Pokerblog – 2006 February

Gold Coast Hotel and Casino located just off the Las Vegas Strip on Flamingo Avenue.

The Gold Coast Hotel and Casino was opened in 1985 by Michael Gaughan, son of Las Vegas legend, Jackie Gaughan. Michael already owned the successful Barbary Coast on the Las Vegas Strip when he correctly read the local market potential for Las Vegas neighborhood resorts even though his critics forecast failure for his off-strip Gold Coast project. Doubters even criticized the overall size of the casino, saying it was all wrong…far too big. The success of the property was overwhelming from day one when Gaughan realized there wasn’t enough parking to handle the traffic his project was drawing.

The Gold Coast Hotel and Casino is one of four Coast Casino properties recently acquired by Boyd Gaming in a deal with Coast Casinos’ owner, Michael Gaughan. Boyd Gaming is the world’s third largest casino company. The Boyd Group retained Michael Gaughan as president of Coast Casinos so little has changed in the overall atmosphere of the Gold Coast Hotel & Casino.

The Gold Coast opened with a number of firsts, the first Las Vegas casino to include movie theaters showing current releases. Another first was convention and special event space that attracted large crowds to the ‘locals’ casino. A modern 70 lane bowling alley was included in the design, another attraction for the Las Vegas locals market. Acceptance and success began on opening day with the players coming and liking what they saw, then returning again and again. The doubters were all proven wrong with the Gold Coast. Neighborhood casinos and resorts have become social centers for the locals area they serve. The continued success of the Gold Coast can be credited to many things being done right while providing patrons with a place that’s more than a casino, a neighborhood gathering point. Parking is much improved from the opening day with only surface parking through the addition of two parking garages.

The food has always been good and plentiful at the Gold Coast with 8 choices of restaurants of where to eat. A cup of gourmet coffee and a pastry can be had at Seattle’s Best, while the prime aged steak lover will find the Cortez more to their liking. The name “Cortez” for the upscale restaurant is a tribute to family patriarch, Jackie Gaughan, and his original downtown El Cortez Hotel and Casino. Pasta lovers will enjoy the selections offered in an elegant setting at the Arriva Italian restaurant. The hotel offers 711 guest rooms and suites, with all the amenities including high speed Internet. The property is within easy walking distance of other major resorts including the Rio, next door and the Palms across the street plus you can hike to the Vegas strip in minutes. A warning or an invitation for some is the walk to the strip is along side and very close to one of the busiest east-west traffic corriders plus you pass over the normally clogged I-15. A great short-hike for adrenalin junkies.

When the Gold Coast opened in 1985 it had a poker room located at the main entrance of the casino, right in the middle of the action. The room quickly established itself as the place to play for locals and tourist alike. Poker tournaments were always crowded with players and the summer tournament was a must attend with many of the pros playing. The room was closed with the opening of sister property, the Orleans. The players moved to the newer, more spacious Orleans poker room and poker was history at the Gold Coast…until Thanksgiving week in 2004. The Gold Coast Casino welcomed poker back to the property with the opening of an 8 table poker room on November 20, 2004. Robert Tagliaferri, room start-up specialist, was brought in from the Orleans to manage the room. Robert has more than a decade of poker operations experience and constantly strives to provide the casino poker player with the best playing experience in town. The room has developed a reputation of offering lower limit games with big limit ‘action.’ Limit Hold’em is offered with $2-$4, $4-$8, $6-$12 or $10-$20 blinds and No-limit Hold’em with $1-$2 blinds and one $100 buy-in. The poker room will spread most poker games including Stud and Omaha when requested if enough players are present.

Tournaments are handled by tournament director and shift supervisor, Jack Slatter. Jack came to Vegas in 1968, got involved in the poker industry and never left the business or Las Vegas. Jack keeps the Gold Coast poker experience everything the players expect in a Las Vegas poker room. His longevity in the business has provided Jack with some great stories of the way it was, when many of the legends played daily in the poker rooms around town. Gold Coast Poker Tournaments are offered daily at 10:00 AM with a $22 buy-in contest that plays limit Hold’em for the first hour then shifts to No-limit. The events are quite popular, regularly attracting 40-70 or more players, even at the early hour.

The Gold Coast Poker Room will be hosting satellites for the Heavyweight of Poker $100K buy-in Tournament. Complete details of the Heavyweight satellites are available by calling the poker room at 702.367.7111. Players can earn food comps while playing in the Gold Coast Room at the rate of $1.25 credit per hour of play up to $9 per 24 hour period, but you must have a player’s card so get one before you play. The comps can be used at any of the food outlets. A high hand promo pays out hundreds of dollars each day to players making certain hands. Additional promos are run throughout the year so check with the room for what they are currently offering.

