In the fall of 2010, my friend and I embarked on a road trip to Las Vegas where we lived for a little while, with sports betting and playing poker as my only means of income. I've talked about it here and there on this blog a few times but I never really went into too much detail. As it gets further and further behind me, I think it would be a good idea to revisit that time in my life and have some sort of chronicle for it. So here goes. Certain names are changed and the exact dates are a little fuzzy, but everything in here is true.
Sometime in the fall of 2010, my friend "Mike" and I embarked on a journey from Massachusetts to Las Vegas, Nevada. Mike was my roommate at the time and could work remotely so while he wasn't involved in gambling, he came with me for the experience. We rented a U-Haul, filled it with as much of our stuff as possible and headed West. We took a Northern route and stopped in Detroit for a few nights. Our other friend was going to graduate school at the University of Michigan so we stayed with him. That was the year the Patriots played the Lions on Thanksgiving so we actually went to the game. (First digression here: for the rest of my life, I will never forget being in the stadium for that game. I have never seen a more defeated, depressed, beaten down fanbase in my entire life. The Lions are actually decent now, but for a looong time they were the absolute laughing stocks of the NFL. Terrible, year after year. And of course 2010 was smack dab in the middle of the New England Patriots Tom Brady dynasty, so it really was like a pro team facing a college team. The Patriots won 45-24 and it was one of those games that are over before halftime. The fans there were totally defeated, like nothing I've ever seen before. They weren't even really rooting for the Lions anymore. It was more like an exercise in sadism. I have a memory seared in my mind of multiple people respectfully shaking my hand as we left the stadium, congratulating ME on the Patriots winning, lol. They were in awe of not just an organization like the Patriots, but in some bizarre way, in awe of me and their fans just for being from New England! I'm telling you, it was borderline disturbing just how beaten down they were. Add in the fact that Ford Field is an oppressive feeling, indoor grey dome and Detroit was basically a third world country in 2010 and you get the idea. The only other worse stadium I've ever been to was Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay Florida for a Red Sox vs Devil Rays game. But the fans in Detroit were nothing like I had ever seen.) The game itself was a snoozer, I remember actually falling asleep in my seat once.
My friend lived in the suburbs of Detroit and one night while we were there we took a ride into the city to go to the Motor City Casino (I think that was the one. It was the main casino in Detroit). I remember seeing multiple burned out and abandoned cars on the side of the road on the highway and tons of dilapidated, empty houses. This was a couple years removed from the 2008 crisis and Detroit was hit especially hard. It was surreal seeing an entire city, completely beaten down and kind of accepting it, up close and personal. (Another Detroit fun fact; there is a big concentration of Muslim people in Michigan for some reason. And they used to do the weirdest thing when walking around the city. They'd be walking normally and without warning, break out into a sprint for like 2 or 3 seconds and then go back to walking normally again. I swear I saw that at least 5 times.) My experience at the casino wasn't noteworthy, I think I played $2/5 NL for a few hours.
We left Michigan after a few nights and headed South West towards our ending point. That drive from Michigan to Nevada was one of the coolest things I've ever done. Driving through the Rockies is truly awe-inspiring. The complete marvels of engineering, the tunnels that go right through gigantic mountains like open mouths in a massive mountain face, the long, windy, SUPER hilly roads. Bizarre billboards in the middle of nowhere. Images I'll never forget. We actually took advantage of it pretty good and managed to ski the Rockies one day. We are both decent skiers and rented everything for a day on the slopes. Let me tell you, West Coast skiing is A LOT different than East Coast. For one, the runs are LONG. You get halfway down and it feels like you did three runs. Also, the thin air is absolutely real and makes it so much harder to catch your breath. Plus with the powder instead of the typical east Coast corduroy/icy conditions, you have to work much harder. We were both gassed out early. It also didn't help that we did a very mogul-y double black diamond run early on by mistake trying to get a good picture. I think we only did something like 5 runs that day total. It was a great experience and a great story, but it was not a great day of skiing.
