Caesars Palace – Bacchanal Buffet: New early brunch special Fri-Sun, 9 a.m.-11 a.m. for $69.99 with no crab offered.
Circus Circus – Circus Buffet: This weekend’s breakfast buffet is Fri, 8 a.m.-12 p.m. for $29.95. Then their dinner buffet is Sat & Sun, 5 p.m.-9 p.m. is $34.95.
The Magician’s Study
Secret Location, South Strip
Thurs.-Sun. 7 and 9:30 p.m.
$99-$159
Large-scale magic shows used to be a fixture in Vegas — David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, Lance Burton … That scene is still around to a lesser degree with Cris Angel, Shin Lim, Mat Franco, and Penn and Teller, but a much more intimate experience is offered at the Magician’s Study — part speakeasy, part magic show, and part stand-up comedy.
The performance itself, roughly 90 minutes, is an up-close show, with a lot of sleight-of-hand and card tricks, mixed in with a little mentalism and a couple of traditional show-stopper tricks.
The room seats only about 50 people and VIP tickets (which I sprung for) get you in the front row, where you will become part of the show. If you’re shy, I wouldn’t recommend the VIP seats, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be left alone. There’s a lot of audience participation and plenty of acerbic wit from the host directed at the crowd.
The VIP tickets were $159 each, and I’m glad I got them, but you’ll enjoy the show just as much from the “regular” seats, which go for $99. Tickets can be purchased only with a code word at the beginning of the ordering process (fill out the form on the home page and if there’s availability, you’ll receive the secret password that allows you to unlock the ticketing page). In addition, the show is held at a secret location, which is given to you on the day of the show, along with another password to gain entry (for purposes of planning your evening, I’ll tell you that it’s somewhere on the South Strip).
Note that The Magician’s Study has a strict no-photography policy, which is why I couldn’t provide any pictures of the show. Also, you must be at least 21 to attend.
It is hot outside. The kind of hot where the right move is indoors, air conditioned, and in front of something cold and worth drinking. Las Vegas is built for exactly this. This week’s list has an indoor adventure park with a retro bar and arcade games, a fresh seafood happy hour served anywhere in the restaurant you want to sit, and an all-day sushi happy hour run by a chef who trained at Nobu and Yellowtail at the Bellagio. All three are verified. The AC is definitely on.
👉 See all verified Las Vegas happy hours at Happy Hour Vegas →
Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri 4–8 PM · 7980 W Sahara Ave
Spy Ninjas HQ is a 53,000 sq ft family adventure park — zip line, rock wall, trampoline zone, aerial net, the whole operation. The Retro Bar sits on the second floor with a direct view of all of it. Neon lights, 80s and 90s hits, classic arcade games, and a happy hour menu that makes the whole afternoon make financial sense.
Cheese Curds $8.50 · Quesadillas $11.50 · Chips, Salsa and Guacamole $5. Cold beer, wine, and signature cocktails at happy hour prices. There is also a Cocktail Claw Machine — yes, it is real, and yes, everyone wins. Watching your kids tackle the zip line two floors below while you play Donkey Kong with a $7 cocktail in hand is a specifically Las Vegas experience that does not exist anywhere else. This is a happy hour designed for parents who also want to have fun. It delivers.
Order this: $7 signature cocktail + Cheese Curds + a turn on the Cocktail Claw Machine. The view of the park from the bar is the real happy hour bonus — free of charge.
Where: 7980 W Sahara Ave, Las Vegas (West Sahara / Summerlin area)
👉 Full menu & hours at Happy Hour Vegas
Daily 3–6:30 PM · 5:30 PM close on Sundays · Two Las Vegas locations
Bonefish Grill calls their happy hour “Social Hour” and they mean it — this is one of the few happy hours in Las Vegas where the discounted menu is available at the bar, the dining room, and the patio. You pick where you want to sit. Same menu, same prices, anywhere in the restaurant.
