Grand Opening, Casino Style

September 1, 2008 · Filed Under Vegas, mo30dc2008 

When it comes to Las Vegas, everything is done in extremes. Hell, even when they demolish a casino, they pull out all the stops. So this weekend when the Eastside Cannery was set to have their grand opening Thursday night, I was expecting an “over the top” spectacle. Since this was my first time attending the grand opening of any casino, I didn’t really know what to expect. In my mind I was seeing fireworks, laser lights, fog machines and a chorus line of show girls a mile long. Much to my surprise, there was none of that. Honestly, I didn’t miss any of it. The low key approach was much more to my taste!

cannery_small 

I’m not normally the kind of guy who’s going to rush out to a casino the night of their grand opening. But, since my wife is an employee of the new Cannery, we figured we’d go and check it out. They were set to open at 8PM. We made the mistake of showing up at about 7:50. The parking lot was filled to MAX capacity. The line to get in the building was wrapped around the building. We ended up parking down the street and walking a 1/4 mile back to the casino. We nearly got a jaywalking ticket when we chose the exact wrong spot to try to cross the street while the place was littered with cops directing traffic. By the time we got to the doors, everybody had filtered inside and the place was packed. The line to get a player’s card was a mile long. We skipped that line and went right to the poker room.

We sat down at an empty poker table, bought some chips and within a few minutes we had enough players to start a game. I’ll put it on record that my first ever hand at the Cannery casino was playing $2/$4 limit poker and I was dealt a 2 of spades and a 4 of hearts. I folded. We played for a couple hours. The poker room filled up and at one point I believe all 8 of their tables were full or close to it. I finished with a $45 profit and we headed home.

Sunday morning I planned to drop my wife off at work since the employees were not allowed to park at the casino during the opening weekend. They all had to park up the street at Wal-Mart and be shuttled to the casino. I decided to go in and play poker for about an hour. 5 hours later I cashed out and headed home. I pretty much broke even.

On Monday morning they held their first poker tournament. A $25 buy-in, 4 table, No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament. They start you out with only $1000 in chips, but they give you bonus chips if you play live poker for 1 or 2 hours prior to the tournament. $500 tournament chips per hour, maximum of $1000 in bonus chips. I was there for an hour before so I I started the tourney with $1500 in chips. I busted a few people out early and built up a nice chip stack. I then played some aggressive poker to continue building my stack. When all was said and done, I ended up chopping the pot with 2 other players. I had a chip lead on both other guys, but the blinds were so high it wouldn’t have taken but one unlucky hand to knock me out in 3rd place. Splitting the pot 3 ways guaranteed us each better than 2nd place money.

So far I haven’t eaten anything at the casino, so I can’t tell you how the food is. Though I heard several people talking about how great the chicken noodle soup is. Next time I go I’ll try out the diner. Plus I plan on getting some more information about their concert venue which apparently is going to host MMA matches. I’ll keep you posted on what I find.

More info to come later.

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