Anyway, we arrived at our apartment in Henderson a week or so after we left MA and settled in. Now, it's important to note here where I was in my sports betting and poker career at this point. I was incredibly naive and was not nearly as good at poker or sports betting as I thought I was. I wasn't even keeping track of my results at this point! One of my regrets with the whole thing was that I made that move way too early. I was obsessed with being a pro gambler back then and moving to Las Vegas just seemed like the thing to do. Plus I was single, winter was coming and our lease was up so the timing seemed perfect. I didn't really have a goal in mind or a set plan. It was just get there, play poker, bet on sports and see what happens.
So once we settled in, I checked out the strip and various poker rooms and games until I found the first of a couple different games that I would play regularly. My first room that I played in regularly was the Venetian $8/16 limit game. That was a good game and place to get my feet wet. It was a super soft and fun game where I met some interesting characters. One was "The Ice-Man," Teddy Monroe. He was a huge black guy who was featured on the World Series of Poker a couple times and was semi-famous in the poker world. He had these ridiculous bedazzled headphones that said "Ice-Man" on them and a little "I'm gonna freeze 'em" catch phrase and was just wicked recognizable. He was a good guy too and fun to play with. (Side note: from what I remember he was pretty bad. I kind of couldn't believe he was a pro and I doubt he was actually making a living playing poker. At one point he tried to get into pick-selling (of course) and I remember him talking to some guy at the table about it. His whole entire shpiel was that they were only going to release one play a day. "If you only bet one game a day you will win. People only lose because they bet too much" I remember him saying). These are the people who sells picks. Don't buy picks.
Another guy I met in that game was a super outgoing kid a little older than me who went by the nickname "Tuna". He befriended me and we ended up being close friends for my entire time out there. He did the same thing as me, moved from New England to Las Vegas a few years earlier to play poker. It was great meeting a local guy like him who was super connected in the scene as he showed me around all over the place and introduced me to all kinds of people. We haven't spoken in a long time but I'll always be grateful to Tuna.
We both did good at the $8/16 game and eventually moved to the Bellagio where we set up shop at their $15/30 and $30/60 games. I was actually there when the Bellagio famously went from the 15/30 and 30/60 games they were running for decades to 10/20 and 20/40. The Bellagio became my 'home casino' and I was there at least 4 or 5 days a week. I absolutely loved the Bellagio and their poker room. They famously had "Doyles room" in the middle of the poker room where all the big time poker pros that you might know from the heyday of TV poker played nosebleed stakes. It was one table enclosed in glass that was usually empty, but when they would play you would have people all over the place trying to take pictures. I saw Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Antonio, Phil Laak, Tom Dwan, plus many others all playing poker with probably millions of dollars on the table, just feet away from me. Pretty cool for a 20 something year old aspiring poker pro.
Tuna was well connected and knew how to schmooze and what buttons to press to get things done in Las Vegas. I remember one night we took a break from playing and got comps for the buffet (he played a level higher than me so he always got amazing comps). If you don't know, buffets in Las Vegas are not what you might picture when you picture a buffet. They're more like a fever dream of fancy and awesome food that people happily wait for hours in line for. The line for it literally looked like a roller coaster line, circling back on itself. And here we come, two 20 something year olds in sweatpants, cutting to the front of the line and being let in on comps only. Pretty sick. I remember getting lots of curious looks. We also developed a nice little system of getting some of the best food I can ever remember eating delivered to us at the poker tables and eating like kings while we played. One underrated aspect of Las Vegas is the food. You might be surprised since it's landlocked and kind of in the middle of the desert, but I had some of the best sushi in my life out there.
We had an awesome little smoking spot for breaks during our sessions at the top of the Bellagio parking garage. It was really hidden and you could see the entire city from there. The views at night were as unforgettable as our little smoking sessions, talking about poker hands and life with thousands of dollars in chips waiting for us back at our tables. Tuna and I also went to the Spearmint Rhino one night which is like one of the most famous strip clubs in the country. I guess if you're a strip club guy it was pretty cool. Massive place with multiple floors. I remember I couldn't wait to leave though. I'm not a strip club guy and it just felt awkward to me. I can't get over paying money for a woman's attention and I usually end up in long serious talks with the strippers, lol. That was one of my "this is all kind of fake bullshit" moments too, leaving that club. Everyone was talking about awesome it was and I couldn't help but think they were faking it for their own sake. I guess I kind of felt like an outsider among outsiders.