Cocktails from $7 · Wine from $6 · Shrimp Toast $9 · Beef Cheddar Sliders $9. Two Las Vegas locations — Town Square near the Strip or the Summerlin location on the west side — means there is almost certainly one close to you. Both run the same menu at the same prices with the same upscale casual feel that makes this one of the most consistent happy hours in the valley. Fresh fish, cold drinks, real patio if you want one.
Order this: Shrimp Toast + a cocktail. The no-table-minimum, sit-anywhere policy is the hidden value here — come for drinks, stay for a proper happy hour meal without being cornered at a bar stool.
Where: Town Square Las Vegas (near the Strip) · Boca Park, Summerlin
👉 Full menu & hours at Happy Hour Vegas
Weekdays 11 AM–5 PM · 7060 S Durango Dr
The backstory matters here. Chef Ted Jung was the Master Sushi Chef at Nobu in Caesars Palace and then at Yellowtail at the Bellagio — two of the most recognized sushi programs in Las Vegas. He left to open his own place in a strip mall off the 215. That decision tells you something about the food.
Pier 215 specializes in high-quality seafood, sushi, and oysters at prices that have nothing to do with their Strip-level pedigree. The happy hour runs from 11 AM to 5 PM on weekdays — not a typo, and not a short window. The Waikiki Roll (Chutoro Carpaccio and Japanese Snapper Crudo) is $11 and was described by one HHV subscriber as “the bite that will set you free.” That is a strong endorsement and an accurate one based on what reviewers consistently say about the fish quality here.
Locals have known about this place for years. The Durango Casino opening across the street brought more traffic to the neighborhood. Easy off the 215, cool room, serious kitchen, all-day happy hour pricing that makes it worth building your afternoon around.
Order this: Waikiki Roll $11 · Spicy Tuna Roll (happy hour priced) · Ask your server what’s fresh. Chef Ted’s background means the fish sourcing is taken seriously — the answer will be worth following.
Where: 7060 S Durango Dr, Suite 101, Las Vegas · (702) 586-3311
👉 Full menu & hours at Happy Hour Vegas
An adventure park bar with arcade games and a zip line view. A seafood chain that lets you sit wherever you want. A strip-mall sushi restaurant run by a former Nobu chef with an all-day happy hour. None of these require a reservation. All three are open this week. When it is this hot outside, a cool happy hour is not a luxury it is a plan.
👉 Browse the full Las Vegas Advisor Happy Hours directory: 500+ verified happy hours with updated menus, hours, and prices across the valley.
The Happy Hour Vegas newsletter is free. No fluff, no filler, just curated deals, updated menus, and new finds from the team tracking 500+ happy hours across the valley. New issue with top 3 picks every week.
We have terrible news … as in Terrible’s is coming back to Primm, to try and revive the corpse of the erstwhile casino town. As you know, Primm and its $400 million price tag was the undoing of Herbst Gaming during the Great Recession. The Herbst boys grossly overpaid for three down-at-heels casinos and never recovered. Herbst got kicked out in 2010 and now is being positioned as the unlikely savior of the tumbleweed magnet. You might say Primm went from having no chance a couple of weeks ago to having a ghost of a chance now.
Continue reading Whistling Past the Graveyard?
A poster, Boris, wrote regarding one of my recent blogs: “You guys always seem to assume nobody makes a single mistake during play. Let’s be honest. Is it really possible to play mistake-free during such sessions?”
Although the question didn’t seem to flow organically from what others were discussing, I’m assuming that Boris is referring to me saying things like NSU is worth 99.73% and 9/6 JoB is worth 99.54% when played well — and other such references that regularly appear in my writings.
As for me personally, I definitely know every possible 9/6 JoB play. Whatever mistakes I make will be due to losing focus, or perhaps mis-keying. It doesn’t happen very often on this game.