I recently took part in the Poker Player Newspaper sponsored Beat the Pros Tournament at the Gold Coast and was impressed with the smooth four day event, a demonstration of the dedication of the Gold Coast to provide enjoyable, professionally managed poker events and cash games. Stop by the Gold Coast Poker Room for some of the best low to mid-limit ‘action’ games in Vegas.

Posted by flipchipro at 1:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting article from Rocky Mountain News.com about the impact Steve Lipscomb and his World Poker Tour TV show have had on the lowly sport of card playing, namely poker. I was especially interested in Lipscomb’s background in film making and his World Series of Poker TV documentary that defined the future of the sport. Adding money man, Lyle Berman, insured enough cash to float a start-up poker-as-a-sports league and Berman’s name recognition cemented deals for major casino/resorts signing on to host a franchised event. Modern innovation added to the success of the WPT with the miniature hole card cameras allowing viewers to see and play along with the pros. Every show was entertaining and eagerly awaited, a sport that featured a colorful cast of characters vying for millions in cash. Each show giving the millions of viewers a playing lesson in the fine art of tournament poker from the world’s most successful tournament players. Poker players, through the magic of television exposure, became superstars, household names, everyone’s hero.

One of the things in the article that caught my attention was a quote from Steve Lipscomb, “Professional poker players used to be the black sheep of the family…” This couldn’t have been more true for my family, gamblers from way back. Most of us have relatives, maybe an uncle or distant cousin, but some blood kin that spends time on the dark side of life, regularly playing poker for money. In my family poker players were numerous, played a serious game and consumed way more than their share of fine whiskey and branch water.

I’m from a large family in deep East Texas, the Ark-La-Tex region. Big time poker for money has always been a part of the local lore and has been a part of the family history. Some of the games from the old Texas Circuit were hosted by relatives. Many of poker’s legends came to town for these ‘local games’ that continued until someone had most of the money, like todays poker tournaments. Sometimes they were really playing for the whole farm.

I have an aunt that is the official keeper of the family history. She has provided reams of documents over the years, all carefully verified, catalogued and placed into chronological order following our bloodlines back hundreds of years. I was moving some of the binders yesterday and one of them fell open to a page from 1852. It was the minutes of a district court in Texas in 1852 and there in the middle of a long list of people charged with “card playing” was one of my relatives from a century and a half ago. The uncle was also charged with permitting the game. This one page allows me to document a history of cash poker players in my family going back 154 years.

Posted by flipchipro at 5:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 1978 WSOP Champion, Bobby Baldwin, and Donna, his wife of the last thirteen years announced they have decided to chop up the pot and go their separate ways. Bobby is the former CEO of Mirage Resorts, and now, he is the executive in charge of the most expensive building project ever undertaken by the private sector, MGM Mirage’s $7 billion CityCenter. Donna is a former model and was Miss Nevada 1984. She has appeared on numerous national magazine covers and commercials.

The Wynn Resort on the las Vegas Strip.

Steve Wynn announced on Thursday that Wynn Resorts Ltd. had a loss for the final quarter of just over $11 million and a just under $100 million loss for 2005. The first 8 months of operation for the Wynn Las Vegas Resort has some remarkable numbers, like averaging $274 per night for the 2,700 hotel rooms. Complete details for Chairman of teh Board Steve Wynn’s Thursday conference call are available in the Friday edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

I find it amazing that the huge $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas managed to open without incurring major losses. The bugs were worked out before the crowd was let into this most expensive Las Vegas Resort. It cost a lot of money to start up such a huge machine for the first time. The place will continue to move forward and into the black under the skilled hand of Steve Wynn. The following list is things the Wynn could have done to hold down cost of opening and operating such a huge joint.

8. Cutting the size of the $110 hamburger without cutting the price.

7. Valet parking runs exotic car chop shop on the side.

6. No goofy shows with puppets.

5. Raise the price of quarter slot machines to 29 cents.

4. No hot water after 10 PM.

3. Swimming pools double as catfish farms.

2. Only food comp is a half off coupon for the Circus Circus buffet.

1. Pay toilets!

Posted by flipchipro at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The poker industry took a giant step into the future with the recent Card Player, Player of the Year Awards. The poker Player of the Year Awards is the creation of Barry Shulman, Chairman of Card Player Magazine The gala was produced by Calvin Ayre, CEO of Bodog.com. The event is a glitzy Hollywood affair with many of poker’s superstars on hand to present and receive awards. Our highest praise for Barry Shulman. An innovative poker industry icon and an accomplished professional poker player, when he’s not busy redefining the image of the sport.

