So here we are in Vegas again. I’ve been here around 30 times over the last 20 years and at last this ever-changing city appears to be slowing down. The recession has clamped its iron fists around the ankles of the fastest growing city in the US. The rarity of a new project like The City Centre has finally opened, after a construction stage that lasted several years rather than the usual couple of months needed to knock up a brand new casino gaff such as The Wynn in the last decade.

But somehow our eastern European taxi driver manages to skirt around two or three sides of the latest Vegas addition without getting within viewing distance, while managing to clock up a $30 fare for a journey of three miles as the crow flies ... 13 miles as the Vegas breadline cabbie hustler flies. He’s only trying to make a living though and even Joe can’t be bothered to protest.

I’d arrived via the Virgin Atlantic Premier Economy personal cinema lounge having got through the usual cocktail of big screen entertainment on my, erm, 10” fold away plasma. I’d been over-fed five times in ten hours and my belly thought it was The Camel’s baby brother. So I’m looking out of the window across the strip at The Desert Passage gaff thinking how easy the trip was nowadays when I found myself thinking back to my first trip when Vegas was ‘an experience’, one of those Jack Nicholson bucket list thingies you just gotta do before you die.

In the mid-eighties I’d somehow flown into LAX, cattle class of course, because the small town Las Vegas wasn’t considered worthy of a direct flight from London Town. So me and the missus (that’s four missus’s back...or is it five?) hired a car and drove up to Nevada through the desert. Now that’s what I call living.

We had stopped off in Death Valley for an afternoon ice cream soda. That was actually a coca cola with a lump, sorry two lumps, of Ice Cream floating in it. Gross. But when in Rome, as they say... So now it’s 7 or 8pm and pitch dark. We’re driving up an unlit desert road miles from civilisation or lights in any direction. We probably pass a car in the opposite direction every ten minutes and its dark, really dark. It’s black black as Dylan used to say.

We had the windows down and the air was typical end of desert day sticky but it also had an electric static tension feel to it. Just when those memories of broken down car scenes from Stephen King films were beginning to lurk at the back of the old grey matter, an orange glow appeared on the horizon... .... Vegas.

For a couple of hours we drove through the dark listening to 15 year old Who songs being played on Radio Hicksville (the same Who songs that are still being played 25 years later). The orange glow got brighter and the atmosphere got more tingly and more electric to the point you could almost hear it... now that’s the way to travel up to Vegas. I promise you. It’s a memory that will long outlast even the sickest of those bad beat stories that linger on. 

We had no hotel booked and looking back I wonder how we even got past The Gestapo at LA immigration control. Surely tourists weren’t actually welcomed to the US in those days? Nope sorry, I can’t remember. Anyway, the old radio is on and one of the adverts, sorry one of the ‘commercials’, is for The Aladdin Casino, queen size doubles for just $14 a night, and that’s the first place we stayed.

The Aladdin was a victim of the Vegas “bigger and better program”, being demolished around the turn of the century. It was replaced by The New Aladdin, later re-branded The Desert Passage. Aha you see. And here we are now, 25 years later stopping in some gaff with a few fountains just across the road.

So let’s get back to Bellagio 2010. The WPT Grand Final. The event that was once the biggest buy-in (if not quite the biggest prize pool) on the poker calendar. Nowadays I can’t afford to stump up the 25 large ones for this myself but fortunately, very fortunately, the Withnail Insurance Cartel had very generously offered to put me in it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

So after the obligatory nap, I wandered into the half-empty Bellagio cardroom just after midnight. Wow. The recession has really hit Vegas. This cardroom has been an over-flowing, splitting at the seams, throbbing throng of poker activity ever since Chris Moneymaker ran like God for a week. I remember doing battle here in a half-empty cardroom, with a very young Matador Juan Carlos Mortensen in August 2000 just after it opened its doors to the strobe-light of day. But my god, what’s happened now? No more 30-deep waiting lists that cost a twenty bucks back-hander just so you’re not overlooked. I actually had a choice of seats in a choice of 2-5 NLH games. Nice one. I was in, straight in action in what appeared to be the friendliest (drunkest?) game that appeared in the middle of the room. Regardless of the perfect game-selection strategy I still managed to do my $500 in less than an hour, with pocket cowboys (as we are now in Vegas) against a mighty A3 double suited.

What a nice game though. Poker players enjoying themselves? Win or lose? It definitely wasn’t like that 25 years ago. Nowadays I’m playing with a couple of internet whiz kids with more physical tells than Jackanory, a bunch of guys from this week’s telecoms conference, and possibly two live pros. 25 years back I was the tourist victim surrounded by a complete table of slobbering-at-the-mouth, hardened live pros. And a couple of the poor afore-mentioned individuals weren’t going to be able to put food in the fridge tonight because they didn’t get my money.

One pleasant change that the Vegas revolution has brought is the clientele. Now boasting around 20 of the world’s 25 biggest, bestest hotels, it has become the conference centre of the world. Outside on the Strip, the plethora of legless Vietnam war vets have been replaced by a couple of million conference attendees. The three varieties of legless Vietnam veterans (those with one leg, those with none, and those with a 24 hours a day alcohol habit) were probably deemed ‘unseemly’ and perhaps they finally got looked after accordingly. There were surely too many of them too get rid of in the desert, Robert DeNiro style....

DC