With NSU, it’s a different matter. The game returns 99.728% when played perfectly — which I suggest nobody does. There are too many really rare situations. For example, who plays Q♠ T♥ 7♦ 8♦ 3♠ the same as he plays Q♠ T♥ 7♦ 8♦ 3♣? I know I throw all five cards away in both hands, but that is only the correct play on the first one. In the second I should keep 78. There are a lot of such plays listed in the appendices of the Winner’s Guide. Memorizing every last one of them is a difficult, time-intensive process — with limited value. Each of these hands come about very rarely and the difference between the best play and the second-best play is very small.
In my younger days, I studied the appendices regularly and probably played at the 99.725% level out of a possible 99.7285. Today at 79 years of age, it’s probably closer to 99.65%, if that. If I’m playing when I’m tired, I make more errors.
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I doubt that anyone plays 100% perfectly all of the time. So, if nobody plays this game at the full 99.728% level, why do I use 99.73% in my writings?
First, I need to know whether I’m playing above 100% or not when everything is included. If there are a half-percent of benefits, then I know this game qualifies whether I play perfectly or not. If I were considering playing 8/5 Bonus Poker (99.17%) with those same benefits, I would know that I’m below 100%.
Second, I want to know which game to concentrate on. For the games that can be analyzed on WinPoker, I know the “perfect play” returns of most of the higher-paying games. When I come across a game I don’t know, I figure out what the return is. Generally speaking, I’m only playing the loosest game in a casino for the stakes I’m interested in — and I need to know these numbers to know which game that is.
Third, merely being greater than 100% is not enough for me to play. I can’t support myself on break-even games simply because I have expenses (as we all do.) I look at the denomination, an estimate of how fast I play, the various benefits of the slot club, and the base game. Using 99.73% overestimates what I can get by a small bit, but it gives me a good idea of what I’m dealing with.
Fourth, I know that the next session won’t follow the book. I might win or lose, but it’s extremely unlikely to exactly match the expected return. There are positive and negative swings in gambling. I know this and so do my readers.
Fifth, I consider myself a video poker teacher and using these numbers is the best way I know to communicate with my readers. A high percentage of my readers check out my column at least semi-regularly. If every time I wanted to talk about NSU I’d say — “this pays 99.73% factored by your accuracy level” instead of just saying “99.73%”— that would get really old really fast.
I assume my readers know this and for practical purposes, using 99.73% is “close enough.” Even though it is an exaggeration for most of us — some more so than others.
To my Vegas homies and Golden Knights fans (just don’t kill the messenger).
I live in Raleigh. Yes, that Raleigh. OUCH! Home to your arch nemesis the Hurricanes. Sorry! Not.
Caniac fever’s off the charts here (right after college basketball). My friends were so obsessed with the Stanley Cup, they asked me to sacrifice some goats and throw in a few vestal virgins. I maybe handled the goats, but I draw the line at virgins. I mean what does vestal mean anyway?
Parade? Vegas gets a Bruno Mars parade and a street named after the billion-download- worldwide one-super-hit-after-another Pinky-Ring-killin’-it Allegiant-sell-out moneymaker. Cool.
We’re having 150,000 people at our parade — for hockey. Heck, we sold out the arena for the watch party.
Another thing Raleigh has in common with Vegas? Drought. But it’s raining today, in more ways than one.
Back in Vegas, shades of Ellis Island and its unlimited-drinks MRB coupon back in the day. These days, Golden Gate has unlimited free drinks from 6 to 7 p.m. and a chance to win up to $1,000 in free play at Prohibition Bar. Check it out and report back, please. I tried to confirm, but Derek went full customer non-service; when you call in, you’re sent to AI hell and wind up on hold forever.
Back here in Hurricanelandia, I’ve been working a frugal summer of fun. So far? Two Carolina beach trips, one on partial points, another super-frugal rate. Saw Earth Wind & Fire. Amazing. Going to Santana in early July, then Gladys Knight. All favorite performers and tickets for each concert under $100. I tend to be in the back at outdoor venues, so I can dance and I do. Let’s groove right?
