I just got back from Las Vegas where I spent a couple of days in the glitzy city.
I had three main goals in Vegas:
- Go and see a magician
- Go and see Cirque du Soleil
- Do a little bit of gambling
I’m happy to say I accomplished all three. On the first day I was there, I went and saw Penn and Teller. That was actually a very good show, and afterwards I got to chat with Teller for aboot 3 minutes.
The next day, I saw Nathan Burton in the afternoon. He’s another Las Vegas magician. He’s good, but he does mostly large stage illusions with making girls vanish or squish into small boxes. It’s good, but I’ve seen it before. What I liked about Penn and Teller was that they didn’t do this type of magic.
That evening, I went and saw Mystere: Cirque du Soleil. Tickets for that was about $100. That was an incredible show, the performers there are amazing and can do things I couldn’t even begin to imagine doing. They must have to train forever.
Then there’s the part about gambling. Before going to Vegas, I decided that I wasn’t going to play against the casino in any games because I know it’s rigged against me over the long run. However, I walked by a game of poker and decided to get into the game.
I sat down and the buy-in was $100. "Yikes!" I thought. I was really, really uneasy about losing all of my money and decided I was going to bail out if I lost half of my cash. I sat down to a table of No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. An hour and a half later, I walked away with $214. Yes, that’s right, not only did I not lose money, I managed to double it. I originally had about $250, but I lost the next hand and decided that I was done and was going to walk away. I think that was the right move. My strategy was to only play strong hands and then bet aggressively when I was certain I was going to win.
The next day, before Cirque du Soleil, I decided to play some more poker. I sat down (in a different casino) to play Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, a different game in which the rules are the same but the betting strategy is much different. This time the results were much different. I sat down with $100 and walked away with $30. I played basically the same strategy as the previous day but things just didn’t go my way. I played the strong hands (like the day before), but the cards never fell my way. I tried bluffing twice but it didn’t work for me.
There was not any single catastrophic loss, instead, it was just a steady stream of bleeding. I was right to bail out of all the hands I stayed in early because had I stayed, I would have lost even more. It was kind of frustrating because close to when I left, another girl sat down and won her first hand because she hit the cards in the flop. I never once hit my flop.
Eventually, I said "Enough is enough." I knew how much I was going to walk away with, and $30 was my limit. Once I hit that, I knew I was finished and I was going to cut my losses. Clearly, my strategy in Limit Hold ‘Em needs some work. I saw one guy they night before burn through $200 in about an hour, I was not going to do the same.
But my poker winning percentage, lifetime, is still 60%. Not bad for only playing 5 times in my life.