East Coast Gambler

I know I’ll miss some things from my trip to Las Vegas last week so I’m compiling a list of quick hits so I don’t forget some of the minor details that may interest.

BNBLV - Awesome.  Beer and Blogs Las Vegas is a gathering over beer with bloggers, tech heads and nerds.  I met a bunch of people I follow on twitter and met some new faces.  I expected to be at the happy hour for 30-60 minutes and I was there for 4 hours.  Good times.  Nice to meet y’all!

Orleans – File under a place I no longer need to visit.  Very similar to Gold Coast, but slightly more depressing.  Low ceilings and smoke don’t help.  Unless I’m in the area (which I doubt) I don’t see myself visiting again.

Free Shuttles – Orleans has a shuttle to Bills on the strip.  This was a bus of drunks, but it saved another $20 (or so) cab ride.

Tourists – I don’t like them.  They move slowly and/or stop abruptly constantly being in the way.  The Las Vegas strip is full of these people and they ruin the experience.  I recommend walking on the CityCenter (west?) side of the strip if you need to get from one place to the other.  You can throw old people in here too.  Ludacris mirrors my thoughts here.

Strip walking – I haven’t walked the strip in a while, but I did twice last weekend.  The walks were great, but made worse by tourists and old people.  I did find one way to make the strip walk enjoyable.  Stop at each casino and either tweet or drink.  It breaks up the monotony.  Sure it took me about 30 minutes to get from Palazzo to Planet Hollywood, but at least I had fun.  That was better than my drunk strip walk the previous night from Bills to Palazzo.

Go-Go dancing in casinos – No longer cool or interesting.  This doesn’t work for all casinos.  Check Mandalay Bay and Excalibur for reference.

Lucky @ O’Sheas – Little man has great pipes.  He was outside of O’Sheas shouting out facebook and twitter offers with a deep booming voice.  He fit O’Sheas marketing image perfectly.

Flamingo – Low ceilings still give it an old feel, but it seemed as if there were a bunch of updates in the casino that gave the look a bit of a modern feel.  In my quick walk through it seemed as if the casino was caught between their history and being current.

Aria Tram - I don’t like heights.  The tram platform is bordered with glass which gives it an edgeless look.  It probably looks cool to many, but I don’t like this at all.  I don’t like heights and between the station shaking and the feeling like can fall off at any moment I won’t go up there again.  I’ll just walk.

Celebrity Sightings – One morning I saw Joan Rivers leaving the Palazzo.  That was awesome.  Later that night I was playing blackjack at Palazzo and saw Brad Garrett across the way.  He’s the brother in “Everybody Loves Raymond”

Palms, Hard Rock, Bellagio – All places I normally make it a priority to visit.  Since I was alone I decided to visit places that I don’t normally visit – for better and worse.

The rest of my trip will be delivered in separate posts with pictures.  These are items that are small and I didn’t want to leave out.

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Last week I realized that I didn’t write up all of my gambling in Las Vegas.  I’d like to touch on slots here.  Video Poker was good to me and Slots were ok.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with slot machines and I’m closer to love right now, probably in the “like” zone.  I guess I like the highs and lows as well as the time spent without thinking.  I will play anywhere from penny slots to $5 slots.  Last year I even threw away money in a $25 slot after hitting getting a royal flush in video poker.

I’m an early riser and instead of staying in my room I will head out and grab a cup of coffee and get my day started.  The day usually starts with low limit slots.  Along with coffee, the bright lights and loud noises give the day a kick start.

To go along with a wide selection of coffee, the Palazzo had plenty of slots from me to choose from.  The casino, itself, is on the small side but there were plenty of morning slots (low limits) for me to choose from.

Millionaire Sevens was one of the obnoxious games I played.  The bonus round sends you to a multiplier ladder.  This was a penny slot and I walked away up $40.  Not bad!  I’ve only seen this once before in Atlantic City.  It’s in a corner by the Harrah’s Poker Bar.  There’s only one and it’s always being played.

It seems that the new thing in penny slots are layover screens.  Basically, the bonuses are laid over a reel slot.  Bonuses come up often to entertain and slow the bleed of money.  The games I played allowed me to choose a theme.  If I didn’t get a bonus after a few spins I’d switch themes, hopefully changing the RNG.  All of the games are loud and fun.  Jackpot Party may be the most fun and (loud) annoying of all the penny slots.

Another of the interchangeable games was Red Hot 7′s.  This became another favorite.