How about premium floor seats at Usher/Chris Brown at $2,000 per ticket? Times two, that’s a hefty down payment ON A CAR. Guys, love your energy, but no way.
I’m more the personal experience, you know? Hanging with Bruno’s 175 pals, waving their pinky rings to the moon, watcha gonna do? This Bruno tour? Like Usher/Brown, insane prices, but if you’ve never seen Bruno and the Hooligans, they’re not too be missed. Bruno’s rocking the world after his Vegas parade and, oh yeah, he’s slated to make $500 million smackolas on this tour. That’ll keep him in Pinky Rings for the foreseeable future.
Now, have you seen Michael yet? $920 million worldwide. Biggest biopic ever. Beat Bohemian Rhapsody, which I saw three times as well.
Back to Vegas, the Plaza’s CEO, my man Jonathan Jossel dipped his toe in no resort fee nation water with another summer NRF deal.
Don’t ever change, Jonno. I mean that. Actually, you do keep changing and I love that. So scratch the “don’t ever.” Just keep “doin’ the things you do” (loved that movie too).
Enjoy the shows, peeps. And freebies. All of ’em. I know I will.
One news story today bravely tried to spin Atlantic City‘s flat May numbers as “marvelous.” Meh. Glass half-full: They weren’t off 2025’s pace. Glass half-empty: At a time when regional casinos are outperforming Las Vegas, you’d expect Atlantic City to get some love. Perhaps we are starting to see an incremental effect of Class III gambling in New York City, which is bound to skim off some of the Boardwalk’s cream. Let’s agree to say that Atlantic City is holding its own.
Continue reading Uh-oh, Atlantic City
The Mandalay Bay pool complex is one of the best in town. Given the regular pools, beach, wave pool, and lazy river, there’s a lot to choose from. You can elevate your experience even further by renting a cabana.
Due to all the options at the Mandalay pool complex, along with access by a limited number of non-hotel guests, it’s a busy and crowded pool complex, with lots of families and kids.
Since I was staying at the W, I could book a cabana (#W72) at the quieter pool, accessible by W hotel guests only, while being steps away from the main attractions.
The cabana comes with a fridge stocked with water and soda, plus a couple of dedicated loungers with an umbrella for shade and two inner tubes for use in the lazy river (more on that later), which I think normally rent for $30 each. The cabana also boasts a TV, ceiling fan, and safe for your valuables. The cabana technically seats six and I could have fit five other people, but that would have been a little tight. It would have been perfectly comfortable for four people. I was solo, so it was moot.
Towel and food/drink service were plentiful. I never had to wait long for an attendant to come by if I needed anything.
The full-day rental cost $375, but I booked it months in advance. Day-of reservations were going for at least $500.
I found the experience to be well worth it. I’m the kind of guy who likes to sit in the pool with my book and have someone bring me fruity drinks and I got exactly what I wanted. When I felt like it, I took a break to enjoy the wave pool, which is a fun, unique, Vegas attraction. I also tried the lazy river, but I don’t like this lazy river as much as other lazy rivers I’ve experienced in other cities; the current on this one was actually a little too fast for my comfort. It wasn’t really “lazy” at all!
It may not look like much from the outside, but new Hollywood Joliet (above) is driving the bus for Chicagoland casino grosses. It will very soon have competition from within the Penn Entertainment family, as even newer Hollywood Aurora opens this month. In fact, mega-kudos to Penn for finishing the newest casino one entire month ahead of schedule. That’s a feat unheard-of in Big Gaming, where the place usually isn’t even complete when it debuts. Let’s hope Penn has set an influential example.
Continue reading Mixed Signals; Sands’ Good Deeds
If you look up the season 1989 episode 45 of Jeopardy! (March 3 of that year) you’ll see what I looked like at age 42. I had studied hard for that appearance, but it turned out that I neglected to master a critical aspect of the game.
The rules were a bit different than they are now. Back then you could win up to five times in a row and then you were retired. Starting in 2003, you could keep going as long as you kept winning.
