For those of you heading out to the WSOP, here are three other survival tips you might not otherwise think of. (If you have others, chime in):
Think Layers: Thousands of body heat-generating players come together each day to test their poker skills at the WSOP. To compensate for the pending crowd, the venue is super-cooled before each day’s play. As a result, there can be large temperature swings over the course of an event. A T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt and hoodie should be part of your daily clothing repertoire.
Go Smokeless: During event breaks, smokers have to coin-flip between a bathroom visit and a nicotine fix. Instead of opting for adult diapers, consider smokeless nicotine solutions like the patch or snus. Both offer an even distribution of nicotine over time, making sure you stay focused on your hand and not your nicotine Jones. Check out Dr. Snus for everything you need to know about this smoke-free tobacco alternative.
Find Your Ten-Pin Zen: Poker is a solitary endeavor. Bowling with friends is a near perfect yin to poker’s isolating yang. In close proximity to the Rio, both The Orleans and the Gold Coast have ample and cheaply priced lanes. And if you have a hankering for something on the campier side, consider a trip downtown to the newly opened Drink and Drag. The club has 12 lanes and is staffed by “America’s best drag queens.”
Friends don’t let friends blog and drive … but sometimes you can get a lot of good content at a red light or while in heavy traffic.
Those who’ve read Lost Vegas may recognize the “Redneck Riviera” off to the left … westbound on Trop a few lights away from the Strip. Pauly called this fortress of blight and putridity home for two months during the 2005 WSOP. It’s also near where I began tailing this fine imported automobile with a driver clearly driven by poker:
click to zoom in.
I wanted to follow close enough to grab a shot of the plate with the school bus rolling past the Adult Superstore — caption contest maybe? — but traffic sped up and I missed the shot … and before the Clark County school kids would pass the next porn outlet, Pocket 8s+Broadway would turn into the Orleans … leaving many to wonder about the role of education poker in bridging the rich-poor gap as seen in Las Vegas neighborhoods surrounding the Rio.
Is that what they’re called now? Kindle, like stuff you burn? I’ve never read more than a chapter of a “virtual book” before. Maybe one of these days Pauly will figure out how to hawk an audiobook version of his tale of a wayward poker media making the annual desert pilgrimage for poker’s version of the Hajj.
Until then, coming very soon, like in less than a week, your second favorite Tao of Pokerati podcaster is going all iPad prior to going iPod:
If you still want an old-fashioned paper version of the most read and most talked about book of the 2010 WSOP, go here.
Forget the dated slogan of “What happens in Vegas …” Sin City is an industry as much as it is a way of life for many. And I think certain oldtimers have been waiting for these untold tales since before Dr. Pauly started surfing RGP. A must-read for Oscar Goodman, Carrot Top, and degenerate dregs of humanity alike. Many Vegas pilgrims already know the character behind the copy … and I hear great things about at least one of his minor antagonists.
(I sometimes forget I actually call this place home now, despite Pauly’s warnings not to descend through the gates any more than I had to.)
Las Vegas lures you to shed moral responsibility and piss away your money on indulgences like decadent food, entertainment, gambling, and sex. If you don’t enjoy these pastimes, then what’s the point of visiting the land of compromised values? Where else can you get a cheap steak, crash a Mexican wedding, get cold-decked in blackjack by a dealer named Dong, play video poker for thirteen straight hours, drink piña coladas out of a plastic coconut, bum a cigarette from an 85-year-old woman with an oxygen tank, speed away to the Spearmint Rhino in a free limo, get rubbed by a former Miss Teen USA, puke in the back of a cab driven by a retired Navy SEAL, snort cheap cocaine in the bathroom at O’Sheas, and then catch a lucky card on the river to crack pocket aces and win a poker tournament? Only in Las Vegas.
In 2005, veteran poker blogger and author of “Lost Vegas: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, and the World Series of Poker” put together his “Top Ten Survival Tips on Surviving Las Vegas.” Dr. Pauly’s sage advice, which ranges from hydrating to the proper tip for a stripper, stands the test of time.
