Binion's hotel closure might make me fat

If you pay any attention at all to Vegas news, you've already heard the announcement that Binion's will be closing the hotel part of its operations two weeks from today, December 14th. See, e.g., here.

This causes me a bit of a dilemma. You see, I spend a decent amount of time at the Binion's poker room. I don't write about it much, because usually nothing of much interest happens there. For reasons that I can't even begin to guess at, the sessions tend to be pretty boring, with probably fewer tweetworthy/blogworthy stories per hour than any of my other regular haunts. You might be surprised at the amount of time I accumulate there, given how little I say about the place.

I checked today, and I have $137 in food comps on credit, even though I eat at the coffee shop with some regularity. That is, I accumulate comps a lot faster than I use them.

I didn't care too much to learn that the hotel is closing. As long as the poker room is going to stay open, I'm happy.

But then I learned that the coffee shop is part of the closure, and experienced a moment of panic. Sure, the stupid "cafe" thing on the main floor will stay open, but it's crummy, with a very limited menu. There's also the steakhouse, but that's much too expensive for my lowbrow tastes. There just won't be much of anything else left on which to spend my accumulated comps, unless they somehow make them usable at the Four Queens (which is owned by the same company).

So it appears that my best value may be to plan to eat there a whole bunch over the next two weeks. Which means more than my usual portion of burgers, fried chicken, cheap steaks, cheesesteak, and other stuff that isn't too good for me. But at least I'll save on groceries!

Perhaps it's just as well. I talk to my friend Cardgrrl nearly every day via a free video hookup on AIM, and just today she asked if I had eaten anything in the last three weeks or so. Apparently I'm looking a little thin lately. I gather that I could stand some fattening up, and maybe the ol' Binion's coffee shop, in the last few days of its existence, will be just the place for it.



Incidentally, I also wonder what will happen to the Wednesday afternoon poker discussion group that traditionally meets in the coffee shop. If you hear, drop me a note via the comments, please.


Played a few hours at Binion's today after eating lunch there, and picked up the nice new chip shown above, in addition to making my daily nut (mostly by drawing to and hitting two diamond nut flushes against opponents who didn't believe that I had done so).