Men “Master” Nguyen walked away with the coveted best of show, the “Card Player, Player of the Year Award.” Congratulations to the Master, one of pokers most dedicated and feared professional players.

In some completely unrelated news from Las Vegas, I can now report that Las Vegas is probably the safest city in the whole Universe to party. Homeland Security has determined that our desert oasis city dedicated to raising the bar in overindulgence, promiscuity, wanton behavior and world class decadence, has no risk of being on any list of places that bad people prefer to see gone. The bad news side of this reclassification is Las Vegas no longer gets a share of the homeland budget doled out to cities deemed to have a high threat level. I understand this, why would anyone want to harm Las Vegas? We’re all equals here in the desert and we all speak one language. No one really cares to know where you’re from or what you believe. We’re all from somewhere different and we all believe something different; but, we are all in Las Vegas by the millions and millions every year just to party. Las Vegas has been the ultimate adult playground for decades, ever since Bugsy’s dream became a reality, sans Bugsy.

I’m really not bothered by this exclusion from the endangered city list, sure the money will be missed, but Nevadans have always been an independent bunch that takes security very seriously (ask Bugsy what can happen with second rate security). Las Vegas has always been on the cutting edge of security so come, party and play in the safest play ground to be found anywhere.

Posted by flipchipro at 5:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday at last, Friday at last, thank________(supply whatever deity you trust)Almighty, its Friday at last. Leave work early and jump in the car or on a plane to spend the weekend in the city of entertainment, Las Vegas. Invest a few coins, hit Mega Bucks for millions and never have to go back. Aren’t Fridays the greatest days for daydreaming? Maybe your dream is to come to Vegas and enter some of the daily poker tournaments, winning and building your bankroll, moving up, flush with cash for the big one at the Rio. Then winning ten WSOP bracelets before taking the final hand at the final table of the main event to win your eleventh bracelet. Only you can make the dream happen.

Dr. Pauly continues to live blog the LA Poker Classic Invitational from the Commerce Casino. Read the Doctor’s factual accounts of the exciting poker adventures of Wil Wheaton and Darwin. Wil is our favorite actor/blogger/tournament poker player, an all around triple threat man. The final table action begins tomorrow at 5:00 PM so be sure to stop by Tao of Poker.com’s online poker live reports from the keyboard of poker’s best contemporary writer and blogger, Dr. Pauly. He is providing quality photos of all the action with players caught in extreme high and low emotional moments. Trust Pauly to spice the live blog with some information you didn’t even know you needed to know. Click on over to Tao of Poker.com and enjoy the Pauly chronicles of the LA Poker Classic championship events and remember to be there at 5 for the live final, final table at Commerce.

Posted by flipchipro at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poker Update: Wil Wheaton is in Day 2 of the L.A. Poker Classic Invitational. Follow all the action on Tao of Poker. -Prof

Small planes towing banners across the Las Vegas sky is a sure sign of a major convention in town.

The MAGIC show is in town and it is keeping the joints full to the point of being crowded. Almost every hotel room in town is filled with some of the 100,000 + attendees here for the week long Men’s Apparel Guild in California fashion trade show. This is where all of the clothing people are gathered and showing their future lines. Thousands of apparel brands are represented with exhibitors pitching everything from very low end T’s right up to the one of a kind Designer pieces that requires a second mortgage if you care to purchase. Flocks of preening stars, starlets and a thousand pretty faces, all in town to hawk the stuff you will be buying and wearing later this year. Buyers by the tens of thousands are in town placing orders that will define the next look for the fashion industry. All of the clothing people are in town to do attend the biggest clothing wholesale show in the world, conduct some serious business, and have a great time. The last part about the good time includes playing poker in the Vegas poker rooms for many of the MAGIC attendees.

Unlike some of the big conventions that attract non-gambling techno types, these people love to have fun gambling. They come from all over the world for MAGIC, the biggest fashion show held in the world’s biggest party city. Poker Rooms are filled with players that only play the Vegas poker rooms twice a year. This well heeled dapper crowd appears to have an excess of dead money. They like to play at all levels so expect a longer list for most of the games, even the higher limit tables.

I worked the fashion biz for awhile and it included hours spent roaming around at the MAGIC show loaded with camera gear. It also included hours and hours of catalogue work in a studio…Boring. I much prefer to roam around poker tournaments loaded with camera gear recording unique moments to add to poker’s rich history. Poker players, at least the serious players, typically live close to the edge where excitement is always turned on and adrenalin highs combine with heart stopping lows for just another day at the job. Standing up and walking away from a table after a bust-out can be a real-time test of character at an emotionally extreme moment.

