BigWhale & brother (feat. MuckPls) does Vegas - 2025 edition (21st-31st March)
Hello people,
I can't believe it's been 6 months since I have been in Vegas, and we cannot let that go on for much longer! I will fly to London on March 20th after work, relax at a hotel there overnight, and then fly direct from there to Las Vegas on Friday the 21st (just in time for March Madness).
My brother will finally join in as well; he actually has a business trip to the US coming up in a few days, so when he is done with work he is already in the country. He will also head out to Vegas on the 21st of March.
A late addition to the trip is also 'MuckPls' who said YOLO and booked his own trip as well. I'll let him post the details on his end.
With this being the middle of March, and MGM having slashed my previous reasonable offers, it was not super easy to find cheap hotels. As of such, I have to stay at 3 different hotels to take advantage of the comp nights I had available (although I have to pay full resort fee). I will be staying at:
- Excalibur (2 nights)
- Flamingo (4 nights)
- MGM Grand (4 nights)
That said, it won't be too much stress to switch between the hotels. For MGM properties I can obviously check in and get digital room keys through the app. And for Flamingo I will just show up early and pay the (ridiculously high) early check-in fee to avoid gigantic lines.
It's March Madness time in Vegas when we are there, so I have high expectation of there being a lot of games to play and hopefully some good action as well. But regardless, it should be a fun and hopefully profitable trip. I will come back with some more thoughts + picture of shoe and bankroll in a few days.
As always, you guys can expect a lot of hand histories as well as random pictures from my end. Hopefully I can get brother to post a bit as well. And MuckPls will obviously also contribute with his own degen stories 
This is only the first of many trips to Vegas for me in 2025, but we can get back to that later. I am regardless stoked for the trip, and it will be nice having someone to share the excitement with as well!
Thanks for all the detail Whale - glad you booked a small winner and hope you had fun!
Quick question…why do you feel you want to size it up on Q77 with AQ?
That feels like a spot you want lesser queens and smaller pairs and A high to call and you have an A so you’re bout really worried about a K
I’d bet smaller on the flop and then go heavy on the turn
Thanks 😀 I am actually not entirely sure why I thought that in time. Maybe because there was a flush draw on board. But I probably did a pretty poor job with most of my posts, and didn't make them interesting enough. There is just not enough time in the day to give them the detail they deserve, as it takes way too long to write them up.
As a general concept though, we should exploitatively sice up on most flops with value, and then size down on turn. People are much less likely to fold on the flop than on the turn, and if we keep our sizing in check we can get them to call there as well.
This is especially good if you have something like KK on a board of (Q-6-2-9) or something like that. We unblock TP, and all pocket pairs between 77-JJ will also call at least once regardless of sizing. So we can bet bigger on this imaginary Q-6-2 flop, and then smaller (relatively speaking) on turn to hopefully ensure that they stick around with very little equity.
(sadly I didn't encorporate this well at all during my trip, hopefully next time)
I had the offer available but it was together with a booked stay, and for such a short trip I just didn’t see it being worth it. Also my comps at Caesars sucks, I honestly don’t know why. Every single trip I stay + gamble like crazy. Last year I lost 10k on blackjack and another 4 or 5k at UX and when the offers were updated they were like here is a 2 day comp at Flamingo and $10 free play, on us! So yeah nah…
Ouch. Wow, that's a sad cry from the offers they used to give! My husband lost ~$5, 000 in BJ one night and we got a huge two (or three?) bedroom suite at Caesar's with six-person dining table, pop-up TV at the end of the bed, etc., for three nights.
I had the offer available but it was together with a booked stay, and for such a short trip I just didn’t see it being worth it. Also my comps at Caesars sucks, I honestly don’t know why. Every single trip I stay + gamble like crazy. Last year I lost 10k on blackjack and another 4 or 5k at UX and when the offers were updated they were like here is a 2 day comp at Flamingo and $10 free play, on us! So yeah nah…
I can understand getting short-changed at blackjack - could be a pit boss not paying attention. But at vp, that's weird. Unless the losses on individual trips were small. But I have noticed that the best comp offers come after wins. They want that money back. A friend of mine won like $2500 in a slot at Venetian, and he said he kept getting comps for years afterward.