Overall, my experience playing poker in Las Vegas was OK. Nothing crazy, to be honest. I realized after a couple months that I really wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was and even though I was still beating the games, I could tell that the guys who were REALLY doing it were at a different level than me. I surmised that I could probably beat games up to about $20/40 limit and $2/5 NL, but the next level up was beyond my reach at that point. I took some shots at $40/80 and $5/10 NL but I always felt very out of place and overmatched. To be honest, my dream of becoming a pro poker player was snuffed out fairly early in my journey. I didn't start really reading and becoming a better poker player until I left Las Vegas and played in the $20/40 game at Foxwoods regularly. I remember back then I was still cold-calling a lot of hands pre-flop, which if you know anything about limit poker, you know that that is basically the surest sign that someone is a fish. When I think about it, it's actually pretty incredible that I even thought I could beat mid stakes games back then. Like I've said before, the worst things to not know are the things you don't know that you don't know.
One quick poker story. I took the single worst bad beat in my life out there (at a non bad beat bonus table of course). I forget the action exactly but it was $2/5 NL and I had pocket 6's and saw a flop of q66 in a heads up pot. So I flopped quads. There was some betting and we a turn 9. More betting and river 9. And the guy gets all excited and jams all in and I swear on my life, I actually thought about it. I knew in my guts that he had quad nines but there was no way I could fold four of a kind. So I called and he rolls over 99 for runner runner quads to beat my quads. People were running over taking pictures. It was early in the session and I remember just picking up and leaving. There was no coming back from that.
Another funny quick little poker story. Same room, the Venetian, playing $2/5 NL. There was a younger kid in the game who had been talking a lot and trying to be the table bully. He really wasn't crossing the line but was coming close to it. He gets into a hand with the table fish, a guy very clearly on vacation and new to poker. On the turn in a big pot, the young kid bets into the tourist and the tourist is thinking. The young kid starts talking, running his mouth a little bit. The tourist is just sitting there kind of blankly looking at him and the young kid says something like "If you raise I fold. I swear to god I fold". An older guy at the table who had been semi going at it with the young kid all session very quietly calls the floor over. The action between the young kid and the tourist was getting all the attention as they were still going back and forth talking and I think I was the only one who noticed this other guy call the floor over. The floor comes over and the older guy asks him, still very quiet "is saying 'I will fold if you raise' binding?" And the floor guys says "yes." Now everyone hears him, even the tourist. The tourist guy finally min raises and the floor declares the young kids hand dead! He had turned the nut straight and the tourist was drawing dead. Now the young kid goes apoplectic. He berates the floor guy and especially the older guy for not being involved in the hand and calling the floor over, so much that he gets ejected. As he's getting ejected, he tears into the older guy who called the floor. Keeps saying "You were a loser in high school! You had no friends, I can tell!" among tons of other stuff. Really laced into this guy. He FINALLY leaves and once everything settles down, the older guy says to the table "by the way, I was on the basketball team in high school. So I had PLENTY of friends" lol. Such a cheese dick thing to say.