Got some time on your hands and you are looking for an excuse to come to Vegas? Then come for the MAGIC fashion show, and you won’t even have to go to the show, in fact, you can’t because it’s closed to the public. You’re really coming for the poker. Las Vegas has the best collection of poker rooms in the world and is currently crowded with some of the world’s best dressed novice poker players.

Posted by flipchipro at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Poker Prof’s only Las Vegas lifer, Richard, has weighed in on the current Las Vegas real estate market with some interesting thoughts and personal observations. Richard has watched Las Vegas grow from a small town built around around the gambling joints into the two million sprawl filling the Vegas valley today. Richard also provided the photos.

A new casino going up across from Sam’s Town? Nope, another Walmart Super Center.

The Las Vegas real estate market has gone completely insane; the price of land in the Las Vegas Valley has gone through the roof. A long skinny acre I sold six or seven years ago for $130K is now worth $300K and because of the shape and location, it’s still a miserable piece of land to try and build on.

The house I live in was built in the early 60s, towards the tail end of a major Las Vegas real estate boom, because of the slowing Las Vegas real estate market, the builder did things like covering the roof on the side of the house facing the street with the wooden shakes that were considered upscale at the time, and doing the back side with the less expensive wooden shingles, I’ve since had to replace the roof with conventional fiberglass shingles.

After I replaced the roof, this house was worth about $100K, in the last 3 years, it has increased in value to the point that I’m now being offered $220K for the same house in pretty much the same condition.

The house next door needed a new roof when it sold a few months back; they got $209k, and the realtor, who’s been in the Las Vegas real estate business for 20+ years, told me that the buyers didn’t care that it would cost them approximately $10K more to fix it. The couple that bought the house are from southern California and didn’t think the price was out of line, I guess, as long as the property in southern California is more expense than the property in Las Vegas, the people from there will keep moving this way and driving up the price of housing here.

I’ve lived in the Las Vegas Valley all my life and my house is going to be paid off in less than 2 years, at this point, I could care less what the Las Vegas real estate market does. The only thing I’m going to have to worry about are the new property taxes, at the rate the Las Vegas valley is growing, they’re going to have to raise property taxes for homeowners, throughout Clark County, in a big way.

Speaking of Las Vegas real estate, does anyone know how much Walmart paid for the property directly across the Boulder Highway from Sam’s Town? At one time there were plans to build a casino there, now they’re building a Walmart Super Store.

Posted by Richard at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Down to the final table six at the LA Poker Classic Championship at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. The final table will be played in front of the WPT cameras beginning at 5:00 PM today, Tuesday. Dr. Pauly continues to provide the best online poker live blogging experience of the LA Classic. Included among the six survivors of the record starting field of 693 players is JC Tran coming to the final table as the chip leader. The winner of the event will take home the $2.3 million first place prize along with a $25K seat to the WPT Championships at the Bellagio in April. Second place will also become a millionaire receiving just over $1.1 million. JC Tran has to be favored to win it all. Tune into the Tao of Poker.com at 5 PM today for the play-by-play of the LA Classic, all the table news that counts, plus a generous helping of the unique weirdness seen by our resident poker scribe, Dr. Pauly.

The 2006 WSOP will be June 25 through August 10 at the Rio Resort in Las Vegas. Forty-five events make up this year’s granddad of all poker tournaments. This is the one tournament that everyone that has ever played poker dreams of winning. The WSOP main event is the most coveted prize in all of poker, the Holy Grail of Hoyle. Winning one of the dozens of event gold championship bracelets is one of the primary lures that brings the world’s poker players to Las Vegas by the tens of thousands. Nothing can keep the dreamers, hopefuls, dead money, professionals and Saturday night specials away from the big show, not even the triple digit Vegas summer.

The main event is expected to seat eight thousand players that have contributed $10,000 to build an almost eighty million prize pool. The largest field ever seated for a poker tournament. The problems created by such large crowds were sometimes overwhelming during the 2005 WSOP; but, they have been addressed and hopefully, solved. Expect many more rest rooms, better quality and variety of foods close to the tournament area, three day events instead of two days so no more over niters, twice as many cashiers and more than double the number of registration clerks for shorter lines and faster service plus a few pleasant surprises. The 2006 World Series of Poker will break records, create millionaires, crown a new world champion, pay a poker tournament record size prize purse, and the entire show will be filmed for broadcast to the world. You can’t be a part of poker’s premier gathering, you won’t be one of poker’s newest millionaires, and you have no shot at becoming TV’s latest poker star if you’re not in Las Vegas. Better make your plans now if you want to be a part of poker history made at the 2006 WSOP.

