The Slut Parade

This post is about what’s been happening in the MGM Grand poker room lately.

Alert readers will likely recall that I’ve never really mentioned the MGM poker room here on the blog before.  Even more alert readers will recall that in the past, people have asked me, here and in the Twitterverse, if BSC (which stands for “Big Strip Casino”) is actually the MGM poker room.

I have never officially and publicly, here on the blog or on Twitter, confirmed that.

And that’s all I have to say about that subject.  ;)

Anyway, I like the MGM poker room and something happened right about the time I arrived in Vegas last month that changed the playing conditions there quite a bit.  It has made it rather, um, challenging to play there and concentrate on the poker during certain hours.

It all has to do with a nightclub that opened there last month.  It is called Hakkasan and is supposedly the largest nightclub in the world.  It is five stories and also has a restaurant as part of its complex (the restaurant didn’t open until the tail end of my recent visit). 

The construction of this club, which replaced Studio 54, has wrecked havoc with the poker room.  For more than a year, the poker room kept moving back and forth between its old location, right near the club, and a temporary location just a bit down the way that almost no one seemed to like.  Business in the room took a hit, presumably from the constant moving and the fact that most of the time it was in the less preferred location. 

The room moved back to its old location at the beginning of the year, and that was supposed to be permanent—a “fact” I noted in my Ante Up column (here).  But then they moved back to the temporary location, just to make a liar out of me.  Then they moved back to the regular location again just before the club opened. 

That’s where they were last time I was in the room.  However, recent reports indicate that  they are soon to move back to that “temporary” location and that it may not be so “temporary” any more.  Now, as this post “goes to press,” I don’t believe it is yet 100% finalized where the poker room will end up. But I believe that this post will go a long way towards explaining why it is unlikely they will return to the original location—the location I am talking about in this post.

Because of the club, they had made a few changes to the room.  First of all, they took out a number of tables in order to make room for more foot traffic.  Because of all the people coming to the club, there are tons of people—non-poker players— traipsing through the poker room whenever the club is open (or close to opening).  So during the evenings, on days the club is open (Thursday through Sunday), there is a constant stream of people just using the poker room as a way to get from point A to point B.  This can be a bit distracting to those of us who possess a y-chromosome, as I will explain shortly.

Also, they put 4 blackjack tables right in the poker room, presumably because they want people who are leaving the club or waiting to get into it to have a way to lose money that is more profitable to the casino than poker is.

So picture this.  On nights when the club operates, people start lining up for it an hour or two before the opening.  Because the club is so big, they line up on both sides of the poker room.  And also, as I said, customers (mostly club-goers but really anybody in the MGM casino—a pretty big place, you know) are walking right through the poker room.

And because the club is the newest and biggest in Vegas, it is attracting huge crowds .  It has instantly become the “in” place for the club-going crowd, and will likely remain that way until the next big thing opens. 

So during these hours, if you are playing poker in the room, and you are in deep thought trying to figure out if you should bet or try for that check-raise, you can look up and will likely be distracted by all the people around you.  You can see one of the two lines, on either side of the room, from pretty much any table in the room, not to mention those actually walking through the room.

Do you know who mostly goes to nightclubs in Vegas (and elsewhere, I would imagine)?  Young people.  Twenty-somethings.  Maybe even under twenty-somethings.  A player mentioned that there’s likely a very good market for fake I.D.’s in a town like Vegas, with all the sins it has to offer, and that some of the patrons for the club looked under-age to him.

Shocking.

Furthermore, the gender-split among their customers is approximately 1000 to 1 female to male.  OK, I may be a bit off in that estimate.  I think that y-chromosome I was born with could be affecting my perception.  Just a bit.

Seriously, it’s not quite like that.  But there are at least 3 to 5 times more girls going to this club than guys.  Presumably this has to do with the fact that the cost to get into the club is totally discriminatory.  It costs something like $75 for the guys, and $30, I think, for the girls.

