Lifestyle of the serious high stakes gamblers in Las Vegas...
THE ULTIMATE UPSIDE! Just for a change let’s take a walk down poker’s fantasy boulevard and see what just might happen to you if you turn out to be one of the world’s truly elite poker players. I’ve just recently returned from Las Vegas and was lucky enough to have extraordinary access to some of the hotel suites reserved entirely for the very rich or very famous. I even got to play an extremely tense evening of Texas Hold’em in one of them. At $40,000 per night (Yes. That’s forty thousand.) You can hire the Hugh Hefner penthouse suite at the Palms where your strip pool runs the length of the triple height glass wall overlooking the legendary Strip. As you swim admiring the view, largely of the world’s biggest air conditioning extractors, a waitress will serve you champagne in a whirlpool which runs from a tributary off the main strip pool. The giant circular bed rotates so that you can sit up in it reading “Sklansky’s Game Theory” and occasionally take in a 360 degree view of the whole of Las Vegas. This includes distant mountains, other giant glass towers and more air conditioning extractors. So who hires these kinds of suites? Visiting rock stars? Not likely, although they do go for the DJ suite which is only $15,000 a night and provides you with a complete set of turntables and a speaker system throughout your eight thousand square feet glass apartment which would have even Snoop Dog barking in ecstasy. The truth, as I was to discover, is that these other wordly palaces are much more likely to be occupied by serious gamblers of Oriental persuasion. The game I was involved in took place in a $5,000 a night suite with its own bowling alley. The real high rollers refer to this kind of accommodation as being available for poker’s “homeless”. In other words the ones who are always getting slaughtered on the felt.
HOW DID I DO? Well considering my third hand saw my pocket rockets cracked by trip Nines the evening didn’t get off to a good start and the “homeless” tag was beginning to look realistic. However, despite a complete inability to control every physical tick and tell in the book during such high flown company, the poker gods smiled down on me and two straights and a decent flush dominated my evening bringing me out with just about enough to afford maybe five hours in the suite my Chinese host was occupying. While I think of it (gospel truth) the bed in the DJ suite actually jigs and dances to the beat of whatever music you are playing. Phone the Palms and ask them but don’t reverse the charges or you’ll blow your high roller cover and the chance of a freebie.
POKER TIP OF THE DAY If you seriously want to play well in big games there is no better practice than hours of online play. There’s no other environment where you can play so many games in swift succession. That’s what hones your game. Pressure practice is everything. It’s a long hard road to High Roller Boulevard.
