Hey, How is your October Going?

Dear Readers,

The month is flying by and I don’t even remember it starting. Here’s a recap of what’s been going on.

I left Asheville, went zip lining in the Nantahala Gorge, then drove to Chattanooga TN to visit my friends Cory and Caroline. I also got to hang out with Brent who was visiting Cory  for the weekend as well. Brent is on leave from the Marines and I rarely get to see him–it made this visit to Chattanooga even better.

We went to a park and hung out by a river during the day. There was an abandoned farm right by the river.

Then Team Adventure hit up Downtown Chattanooga.

We made a couple new friends along the way.

One girl recognized Adventure Paul and wanted a picture and autograph (or so Brent says).

Brent even found a girl with a similar shirt on as me. We had to be friends.

I left Chattanooga on Sunday morning. I arrived in Vegas at 5:30am Tuesday. I obviously made the drive pretty straight through with very few stops. One of the few stops I did make was to use the bathroom at an Indian casino.

That’s where I went negative -$20 into my Vegas budget before I had even gotten there. But they gave me $10 in free gas at the Travel Center across the street for signing up and getting a Players Card. So really minus $10, I rationalize publicly.

After that, I drove straight to Vegas, minus a five hour nap. I stopped at a Love’s Gas station to fill up and because I was tired. Coincidentally a storm started as I fell asleep and I slept through what would have been a terrible drive.

The next morning I’m in Las Vegas.

It was too early for a game so I walked around the strip and checked out old places I had been to and a few new places I had never seen like the Cosmopolitan Hotel and the Planet Hollywood Westgate. I took this picture for my buddy Drew at the MGM.

I finally caught a game at MGM Grand at about 1pm–it was called Beginners No Limit Holdem $0.50/$1.00 blinds. At first I was just going to play until a different game got started but I soon realized how big of a cash cow this small blind table would be. People were playing anything.

I quickly made friends and enemies at the table (all of you were cool though if you’re reading this, I had a blast). I gave nicknames to every person throughout the day. There was Ballzy, Censor, Silencio, Heineken, Pretty Girl, Pretty Girl’s Boyfriend, Unabomber, The Hulk, and a whole lot of others.

As new people arrived, the sitting players asked me for the new people’s nick names. It went well until I nicknamed one girl “statutory” because she looked 17. They didn’t speak very good English and the husband, Silencio, who I had named because he hadn’t said a word since he sat down says, “Is that a compliment?”

I said, “Not a compliment or an insult–it just means young.”

I sat at the table from the time the game started at 1pm to the time everyone had lost their money, gone to bed, or gotten drunk at 3am.

I watched as the couple next to me poured over $300 a piece into the table throughout the day in increments of $50 which was the max buy-in. I saw as others did the same, like the person I nicknamed Anger Management, because he lost an all-in hand, threw his cards down, made a scene… then bought back in and lost it all again almost immediately. I was laughing too hard.

At one point throughout the day, over half the players had over $200 in their stacks– which is pretty high for a $50 max buy-in game. I watched people come and go all day and add cash to the table–most of it which ended up in my stack and a German guy’s stack who played almost until the end with me.

There was one period of time between 9pm and 12am that I didn’t play a single hand other than my big blinds. I patiently grinded away until I hit my full houses against flushes, trips against pairs, and straights against high cards. In the end, I finished my first day in Vegas +$180. I started with a $400 budget for Vegas… ate two meals, drank all day, lost $40 in the slots, and still left with $580.

It was a good day but I realized, “Adventure Paul, you’ve got work to do. You can come back to Vegas anytime.” So I left the next morning at 7am and drove to Los Angeles–probably one of the few people I played cards with the day before who left Vegas in the plus.

Driving to Los Angeles meant I’d be passing Bakers, CA, the place where craziness happens. Did I stop and visit the Denny’s where Cory and I potentially came in contact with ghost demons? Or did I keep on driving? Find out next time on Adventure Paul. Same adventure man, same adventure website.

Sincerely,

A.P.