Last night at the Rio, we were told Day 1A of the $1k ‘Stimulus’ event was sold out. At that time, I was reluctant to believe that. Last year, I registered for the first day of a two-day event and found out from some friends that they had been told earlier that day one was sold out. I figured this might be another such case of Harrah’s trying to balance out the two day ones. Despite contemplating coming back later to see if Day 1A was magically no longer sold out (so I could be free to play online on Sunday), I went ahead and registered for Day 1B on Sunday. It’s a good thing, too. I awoke to a text this morning from Dave Irish that the event completely sold out with 6,000 players!

I’m really glad we went to register last night rather than waiting until this morning. My Uncle flew all the way out here from Chicago primarily just to play in this event. I would have felt really bad if we had showed up to register this morning to be told we couldn’t play. I’m in the Miranda room at table 269 (or something) tomorrow.

Before going to bed last night, I had an itch that needed a scratching so I took a seat at a blackjack table at Bellagio. I escaped an $850 winner which afforded me a bit more of an easy time falling asleep than TwoGun probably had after dropping quite a bit at the craps table. This morning, however, he won back quite a bit and I took the blackjack tables for another quick $300 while we waited on hunger to overtake our need to gamble.

I’ve been to a lot of the buffets in Vegas, but one I had never been to prior to today was the Bellagio. It was already great before ever eating a bite of food; we circumnavigated the lunch crowd and got seated right away on a comp thanks to our degeneracy. Growing up, I always associated buffets as something that is sort of white trash. To me, a buffet was the $5.99 highly-processed meal you’d get at Old Country Buffet or Golden Corral. Vegas does buffets entirely different. Most of them cost between $15 and $35. The food quality and presentation puts the aforementioned feeding troughs to shame. Bellagio runs a great operation. My only disappointment was that they didn’t have any mac’n'cheese, but I had a hard time dwelling on that thanks to the pesto mashed potatoes.

I’m focused on trying to eat responsibly on this trip. It’s so tough to maintain any semblance of a disciplined workout schedule in this city that the best hedge you can make is to eat as healthy as possible. However, this is also really challenging since the food here is pretty good, options endless, and portions huge. I think the best play you make is to choose walking over taking a cab whenever reasonable and avoiding overeating. Yes, I know I probably sound like one of those adamantly anti-gay officials that get caught soliciting sex in an airport bathroom or something by talking about how much I enjoyed the Bellagio buffet one paragraph before pontificating on the importance of controlling portion size!