So you are coming to Las Vegas for a weekend and want to play some poker? With all the new and old card rooms—where should you play? This is part one of a series which will take a look at what is actually going on at each and every one of the poker rooms on the Las Vegas Strip on a typical Friday night. For our first "Friday Night on the Strip" I started at the southern most end of the Las Vegas Boulevard where I began injecting, inspecting, detecting and rejecting the card rooms at: Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, and Tropicana. Here is what the action and inaction looked like in these four poker rooms on a recent Friday Nite. Mandalay Bay I began and finished my evening at Mandalay Bay. You

gotta park the car somewhere, and with the tram from Mandalay to Luxor and on to Excalibur and then an over-the-Strip walkway to Tropicana, I was not going to get a lot of exercise between casinos tonight. Mandalay Bay has a ten table room which at 7:30 had nine tables in action. Like nearly all of the small and medium size rooms in Las Vegas these days, the action was 'all Hold'em all the time.' Limit and No-Limit, of course, and all of the tables were low-limit, nothing over $4/$8. Also like most of the rooms on the weekend, the tables are filled with players staying at the property. At Mandalay Bay about 70% of the players were staying on site, another 20% were staying at nearby properties and less than 10% were locals who consider this room to be their own private fishing hole. This split of players is fairly typical of many rooms. This means that some players at nearly every table know each other and are in Las Vegas to enjoy themselves. On this night I played three different tables at Mandalay Bay and played with two couples from Chicago and an entire family of four from Atlanta. A bit surprisingly, the action was actually a lot tougher after midnight when usually the alcohol factor has set in. The room was full by 11 PM and the wait for a seat got as long as 30 minutes by midnight. Luxor Just a short tram ride or a moving sidewalk away is the Luxor poker room, but these two rooms (Mandalay & Luxor) are nothing alike. Again, it's all Hold'em at the Luxor but they spread an interesting No-Limit game. The buy-in in $50 maximum with $1/$1/$2 blinds. Basically, this is a no fold'em Hold'em no-limit game and there were plenty of tables going on Friday night. You can only rebuy if you go bust, so any short stacks are pushing with borderline hands to either get back in the game or rebuy back to $50. These are very loose games, which make the room a lot of fun to play if you like loose and loose-aggressive games. No-limit with a low buy-in is a strange concept to get used to and many of the players never do. I walked the room around 11 PM and found only one player at any of the no-limit tables with a stack larger than $200. There was also a lot of table talk at the Luxor tables, about poker, about politics, about sex: "The Luxor ['working girls'] have better bodies than those at MGM." I am only quoting here, I have no evidence to offer a personal opinion. Excalibur Next it was on to Excalibur. The first thing you will notice at Excalibur is a lot more local players. The old room here was a local favorite for many years and the property still draws a fair number of locals. One reason is the $2/$6 spread limit game. There is a real added skill in having the option to "make it six" anytime. Also the room at the Excalibur seems to have a faster turnover; a fair number of players are sitting down for short sessions and the turnover makes for less reads and more cards-only play. On most nights at the Excalibur the games are a bit more conservative than at the more tourist oriented rooms, so if your game is tight and right, this may be the room for you. Tropicana Many rooms have become all Hold'em; the Tropicana has become all no-limit Hold'em. The only game dealt in the six table Trop room is $1/$2 no-limit Hold'em. Rumors are that the big face-lift in store for the Tropicana casino will include a new poker room but until then this is a small and quiet room with generally only one or two tables in action and several long-time players who make a living in this tropical pond. If you need no-limit lessons, you can get them here but you will pay.

Since the dawn of the online poker age, no online poker room has launched to more fanfare than Mansion Poker. The company has pulled out all the stops to get players attention, and add value to their bankrolls. The company has a weekly television show in the U.S., broadcast from its own state of the art TV poker facility – the Poker Dome. Now, the company has taken its 'add to player value' philosophy to a new level. Between December 4th, and January 1st, Mansion is adding $250,000 to the prize pools of tournaments. This isn't $50 added to a bunch of different tournaments, either, this is at least $5,000 added to one tournament each day, every day until the first day of the new year. There are

no 'catches' to this promotion – anyone can enter the tournaments, and the added money is there for the taking. Mansion will add $5,000 to its 7:00pm (U.S. Pacific Time) $50+5 buy in tournament on December 4th, and won't look back from there. Each Sunday during the promotion, Mansion will add $10,000 to its 7:00pm (Pacific) $100+9 tournament. Each Monday during the promotion, Mansion will add $20,000 to its 7:00pm $200+15 buy in tournament. This all leads up to the big $300+20 buy in tournament on January 1st, where Mansion will add $30,000 to the prize pool. The fields for these tournaments will not have thousands of players in them, either. A good percentage of the prize pool will be added money, so the value to players is really high. Sign Up today, and take advantage of this big offer. Can't wait until Dec 4th? You're in luck. On December 3rd at 9:00pm GMT, Mansion are hosting an Aussie Millions Super Satellite with a $300+20 buy in that guarantees seven packages that are valued at $14,000 each. Each package includes an entry into the tournament, $2,500 for travel, AND 12 nights hotel accommodation. Mansion has far and away the best Aussie Millions package of any site out there. It's also very likely that there will be an overlay in the Aussie Millions satellite. Mansion have come out swinging from day one to try and get players the most value of any room out there, and its clear with this new promotion, they aren't going to let up any time soon.

