My friend Eric came out to Las Vegas from Monday midday until Wednesday night. His friend Mordy was out here on assignment for ESPN The Magazine. I don’t know if I’m supposed to publish the topic of Mordy’s article but I’m pretty sure that I can say that it’s about poker. So I hung out with them two of them a bunch in the early part of this week. On Tuesday we went up to the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop on Las Vegas Blvd. It’s the pawn shop that is featured on History’s Pawn Stars. Pretty cool to go see it and see what they had in stock. It’s amazing how different it looks in person. I’d actually imagined a much bigger store. I think the coolest items they had there were some NFL and NBA championship rings. Unfortunately they were asking 100k for them so I don’t think I would have been able to negotiate a price that I was willing to pay.

After the pawn shop we looked up a gun range for us to go shooting at. We found a place called Las Vegas Gun Range and all of the reviews said that it was a shitty gun range for regulars and that they just catered to tourists. In other words, perfect for us. None of us had much experience with guns at all. I’d shot an M16 in Israel when I was 16. I actually learned to disassemble and reassemble it too but that was so long ago I’d actually forgot pretty much everything I’d learned about it 11 years ago. So we ended up at this place:

That’s Eric on the left and Mordy on the right. We ended up going with a few different packages. Eric opted to just shoot the handgun while Mordy and I each picked handgun/machine gun options. I also got a t-shirt which I got to shoot up with the handgun. Here I am shooting the machine gun (Eric actually managed to get a shot with the flash coming out of the barrel or whatever it’s called):

That was a cool experience. One downside to being lefty is that the shells come flying out of the right side of the gun and a few of them hit me in the face. I wonder if I can get a lefty gun next time. Anyway, next was the handguns. Here’s a picture I took of Eric shooting the handgun.

Of the three of us, Eric was probably the best. He took aiming pretty seriously compared to Mordy and I. I also have this video of me shooting the handgun at the t-shirt. I didn’t take the first clip very seriously but the second one I actually tried to aim a bit. It’s amazing what aiming will do for shooting accuracy.

Anywho, good experience. I’ll definitely do it again and try to improve my accuracy next time. After Eric and Mordy left on Wednesday I went bowling with Ozzy at Sunset Station. They have a huge bowling alley and it’s amazingly cheap. We bet $20 on the first game. It was not close at all, he was having a lot of trouble finding the middle of the lane for most of the night. He started to get hot the last few frames of the second game (understandably he called off the bet on the second game) but it was way too late. Fun game, I’d like to go back sometime with a bunch of people. Here’s a pic of Ozzy bowling:

After I dropped him off at the Bellagio I went home to play around on my new MacBook Pro. While Eric was here I upgraded to the new Core i7 2.66GHz 15″ MacBook Pro. I also upgraded the RAM to 8GB and got the antiglare high res screen. It’s a very high end laptop but I spend so much time on the computer it’s worth it in my opinion. Eric bought my old 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 15″ MacBook Pro as he was looking to pick up a new laptop and it is still a great computer.

I guess the last thing to talk about is the WPT Championship. I have been down there a few of the days this week and I have to say it’s great to see a lot of old friends here. I have been pretty out-of-touch while living in Costa Rica and Cayman and I’m glad to be back in Vegas. Last night I went to dinner with a bunch of people (ike, his girlfriend, aaronbeen, RandALLin, Ozzy, mastrblastr/Scott Seiver, etc). I haven’t done stuff like that in a few years so I’m looking forward to a lot of that over the next few months during WSOP time and such.

Related posts:

1. Balla Watch Contest: $25K WPT Championship
2. PokerStars Blogger Championship
3. new wii bowling high score (i think)
4. Some weight loss, birthday & bowling
5. Gigabet, sheets, Ozzy and N 82 on the WPT