I was a poker player first and sports bettor second in those days, but I think a few months into my time in Las Vegas was when that switch sort of got flipped for me officially. I think I intuitively figured out that my ceiling was fairly low for playing poker as a career so I moved onto sports betting more heavily. The first thing I tried to do was to beat props which I had been doing for a couple years back in MA at this point. And man, I just could not figure out a way to make it work. My process normally is that I'll have whatever model I'm using up at the same time as the multitude of accounts I have. I go bet by bet, guy by guy, making bets as I use the model. So if I'm pricing, say, Brad Marchands shots on goal for the night, I'll use my model and come up with a total expected shots for Marchard. Then I look at the lines and see if my model is suggesting a bet. If it is, I will usually find the best possible number and bet it. However, often times it's close and I might look over his stats and the matchup more closely, and something like his ice time over the past 5 games or the opponents recent few games. Maybe they're on a back to back? It isn't always as easy as betting when the model says to. There are plenty of times when the model shows a big edge, sometimes too big, and I'll have to dig in and usually find something that explains the difference (opposing player or linemate is out or something like that). Once that's done, I erase all the inputs for Marchard and do the next guy, leaving all the game stats up on my model until I move on to the next game. But now in Las Vegas, I had to do my prop work first without even knowing which bets will be offered. So I'd make a little piece of paper with my projections on it and then head down to the strip. I'd go from book to book asking for their prop sheets and half the time they wouldn't even know what I was talking about. Other times I'd get handed a sheet with something like 10 props on it, all super standard game props that was old and usually had the wrong odds listed and usually had like 60 cents of juice. So the vast majority of the time I would do hours of work and not get a single bet out of it.
I tried out casino after casino. No one really regularly put up prop markets that I could find, and even those that did would be copied from The Greek or some other offshore book with extra juice. The only exception was big Sunday night and Monday night NFL games and I did manage to get in pretty good on some props in those games. The Super Bowl was an absolute feeding frenzy and I eventually found a casino way off strip called "The M" that would offer props every week, but I found out pretty quickly that I was not going to be making any serious money betting props in Las Vegas. I tried to adapt to just finding off-market straight bets and one thing I did moderately successfully was find these rinky-dink off strip casinos called "Stations Casinos." They were almost like the PPH's of Las Vegas. They were not on the strip and didn't have the glitz and glam of a regular casino. I think they were kind of marketed towards Las Vegas locals which is kind of a weird thought when you think about it. But even that was difficult. I found an online odds checker site that would list the odds from different sports books in Las Vegas and I would find these Stations Casinos would have a lot of college basketball stuff that would be a couple points off market. So I'd write down the Pinnacle lines and head out to one of these places. By the time I got there usually the lines would change against me or the odds checker was wrong so I'd have like 3 or 4 bets total. And even THEN, they would try to cheat me. I think I told this story on here before, but one time I went in and there was like 10 or so good looking college basketball bets. So I'm at the counter with my little sheet putting my bets in with a guy and I see another boss looking guy off to the side clearly listening to us. The process was I would ask him for his line on a certain game and then tell him what I wanted to bet. After I got a couple in, suddenly the ones I would ask for would magically change away from me, that instant. The guy who was eavesdropping had walked over to a computer and I'm 99% sure was listening to me ask for a game and then updating the odds before I could bet. So after a few months of this it dawned on me; what was the point of this, exactly? I had access to more and better sports books online. I wasn't good enough to make a real living playing poker and even if I was, there was plenty of poker to be found back home. So what was I doing out here, really?
I knew fairly early on that I wasn't going to make LV my new home. Even besides the sports and poker stuff, socially it kind of sucked too. Thank GOD I met Tuna and his friends, I can't imagine how awful it would have been if I hadn't. We had some fun nights out bar hopping and played a few rounds of golf at some unreal courses. But even with his group of friends, I would slowly realize eventually that they barely knew each other. See, no one, and I really do mean no one, is actually from Las Vegas. They were all transplants like me. So there were no roots at all. No childhood friends, no connecting stories, it was more like a collection of random people who, in my eyes anyway, sure acted like they were better friends than they really were. I think that may be a bit of a west coast thing; aloofness, little bit fake? One time a new kid Tuna and I had met playing poker started hanging out with us away from the tables for a month or two. He was more Tunas friend. One day he was just gone. Come to find out, he "bought" a really nice set of golf clubs from Tuna a couple days before but hadn't paid him yet. So of course no one hears from him ever again and he makes out with new clubs. And Tuna wasn't even THAT shocked or pissed off. That's just an example of how transient and weird things were. Flimsy, almost like you could put your hand right through the whole state.