Binions, formerly The Horseshoe and/or Binion's Horseshoe, in downtown Las Vegas is the most recognized poker room in the United States, if not the entire world. For the first 30 years Binions was the home of the World Series of Poker but the Binions of old is not the Binions of today. Sure lots of poker players make the trek to this revered poker mecca when they travel to Las Vegas. We all have "played at Binions" just to say we have. The room itself is still dark and often dank. The dealers still have an average age of at least seventy-four and bad behavior at the tables is treated with a decidedly less politically correct attitude than in the kinder, gentler corporate casinos. But Binions, too, is a changin'. Today

Binions is all about hold'em and even more all about tournament hold'em. On a normal day they hold four tournaments. The events are $60 buy-ins and go off at 10 AM, 2 PM, 8 PM and 2 AM. The 8 PM event gets boosted to $125 on the weekend. On the first Sunday of every month the winners of each daily event meet in a Tournament of Champions event for the previous month. But that's not all! For the next year (Oct. 2006-Sept. 2007), the Ultimate Poker Challenge runs at Binions every Saturday, Sunday and Monday. This tournament is in addition to the regularly scheduled daily events. On Saturday and Sunday the UPC is a $340 NLHE event, the Monday tournament is a $660 buy-in. The events have been drawing crowds in the 125-150 range and the televised final table goes off the very next day. That's right! A TV final table is taped at Binions every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The Ultimate Poker Challenge is the quickest, fastest way to get your face on the tube squeezing out a pair of pocket rockets. The TV face time also draws name professionals to the Binions events on a regular basis, look for familiar faces in the Monday event every week and less often in the Saturday and Sunday tournaments. I did spend an hour sitting across from Kenna James this past Saturday. There is a less than two week delay between the taping and first air-time, so play today and be semi-famous tomorrow. Sure there are still cash games spread at Binions but you had better want hold'em. Limit and no-limit hold'em are spread 24/7. The games range for the always available $2/$4 and $4/$8 to a $10/$20 game that goes off most nights and, of course, a wide range of games on the weekend. The No-Limit action tends to be at the $1/$2 tables but $5/$10 is also available and is sometimes a big, big game. Even though you can get the brush to start an interest list on any game you name; I have not seen an Omaha or Stud game at Binions in any of my recent visits. This is not Benny Binion's room anymore but the good news is that it's not Becky's either. Major upgrades are under way. The new mahogany floor is going in, new carpeting is on the way and to the dismay of olde timers the red flocked wall paper will be gone by the new year; rumors have it that an "establishment" in Pahrump has bought the wall paper for their "All-In" theme room. A brand new sports book will open November 16th, right in the poker room. All of these changes and upgrades mean the Binions poke room is now 35 tables including the permanent Ultimate Poker Challenge TV final table set-up. The room, in fact the entire end of the building, is non-smoking. One final note on playing at Binions. While I would not call the games fishy. I will say that it is still true that many players in town for poker, vacation or business still like to say they have visited and played at the historic Binion's on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. This is true of the low-limit cash games but it is also happens to some extent in the tournaments and not just the $60 buy-ins. Last weekend I played the UPC events on Saturday and Sunday, I can say without hesitation that these were not the types of fields one might expect to encounter on the way to a television appearance. That being said, you will notice I am not announcing any broadcasts dates for my final table.

It should come as no surprise that the Ayn Rand Institute has formally weighed in against the UIGEA. In a press release issued this month, executive director Dr. Yaron Brook called the measure "an infringement on our rights." The Ayn Rand Institute is a non profit organization that provides outreach and educational programs that are synergistic with the philosophies of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a novelist-philosopher best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and the creator of the philosophy of Objectivism. Like her novels, Objectivism celebrates man's rational self-interest, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism. The institute's position relative to the UIGEA is consistent with its views

on the role of government. In her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand wrote, "Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection." The Institute's press release went on to say, "Why do supporters of the law deny individuals the freedom to spend their hard-earned money on gambling? Because, they say, people will bet and lose more than they can afford. In other words, individuals are inherently incapable of making rational decisions, and thus it is the government's job to protect us from ourselves. This vicious, paternalistic idea has no place in a free society." While Rand's individual-centric philosophy is applicable to many regulatory laws and issues, its ideology is particularly salient to the discussion of online poker. In many ways poker is the perfect Objectivism gambling metaphor. Rand would have argued that altruism is as misplaced in society as we know it to be at the poker table. As a poker player, our goal is to insure our own personal success. While poker rarely makes society's short list of moral activities, Rand would have disagreed. She felt that a person's "pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life." While anti-UIGEA sentiment has been expressed by a number of unlikely sources, The Ayn Rand Institute's position is as expected as a minimum of five pre-flop callers in a low limit hold'em game.