If you came in first place, or tied for first place with a greater-than-zero score, you got to keep the money you earned and come back and play in the next episode. If you didn’t win, you received no money. You were offered consolation prizes — which you paid taxes on, if you kept.
From the beginning of the contest, it was a back-and-forth match with all of us getting some answers correct and missing others. The part of the game that I hadn’t mastered was how much to bet during Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy. I thought it was fairly straightforward. I was wrong.
Early in the second half of the game, I landed on the Daily Double in “Astronomy” when I chose the bottom answer of that category — meaning it would be more difficult to get correct than if it had been one of the earlier answers. Choosing the Daily Double allowed me to bet any amount up to the total amount of my accumulated score. If I missed the question, the other contestants didn’t get a chance to get it correct.
While I haven’t seen a video of this episode in a while, this is what I remember: I was in third place going into the question, and if I bet everything and got it correct, I’d temporarily be in first place — with about a third of the game still to go.
If I bet everything and got it wrong, I would be wiped out and there was insufficient time left to recover and have a chance to win the game. If I bet less than everything, I’d at least have something left if I missed the question and could fight on from there.
Astronomy wasn’t my best subject. While I had taken an Introduction to Astronomy class in college more than 20 years previously, I didn’t remember much of what I had learned. I knew the planets in order (back then Pluto was still a planet!) and the names of some of the constellations. I certainly didn’t know the names of all the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. There were some questions I could answer, but not many.
The question became: How much should I bet? To simplify, I’ll give you three choices to consider:
A. “True Daily Double” — meaning I bet the maximum I could. This gives me the best chance to win the game if I get it right and wipes me out if I get it wrong.
B. Bet about 2/3 of my total — saving some money “in case” I got the question wrong. And I believed that I was probably going to get the question wrong.
C .Bet a minimal amount so my score wasn’t affected much whether I got it correct or not.
What would you bet?
I bet option b. The answer was something like: “Built on the palace grounds of Charles II beginning in 1675.”
I guessed, “What is the Greenwich Observatory?” and it turned out to be correct. I never knew when or where that observatory was constructed, but it seemed to be a momentous enough event to be worthy of a Jeopardy! question. My answer turned out to be correct — but my bet turned out to be wrong.
What I didn’t sufficiently realize at the time was that to win at Jeopardy!, you have to take your chances when they come. If I had missed the question, even if I had $1,000 left to play with, I would essentially be out of the game. Since I wanted to win (otherwise why would I be there?), I should have bet the farm and taken my chances.
As it turned out, had I bet everything and the rest of the game went as it did (big assumptions!), I would have tied for the lead following Final Jeopardy and come back to play on the next episode. Since I hadn’t bet everything, the leader going into Final Jeopardy was able to bet enough to shut me out if I bet everything and we both got the Final Jeopardy question right (which is what happened.)
So, I came in second place — got a Lazy Boy recliner (which didn’t survive the cut when I next got married) and a framed lithograph (which did). My first day of competition turned out to be my last day.
After the round was over, it was easy to calculate that I would have tied had I bet the Daily Double properly. While I couldn’t have known that was going to be the result when I made the bet, I should have been able to figure out that if I was going to win, betting everything on the Daily Double gave me the best chance. It was a small chance (I first had to get a difficult question correct) but it was my best chance.
Oh well. Spilt milk, and all that.
In case you want to test yourself on the Final Jeopardy question from that day in the category of “American Revolution,” the answer was:
One of the two people Paul Revere was attempting to warn when he made his famous ride.
While I didn’t know the correct question before hearing the answer, I knew that Revere’s ride was in the Boston area and one of the revolutionary firebrands in that part of the country was Samuel Adams, so that was what I guessed (in the form of a question.) It turned out to be correct and John Hancock would also have been correct.
I never watched the following episode to guestimate how well I would have done had I bet correctly and gone on. All in all, even though I didn’t win, I felt I had done pretty well — with one exception.