I thought such discrimination was against the law?  Why isn’t Gloria Allred suing this club on behalf of all the guys who are paying a penalty merely because they were born with the ability to urinate standing up?

Oh well, I don’t discuss politics on this blog.  It is what it is, and as a result, the crowd for this club is three-to-one (at least) female.    The point being that, there are just a ridiculous number of girls in their 20’s in and around the MGM poker room these days.

And do you know what girls these days wear to go to these clubs?

Nothing.

OK, not exactly nothing. 

Next to nothing.  As close to nothing as they can get away with without getting arrested.

I’m not exactly a club-going kind of guy, so I dunno what the girls wear when they go to clubs in other cities.  Maybe the same thing?  Beats me.

But if you’ve ever been to Vegas and have seen the crowd lined up for a hot nightclub, you surely know what I mean.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon for many years, happily so.  Every year, it seems the less and less material is actually used to make the outfits these girls wear.

It was Prudence who told me the name of the standard issue dress they almost all wear.  It’s called the “bandage dress.”  It seems to be the required uniform of the twenty-something female club goer.

Its properties consist of at least two (and frequently all three) of the following, which I will list in order of seeming importance:

1.  It is extremely, and obscenely, short.

2.  It is incredibly tight.

3.  It is low cut, revealing abundant cleavage.

Oddly enough (to me, anyway), the first two are almost equally omnipresent, whereas the cleavage is not nearly as universal.  Which is not to say there isn’t a helluva lot of cleavage on display on a club nite.  There is, but there’s a lot more upper thigh on display.

Believe it or not, the pictures below were the best I could find on the internet to give you an idea of what the average Vegas club-goer looks like (no, I didn’t take any pictures myself, preferring not to be banned from the MGM).   Trust me, these pictures don’t really do justice to reality.  The outfits the girls at the MGM are wearing are much, much shorter, much, much tighter, and reveal much, much more cleavage (when revealed) than these pics show.

I mean, the dresses are so short that the girls have to keep pulling them down, on the average of once every two minutes, in order not to reveal what Hustler magazine is famous for.  They are so tight that you have to wonder how they managed to get into them (in some cases, I’d pay to watch this).  You also have to wonder how they can bend.  And if they were ever to eat even a single saltine, you’d be able to tell by instantly seeing their stomach expand.  The outfits are especially tight across the butt.  I swear, following some of these gals, you’d be able to tell if they had hemorrhoids.  

As for the cleavage, well, you know, it’s cleavage.  It all depends on how well-endowed the gal is (or how big the implants she ordered were) and then how much she wants to show.  Some show plenty.  A common outfit I saw among the girls not wearing the bandage dress was a very low-cut look with the cleavage covered with a transparent mesh.  I guess this gives the impression that the dress isn’t as revealing as it is.  Or perhaps the mesh helps keep the ta-ta’s from falling out.

So I guess maybe the girl whose nipple I clearly saw needed that mesh top.  She wasn’t wearing the bandage dress.  She had a wide open top that was very lose fitting.  We were walking in opposite directions and as we drew up even, a quick glance to the side revealed that her nipple was right there in clear view for all the world to see.  This was no nip-slip.  It was just right there for the looking.

Which brings me to the title of this post.  The "Slut Parade” refers to the girls who dress like this and march through the poker room (or the rest of the casino), or line up to get into this hot nightclub.

Is that too harsh?  Is that unfair?  Am I being judgmental?  As it happens, one of my friends didn’t think it was a good idea to call this post “The Slut Parade.”  He said “slut sounds dirty and negative.”

However, these days, I’m not sure how negative “slut” is.  Last year, fellow blogger grrouchie  did a post about some female friends visiting him from out of town (see here).  One of them was debating if an outfit she was thinking of wearing out wasn’t a bit too slutty, before deciding (quoting grrouchie, quoting her) "I didn't f***ing come to Vegas to NOT dress like a slut." 

I don’t think this woman thinks of herself as a slut, and I don’t think she’d like it if, back in her home town, someone called her that.  But dammit, she came to Vegas to dress like a slut, and that’s what she did.

