New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas is always completely wild and decadent. When my dad suggested that he might want to bring in 2010 with me, I warned him that things would get pretty crazy. He didn’t seem particularly concerned, so I figured it would be cool to give him a taste of Vegas at its most outrageous. Nevertheless, I decided to start the night on a fairly upscale, chill note. We’d begin by having dinner at Cut, along with two of my least degenerate friends, both of whom are physicians. I dressed up for the occasion, wearing a nice suit.
On the way down to the lobby of my condo, at around 8:00, we shared the elevator with four guys who were shotgunning beers. A girl stepped in on one of the floors, and, without missing a beat, she took a beer and shotgunned right alongside the guys. My dad seemed unfazed, and I took that to be a good sign. We walked to the restaurant since the Strip closes down to traffic for New Years Eve. En route, I acquired a sparkly gold top hat.
Cut is very good. Very classy, and probably my favorite steakhouse in Vegas. As soon as we sat down, one of the doctors started ordering $1,500 bottles of wine. That shocked my dad and, truth be told, scared me a little. Dinner was clearly going to be even pricier than I had expected. I told my two friends that they better go out with a bang this year, before nationalized healthcare kicks in.
The real shocker came when one of the doctors and his drunken girlfriend started talking about what they did the night before. They went to the Spearmint Rhino and brought home three girls for a five-some. Then the girlfriend started showing iPhone pictures of the festivities. My dad took it all in stride, and I was glad that we got together with my more respectable friends. I can only imagine what would have happened if it was all degenerates!
We played credit card roulette for the bill, and, luckily, I didnít lose this time. After dinner we headed over to Antonio Esfandiari’s condo. He was having his annual New Year’s Eve party, and I knew it would be total debauchery. Antonio had 20 guys, 40 super-hot girls, and a balcony that afforded a perfect view of the fireworks that traditionally take place over the Strip at midnight.
I brought two bottles of Dom and stashed them in the fridge. Things got about as wild as you’d expect them to be with lots of drinking, raucous dancing, and Antonio’s dad commandeering one of my bottles. My friend Keith had an extremely interesting conversation with Mike Matusow (details of which cannot be revealed here ) and my dad was pretty blown away by the quality of the girls. A friend of mine walked up to my Dad and said, “You’re so good looking and Andrew’s so ugly. How can that be?”, I didn’t think that was so funny!
For me, of course, it was just another night in Vegas & though I did get more wasted than usual. By 9 a.m., everybody was pretty much gone except for me, Phil Laak, Brian Rast
, Antonio, and Sander who is the number-one backgammon player in the world.
He gave Antonio a spot and they began playing backgammon. The rest of us took action on the matches. I think I made a little bit of money. Then Antonio went to sleep and things got ramped up a little bit with us shooting dice for $500 a roll. As is usually the case with these things, it got out of control pretty quickly, and I wound up ahead by $15,000. Sander was stuck the money, and tilting pretty badly. So when I told him that I wanted to quit shooting dice, he offered me $200 in juice for every five rolls ñ I calculated that, all things being equal, it was worth about $20,000 per hour & so we kept gambling. But instead of throwing dice, we switched to using cards and played for $1,000 a point. A few hands in, I went from being up $15,000 to down $25,000. Now I was totally tilting, willing to offer all kinds of sweeteners to anyone who’d give me a chance to get even. But suddenly everybody was a pussy and nobody wanted to gamble. So I started the New Year on raging tilt.
This was definitely not the best way to begin my 2010 gambling year. But, as I see it, things can only get better from here.
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