Overall I was about even on the penny slots, never going above my $20 per machine limit.  They did the job for me.  I played a few other $1 slots at Palazzo.  All were losers.  However, my trip to Aria proved fruitful.  All of the slot machines were new and I found a new $1 Top Dollar slot machine.  Top Dollar is a favorite.  I won a couple hundred dollars and walked out of Aria with a smile.

Up next…Video Poker

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I was able to get a few more reviews from my trip to Las Vegas up.  I’m almost done!  I can’t believe that I didn’t get to gambling earlier.  That’s not my nature.  I think I was excited to use the pictures I took.  Here’s the week in review.

• Delaware Death Blow To AC, Legalizes Table Games
• Carne Vino Take 2
• MGM Mirage Selling Borgata; Leaving Atlantic City
• Thoughts on City Center
• Casa Di Amore

Happy to say that this is my first post from my new MacBook.  It’s going to take a little getting used to, but I love the way everything looks and works.  Here’s my favorite video of the week from ECG.

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CityCenter are the huge hunks of steel in the middle of the Las Vegas strip and owned by MGM-Mirage that has been under construction for the past few years.  There are multiple buildings as part of the city and there were multiple grand openings for these properties.  The final building to open was Aria, the casino and hotel, which opened while I was in Vegas.

I waited for everything to have their grand openings before exploring CityCenter.  I walked over from the Bellagio where I had a wonderful cigar and Grey Goose and soda at the Petrossian Lounge.  I was treated to some Christmas songs on piano while enjoying a Sunday night.  This is one of my favorite spots at Bellagio.

I hate crowds and I didn’t need to worry about that when I headed over to CityCenter.  After walking through the construction I finally landed in Crystals mall.  This is a beautiful building, but the lack of opened stores was kind of depressing.  If it wasn’t brand new it would have felt like a mall on its last legs and about to close.

I hope this isn’t an omen for Crystals.  It could just be the bad economy.  Right now, I don’t think the market needs more high end shopping.  Of course, this wasn’t the case when CityCenter was being planned.  Similarly, The Shoppes at Palazzo had a similar feeling but at least there are restaurants to bring people in.

From Crystals I headed into Aria.  One of the cool things about both Crystals and Aria was the modern style and clean lines with interesting shapes and certainly not boring.  Modern style only remains modern for so long and it will be interesting to see how Aria develops in the future.  From the monorail station I felt as if I was looking at a building from the movie Tron.  Below is a sweet water wall outside the main entrance.

The interior of the casino was very dark and the ceilings felt low, even though they weren’t.  My iPhone couldn’t grab any interesting pictures due to the darkness.  This is in contrast to how bright everything was on the outside.

Everything inside the casino was new.  All new versions of my favorite slot machines – including a version of Top Dollar which I’ve never seen before that paid me $200.  All of the slot machines were very bright and showed well in the dark setting.

There was one odd finding at Aria.  There was a lack of ticket cashing machines.  I walked around for a few minutes before I could find one.  I only saw one in the entire casino.  I’m sure there were more, but there was poor signage throughout CityCenter and this was just another example.

There were not many people playing table games.  If I recall correctly all blackjack games under $25 use a Continuous Shuffle Machine (CMS).  I don’t like CMS, but it’s better than 6/5.

After my tour I searched around and around for the monorail to go back to Bellagio.  Since signage was poor it took a few minutes, but I found my way.  The monorail let me off in an area of Bellagio that I’ve never seen.  If I didn’t know what I was looking for there was no way I’d ever wander from Bellagio to CityCenter.

Overall, I have mixed first impressions on CityCenter.  Everything looked very cool and very clean with some innovation that we’ll see in future casinos.  I like the modern feel to everything, but that feeling was subdued by how cold and empty Crystals and Aria felt.  I have the feeling that would have been even deeper if I’d gone into the other buildings.

CityCenter is still so new that I have to reserve judgement.  After all, I hated Wynn after one trip and my December trip changed my mind.  I’m curious to see how the property develops this year.  I’m looking forward to seeing the difference when I visit later this year.

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It was a relatively slow news week which was good because my week outside of ECG was a little busy.  The final installment of CityCenter, Aria, opens next week and I’m sure that will be most of the casino news as the year slowly comes to an end.

• Week 14 NFL Picks
• Follow Aria’s Opening Next Week
• Heisman Trophy Winner:  Who Ya Got?
• CityCenter Opens

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Two of my favorite Las Vegas blogs, Rate Vegas and Vegas Tripping, have teamed up to provide coverage of the grand opening of Aria when it opens next week at ariaopening.com.

Vegas Tripping has full details on what ariaopening will offer here.

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