New Year, Slow Start

Jamena, Evon (Jamena's Mom), and I spent New Years at the Pallazo in Las Vegas. I ended up getting sick almost the moment we left San Francisco which put a damper on the trip. Fortunately, I didn't get really sick until New Year's day so I was at least able to have some fun. We went to Lavo on New Year's eve which is the Venetian's new nightclub. Things didn't start out so well as they told us they weren't seating anybody on their terrace due to the weather. It was 50 degrees and clear, downright balmy if you're from Boston. We paid $2,000 for terrace seats in the hopes of having a good view of the fireworks so we were understandably pissed off. Jamena ended up talking to the manager of the club and adeptly negotiated a free bottle of Dom Perignon as well as an escort to a private section of the terrace ten minutes before midnight. Everything worked out well, maybe even better, since there weren't any great views of the fireworks from Lavo (they're on the first floor of the hotel).

Here are some pictures from Lavo. The last picture is Las Vegas Boulevard a few minutes before midnight. The picture doesn't do justice to the number of people that were outside, it was literally a sea of people.







Aside from New Years eve, most of my trip was spent laying in bed sick where I tried to play as much poker as my body would allow (see profile picture). I was able to get some blackjack in each day and ended up losing about 7K on the trip. That felt like breaking even after my last four blackjack adventures in which I went through several fifty thousand dollar swings.

On the poker front, I've fallen behind with my SNE chase. As of today, I've earned 8,091 VPPS behind the 10,958 VPPS needed to keep pace. It hasn't been for lack of effort, I've pushed myself about as hard as possible the last four days. I've just been too sick to play. New Years days was spent playing 1 hour sessions followed by two hour naps. To exacerbate matters, I learned that my hand requirement on Ultimate Bet is 2000 hands per week and not 1000 as I originally thought. So, that's an extra 1000 hands a week I hadn't counted on. I did manage to fulfill the UB requirement this past week. I also finished the week 213 big bets to the plus side. I went through the worst losing streak of my career last month - about 550 big bets, so winning 200+ big bets in the last week has done a lot for my psyche.

I intended to comment some more on game selection since I've had some time to think about Rory's advice but I think I'll leave that for another post. Off to play some poker....