondes.

Alas, I've learned the hard way that blondes are -EV for me.

On Wednesday, Grubby and I headed back to Palms for dinner. I have a routine now. I wake up around Noon and write for a few hours. I play a few SNGs on Noble Poker, then write some until it's time to meet Grubby for dinner. Then it's off to casinos to play poker.

Grubby had passes to a preview of the new Wes Craven film callled Red Eye. We caught that and decided to play some more poker at the Palms. He wanted revenge and I wanted to see my hot Romanian waitress. Red Eye was pretty good. Grubby liked it better than Star Wars 3. Before the flick we got comped for the Palms buffet. It's better than average and I liked the penne in garlic butter and the pesto chicken.

We wandered over to the poker room and I was seated next to this hilarious 60+ Jewish woman originally from NYC. She cussed like a sailor. She had tiny statues of Buddha that she'd use as her card cappers. When she lost a big pot, she's switch statues. I dropped about $35 in three hours. Derek called from Atlantic City. He was playing at the Taj and was about to head over to the Borgata. Grubby's table was broken up and we decided to bail.

We headed back to the Redneck Riviera and we fired up Party Poker and played an SNG. It was good to see how he'd play a specific hand as compared to how I'd play. We took 3rd and ran into AA on a steal.

Time for a Noble Poker SNG.