By SirWatts on May 30th, 2008 (more posts by author)

Hey gang, welcome back. I arrived in Vegas today and got to our house for the summer with no problems. I'm living with a bunch of different people this year: Serge (Adanthar), Tony (Bond), Celina (Bondgirl), Tom (LearnedFromTV), Nath, and Kyle (grafyx). We have a pretty nice house rented off the strip. Whoever designed the layout for this thing really butchered it, the main area of the house is one huge open room which is kind of weird. I usually like a nice open space but they took it too far. Also, the big TV kind of sucks it's a bit flickery. Nonetheless there is lots of space and it should have everything we really need including an outdoor pool. Yes, the pool really is a necessity.

I went down to the Rio today to check out the new set up and see if my money had arrived. I had read a few reports that they had made a lot of improvements this year and it looks like that's definitely the case. They have a separate room dedicated to satellites with its own cage, as well as a separate room for tournament registration which should hopefully help eliminate much of the congestion that was present last year. There's also a few more food options, most interesting to me is the new Sushi & Noodles place. It was open today so I tried it out and was pretty happy with it. It's All-You-Can-Eat, just noodles is ~$20ish and just sushi is ~$29. For a combination of both menus it's $38. I just had the sushi and was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the fish. It's certainly nothing amazing by any means, but it was pretty good and definitely exceeded my expectations for a small little place like it is, so I'd definitely recommend it to people looking for a relatively quick delicious meal near the poker room (it may not be quite so quick during the Series when you're not the only person in the room, but the simple all you can eat format is clearly designed to make your options simple and get people in-and-out). They have all the usual basic sushi options; salmon, tuna, shrimp, crab, eel, mackerel, yellowtail, nigiri and sashimi, as well as various rolls.

So while that was very good, it was the high point of my trip to the Rio as once again my wire transfer had not yet arrived. You'd think I'd have learned from last year, and I intended to send it much earlier this year, but I also had to send a lot more this year and it took me a little extra time ot get that money wired to my bank account after returning from Europe as I was waiting to get my MoneyBookers account set up properly. So I've repeated my mistake and will probably end up skipping the 10K PLHE event tomorrow, which isn't the end of the world since it figures to be a relatively tough event, though I would have liked to play. I'm still definitely planning to play the $1500 event on Saturday which will be no problem to borrow money for if need be. Oh yeah if by any chance someone in Vegas reads this and has 10K they can lend me for tomorrow's event that would be awesome, please get a hold of me. After that I'll basically be playing the NLHE events almost every day plus some PLO, and who knows what else. I do plan to skip some of the $1500 NLHE events later in the series though to try to avoid the burnout that hit me by the of the series last year. So wish me luck, hopefully I can do better than last year and come home with some jewelry and a bunch of money.

Edit: Looks like I found money and will be playing tomorrow. GL me!

Mike