One really cool thing I did out there was road trip to Hollywood. An old friend of mine who was an aspiring actor was out in LA/Hollywood for a few days doing something and I decided to make the drive from Las Vegas to LA to hang out with him. That was another drive I'll never forget. Up, over, around and through mountains, desert and even snow going by the windows. 80 MPH speed limits. I'm glad I got to see LA and especially Venice Beach before it turned into the open air drug marketplace and homeless encampment that it is today. We had dinner at this cool, really tall building in LA that had a big lazy-susan at the top with 360 degree windows for walls, and it slowly rotated. So you could see literally all of LA from your seat while you ate.
Another fun thing we did was I had two of my friends from college come visit us for a few nights. We rented guns and a shitload of ammo and took em out to the desert and had a blast shooting cans and cactuses (cacti?). By the way, you know that weird "PACH-UUUUuuuu" high pitch sound that guns sometimes make in movies? They really do sound like that when you shoot outside. We'd throw cans in the air and try to shoot them on the way down. Super fun.
Another fun trip I took while in Las Vegas was to New Orleans during Mardi Gras with the same friend who we visited in Detroit. Mardi Gras was exactly what you'd expect. Dirty, hazy, booze filled and tons and tons of boobs. Not all of them were ones you wanted to see, either. It was interesting how beads literally became currency during Mardi Gras. Women really wanted them and it was sort of a badge of pride for a woman to have a shitload of beads around her neck walking around. I think every young single man should do Mardi Gras once in their life, but exactly once. I would never go back there. It's a pretty gross city to be honest. Mind you, this was not that far removed from Hurricane Katrina and one day it rained pretty heavily for a couple hours. And basically the whole city flooded and shut down. They had no drainage. I also got an alligator sub which took over an hour to get and was absolutely terrible.
All in all, Las Vegas and all the mini trips were a terrific experience and I wouldn't change it for the world, but I do have some regrets. Namely, that I went way too early and without a real plan. I thought that because I could beat small/mid stakes home games and was crushing super soft PPH accounts that all that would transfer over and I could win at poker and sports in Las Vegas. Like I said, I wasn't even keeping track of my results back then. So it really was incredibly naïve of me to think I could do it forever. I wish I had taken it either more seriously or less seriously. I should have either really taken it serious and done more studying and improved upon my skills, or less serious and looked at it for what it really was; an adventure. I really don't have a good reason for why I didn't buckle down and try to at least get better at poker, which I did do a couple years later back in Mass. Also, for life of me, I cannot explain why we didn't take more advantage of the incredible roads and wide open landscape in Nevada. We could have rented motorcycles or dirt bikes or cool cars and had a sick couple days exploring the sand dunes and wide open roads, and/or check out Lake Mead in some capacity. Ultimately and surprisingly, I ended up kind of getting homesick and was looking forward to leaving within a few months of getting there. I never really met any girls there too which added to the homesick/lonely vibe that was building slowly.
When our lease was up, we sold all that we could to Tuna and packed everything else up and started the journey home. We took the Southern route and went through Texas and St. Louis and then up through New Jersey/NY. We saw the Grand Canyon at one point too, which was cool.
So there you have it. I did warn you, it wasn't anything spectacular. When I got home, I focused more on my career thinking that my gambling days were largely behind me. But that was not the case actually, as the 6ish years after I got back to Mass were the absolute top of my betting career. I need lots of new (and soft) accounts to do what I do successfully and other than the adventure angle, there really wasn't a good reason for moving to Las Vegas in the first place. But if I hadn't gone I know I would have thought "what if..." for the rest of my life. I'm very glad that I went and saw for myself that even if I did manage to find a way to make it all work, it wasn't what I wanted.
I've been on fire lately with the posts, huh? Check back soon as I have an idea for a close look at the BTC ETF'S and exactly how much BTC they're buying. I might do another inside look at a different model because the last one was fun. This seems like a good place to mention, by the way, that I am not selling anything on here. I don't even have ads. I ask nothing of you, dear reader, except for your attention. Remember to follow @POOGSblog on X for updates or just bookmark me and check at least once a week. Bye for now!
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