I chatted with a player that had just driven up from LA late Monday afternoon and he said that the heavy traffic going southbound on I-15 from Las Vegas to LA was red-flagged by an accident that had created a line of stopped traffic stretching for twenty-five miles. It happens on the third day of every three day holiday weekend when the zillions of California cars make their way back to LA, always. One of the great Vegas driving experiences is being caught in one of these drives thru the gamma quadrant. It’s a real contradiction to be waiting in your car because the road is clogged with stopped cars as far as you can see in front and behind, then turning to look out at the stark emptiness of the Mojave Desert stretching on both sides to the horizon.

Miles of empty desert between LA and Las Vegas.

Posted by flipchipro at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember, go to Tao of Poker.com for the best poker live blogging from the Internet’s #1 poker blogger, Dr. Pauly, coming to you live from the LA Poker Classic at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. The action begins at 3:30 PM PST.

I played and cashed in the 7:00 PM NLHE tournament at Sam’s Town Saturday evening. The three day weekend crowd filled up the regular Sunday night event and they had a long alternate’s list. Most of the drop-in players are only too anxious to get their rebuy money into the pot so tonight’s action was unusually loose and never ending. Wait around for something to play and you were assured of getting a great pay off. This tournament is a daily offering at 7 PM and provides players with some great tournament poker experience against some quality tournament players and for not much money, only a very affordable $63 buyin and one $40 rebuy.

I noticed someone wearing a Matusow Full Tilt jersey at one of the cash games and for a moment I thought it was Mike, there was a strong resemblance but no Mike. It was Mike’s brother, Scott Matusow, playing in a limit hold’em cash game. I’m not sure if he is exceptionally lucky or perhaps poker skills are gene pool things, but Scott had accumulated most of the chips at the table. For a moment it definitely reminded me of the old days in the Sam’s Town room when a very young Mike would come in almost everyday around midnight and join an equally young group of players for a $3-$6 limit Omaha game. The geriatric room rocks would begin to whine at the sight of this bunch, because these were not your average 3-6 Omaha players and the game wasn’t typical either. Omaha is usually more chip rich and offers faster action than hold’em but this Omaha game was at another level altogether, “X-treme Omaha.”

Many nights the action would be so heavy that the table literally groaned under the weight of the chips. The players would be on their feet for most of the night yelling at everything…cards, dealers, players, even themselves. Mike could yell the loudest and more than once in an evening’s session he would be reminded to hold it down; but, throttling “the Mouth” has always been a formidable, if not impossible, undertaking. I kind of knew even back then that Mike was going to become one of the game’s greats, so I wasn’t surprised when he won a gold WSOP bracelet and then another. I’m also not surprised that Mike holds the record for most penalty minutes at one time when his mouth wouldn’t stay closed at the 2005 WSOP. Mike didn’t win a gold bracelet at the 2005 World Series but he did get sole possession of that penalty minutes record. He also won a million dollars at the 2005 main event final table.

I remember from those early days that Mike always had more fun than anyone else around. The young Mike Matusow was much more than the life of the party, he was the party. He was developing his winning persona way back then and all those times he was raising poker room hell for the fun of it in the low limit Omaha game at Sam’s Town, he was honing his poker playing abilities to a razor’s sharpness. He cashed out rack after rack of chips usually requiring more than one trip to move them to the cage. Mike’s talent quickly moved him up and away from the little Omaha games at Sam’s Town. Mike’s journey has certainly had its’ ups and downs but the 2005 WSOP Tournament of Champions victory at Caesars Palace last November will be remember as his greatest ‘up’ achievement, his come back proof. Mike outlasted a field comprised of poker’s A-list superstars including nemesis, Phil Hellmuth, and grandmaster Doyle Brunson to take the Champion of Champions title. I was there for that one and it was the poker show of the year with an all-star cast. Mike also won another million dollars.

The room at Sam’s Town tonight was quiet compared to those old days, even with one of the Matusow brothers playing in the room. Scott never got up and danced around the table crooning his full throttle opinions to everyone, nor did Scott do any vocal play-by-play of winning hands to his buddies, way over there in the sports book. Nope, tonight wasn’t even close, but it was enough to remind me of the fun of watching a young Mike Matusow grow poker wings and soar.

Posted by flipchipro at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)