Tips for Attending the Wsop/Las Vegas this Summer

April 19th, 2014 As per my Weekly Shuffle article last Sunday, this article will hopefully provide some more helpful tips on the WSOP and Vegas living. The series is coming up and many aspiring players will be taking their shot on the felt in hopes of finally hitting that big score and attaining the financial freedom required to travel the circuit year round. If you are anything like most of the players living in Vegas for their first summer, or even just coming out for a week – you will definitely benefit from these tidbits of advice. 1) Make sure to pack shorts with deep pockets, or cargo shorts to hold your cash, tournament receipts, etc. After you have been deep in thought for a long period of time – or a gruelling grind on the felt – you are less likely to realize that something significant had fallen out of your pockets while at the table, and by the time you figure it out, it may be too late. Cargo shorts are the best option because they have multiple pockets and most of them have large pockets on the side that button up. The same goes for jeans and pants – make sure the pockets are deep so your belongings can’t fall out of them while you are sitting down. 2) Photo copy your passport, other personal forms of identification, credit cards, and anything else that may cause you to end up in a world of trouble. This may seem a little over the top, but you wouldn’t believe how many players lose their passports and wished they had made a photocopy. 3) Staying in a casino hotel for weeks at a time can become very expensive. If you are just staying for a week, there are some great deals on various travel websites that probably won’t cost you an arm and a leg for a two-way flight and one week’s hotel stay, but if you are staying for more than a week, you will be hard pressed to find an amazing deal. If you are staying for a month or more, look into renting a house with a bunch of friends – the housing economy isn’t doing so well in Las Vegas right now so it won’t be hard to find a good deal that you can split with your mates – get five guys together and you probably won’t have to pay much more than five-hundred dollars each for a decent house in a subdivision not more than twenty minutes from the strip. There is also the option of renting a condominium on the strip, which will still only run you about half the price than staying in hotels would. 4) If you are like me and live outside the U.S., you will probably find that it is super expensive to operate or pay for a plan to use your cellphone in Vegas all summer long, or even for a week. I would suggest making your way out to the nearest phone dealer and buying a pay-as-you-go phone. You can purchase the phone for as little as twenty dollars, and load however many minutes you need on it. I found that buying the phone and fifty-dollars in minutes was all I needed for a whole month – this is still much cheaper than what my service provider here in Canada would charge me if I were to work out a plan with them. So if you have a smart phone, you can still bring it to use for the free wifi that is provided by many of the casinos, but make sure to use your pay-as-you-go phone for all your calling, and disable everything else on your smartphone. Be sure to check last week’s Weekly Shuffle article for more tips on attending the WSOP this summer, and good luck at the tables!