Restaurants and the rodeo

I've been meaning for some time to write about  a real restaurant find, the Second Street Grille in the Fremont downtown. This small art deco style room serves some very imaginative variations of steakhouse fare, including Mongolian rack of lamb, Thai Cioppino (all right, not usually served in a steakhouse) and Paniola rib-eye steak, with a southwestern-influenced sauce. The service is excellent and there's rarely a wait to get in. The staff says very few locals ever eat there, which is a shame.

The Rio was the only casino I know of that had two completely separate buffets -- the Carnival World Buffet and the Village Seafood Buffet. Until a couple of weeks ago, they were at opposite ends of the very large casino. Now the seafood buffet has been moved to the Carnival World location. The new setup works like this: There are separate entrances for each buffet. The new seafood buffet contains only seafood items. If you pay for the seafood buffet, you also get access to entire Carnival World buffet. You can also, for less, buy access to only the Carnival World, which does include some seafood, including crab legs at dinner. This makes sense to me because it avoids the duplication of offering non-seafood items at both buffets and gives seafood customers a much wider choice of other items. The spouse and I sprung for the seafood buffet recently and were a bit disappointed. Many of the seafood items had been left out too long. Now is a good time to try the Carnival World Buffet; you can get in free by earning 50 tier credits ($500 coin-in) and swiping your player card at a special promotional kiosk outside the buffet. The ticket is good for a couple of days.

The National Finals Rodeo is in town, and South Point has been full people who may be cowboys or may be just Walgreens managers from Laramie and accountants from Boise dressed up like cowboys. One sign the rodeo is in town is the sign in front of Don Vito's, the casino's Italian restaurant, which states that it will be serving the Silverado Steakhouse menu while the cowboys are in town, due to the high demand for steak during the rodeo.

A quiet time in Vegas -- update

A few days ago I wrote about the last couple of weeks in December being a relatively quiet time. This years, in my experience, that was definitely true between the end of the National Finals Rodeo and Christmas. But during the past couple of days, traffic on the roads and activity in the casinos seems to have picked up considerably.

On Friday, we visited Ellis Island, a casino near the Strip. To my amazement, we were told by a security guard stationed at the garage that only four empty spaces remained in the entire structure. The casino wasn't packed, but the restaurants were very busy.

The spouse and tried to figure out what all the cars were doing in the garage. We guessed that most of them belonged to guests at the Super 8 motel adjacent to the casino. We figured that between Christmas and New Year's was probably a good time for a lot of college students and other young people with time off to come to Vegas for a few days, having fulfilled their family holiday obligations.

Also, a lot of businesses close down or slow down during the last week of the year, so a lot of other people have time off as well.

So I will modify my statement that the last two weeks of the year are a quiet time in Vegas. I would still recommend the week and half between the end of the rodeo and Christmas as a time when Vegas is uncrowded and cheap, but not so much the week between Christmas and New Year/s.

A quiet time in Vegas

The last couple of weeks of December are a special time in Vegas, and not just because of Christmas, Hannukah, and Festivus. It's an unusually quiet time in the hotels, and the time when the casinos traditionally "give away the store."

My spouse got an unusual invitation from South Point, one of our secondary casinos in amount of play. It was for a room night, which we took Thursday night, and dinner at either the steakhouse or Italian restaurant. We chose Don Vito's and ran up a bill of $100 without even getting the wine and soft drinks that were part of the comp.

The desk clerk told me the hotel, which had been bursting at the seams through the end of the National Finals Rodeo this past weekend, was only 30 percent full. We have been out and about quite a bit in the past few days and almost all the casinos we have visited have been about as empty as we've seen them.

As advantage players, we're always looking for an edge, and fewer people in the casinos creates opportunities where competition is a factor, particularly drawings.Also, if I were a bingo player, I'd be playing whenever I could in next week or so, particularly if there were some unusually bad weather.

This year is shaping up as a very good one for me financially, but we have faced numerous changes and challenges, as is always the case in this line of work. One of the biggest challenges was being being "no mailed," which is when a casino decides not to send you any more marketing offers. This happened to me twice, and much to my surprise, I am still finding opportunities to make money at the casinos in question. There's no guarantee, however, that this will last.

One of the biggest changes we made this year was setting up a spreadsheet system (with invaluable help from my daughter) to track not only our results but, more important, the value of what we receive from each casino we play at. This will help us greatly in the continuous process of figuring out how and where to best spend our time. We also switched our calendars from day planner books to the computer. Thanks to my spouse for a lot of hard work in setting this up.

My biggest goal for next year is to cut down on the time I spend gambling. Having more information and making better use of technology should make that easier.