Casino's: A review of my experiences: Atlantic City

I've told everyone about my first WSOP Circuit event cash because that's a fun story to tell.  Now lets go to the other side of things and discuss the first WSOP Circuit event that I played in... in Atlantic City.  My girlfriend bought me into the event as a gift which is the best present she could have gotten me. 

The trip was interesting to say the least.  We flew into PA and took a train which was a fun experience...for the most part.  It was the first time my girlfriend has ridden a train so that at made it better.  First things first though, everything about Philly pretty much sucked.  Everyone in the airport was so rude and it seemed like I was causing them an inconvenience to make me a coffee...when it's their freakin JOB!!!!  All in all, we had to go to three different shops before we found a place that we didn't leave before they made our coffee.  That city must suck.  On this train ride, we had to make one connection. Since it was freezing cold out we didn't want to stand outside so we stood right inside of a covered glass area.  To keep this part of the story short, the train that we were supposed to get on was in and out before we could get on...in fact, I'm not even sure that it stopped.  I think it slowed down to a jogging pace threw some people out, I think one guy jumped as the door was closing at which point they were back up to full-speed.  In the end we got to Atlantic City.

We stayed at Harrahs because we heard it was one of the nicer places to stay there and it definitely was.  Prior to the tourney my girlfriend and I played around, hit some video poker, wasted some money in some slots for a bit then I got ready for my tourney.  What we found is the negative effect that keeping tight slot machines and horrible odds has on everyone in this entire city.  We walked around for hours and didn't hear 1 person scream, didn't hear one jackpot being hit, and never heard anyone anywhere happy about anything.  Here is how this snowballs down.  When players are losing their money ALL THE TIME with no real return to speak of they begin getting bad attitudes to the staff.  After hours, months, or years of dealing with bad attitudes, their attitudes then get bad.  The blackjack dealers weren't nice or inviting.  They never got excited, and they were openly happy to take peoples money.  It went a little something like this...4 people at a table and the dealer is showing a 6.  One player has 20 and stands, one has 18 and stands...one splits 9's to get 19 on each and one doubles down on 10 to make 20 for the rest of his chips.  The dealer never smiles once....until he turns over his other card and sees a 5... when the 10 hits he might as well say 'BOOOO-YAAA, in your face b*tches...I'll take that, I'll take that, awwwww...you're broke, peace out'.  Yep, that about sums it up.  This in turn has a negative effect on the attitude of generally happy players and the cycle continues.  At least I hope this is how it happens and it's not just that everyone in New Jersey is just that unhappy and generally horrible.  But then again, that's the back-up hypothesis.

So, that about sums it up. AC was pretty dirty, not a lot of fun, and you could cut the hostility in the air with a knife everywhere you went.  Not good for my Qi.

As for the tournament, I made some rookie mistakes like not noticing that the blinds changed once and raising under the minimum because of it.  Good learning experience and I missed cash by 20-30 players or so.

Next review will be for Reno I believe.  Until then:  Good luck in everything that you attempt.