So, I think these girls know, whether or not they actually are sluts (and how one would objectively determine that, I have no clue) that they are indeed dressing like sluts when they go to these clubs, and they actually enjoy doing that.

I have no idea what these girls do in these clubs, or after.  For all I know they just enjoy the music, dance, and have an adult beverage or two.  And go back to their hotel room alone, and get up early the next day and go to church.

But they sure as hell dress like sluts, and they know it.  Whether or not they would admit to being sluts—or be offended by being called that—I think they would all cop to “dressing sluttily” and on purpose.  So I’m calling them “The Slut Parade.”

Thus, between say 9:00 PM and long past midnight, on a night when the club is open, there is quite the Slut Parade omnipresent in the MGM everywhere.  The sluttily dressed girls are everywhere—lined up outside the poker room, and constantly coming through it.

If you are a heterosexual male (and I plead guilty to that) it is a bit distracting to say the least.

OK, more than just a bit.

Now every guy in there has seen women wearing even less clothing. And every guy in there has seen better looking women.  But I doubt than anyone in the room has ever seen the sheer overwhelming quantity of sluttily dressed women in one place before.  It really is a sight to behold.

Truth be told, not all the girls are all that hot, of course.  Law of averages, you know.  Some of those girls are wearing dresses (particularly the bandage dress) they have no business wearing.  I mean, those dresses are so damn tight that if a gal is even half a pound overweight, you can tell.  And some of them, sadly are a lot more overweight than that.  Some of those bare legs don’t look all that sexy.  And some of those boob jobs….well.

But it doesn’t matter.  No matter what your taste, no matter what your preference, there are plenty, I do mean plenty, of your “type” on display.  Tall girls, short girls, skinny girls, voluptuous girls, blondes, brunettes, redheads, etc.  If one girl didn’t catch your fancy, chances are one of her girlfriends would.  Or two from the next group.

If only 5% of these girls could be considered “9’s” and “10’s”—that’s still a helluva lot of 9’s and 10’s in one place.  More than you’re likely to see anywhere else.

So it’s not that we’ve never seen sexy, slutty, nearly-naked girls before.  It’s just that we’ve never seen so many in one place at one time before.  Nobody has.  Hugh Heffner hasn’t.

And the truth is, no man in the history of mankind has ever seen "enough" scantily clad, hot women. Yes, that includes the aforementioned Mr. Heffner too.

Just try calculating whether or not you’re getting the right odds to call with your flush draw when you can look up and see at least 50 pairs of sexy legs, 50 barely covered asses, and enough bare boobage to satisfy….well, me.

My first two nights in town, I enjoyed this parade from different seats in the room.  Good seats for the eye candy, but not great seats.  During these sessions, when the Slut Parade (or “SP”, for short) was in full throttle, I had one male dealer whisper to me that for his entire down, he was following the game only peripherally.  He claimed to never have actually looked directly at the actual cards or chips.  I think he was exaggerating.  At least a little.

Another male dealer was relieved his patience had been rewarded.  Months and months of the room being moved back and forth, nothing much to see all that time, no club to attract the hot chicks.  Now he was been compensated in spades with the show.  He also wondered why it was that they just can’t make dresses long enough so that the girls didn’t have to spend every other minute pulling them down.  I wondered back why the dresses had to be made so tight that the girls could barely breathe.  And we agreed that sometimes the desire to wear the appropriate uniform overcame good sense and yes, some of those otherwise hot girls were wearing dresses way too tight for their figures, and it ruined the overall effect.  

One of those nights a group of four of these girls walked right by our table, I only saw three of them and they were all quite appealing.  I didn’t see the fourth one because she fell right behind the poker table.  This wasn’t that unusual, because a lot of these girls had trouble with the other requirement of the uniform that I haven’t mentioned, the ultra high-heel shoes.  So it wasn’t unusual to see the girls falling as they tried to figure out how to keep their balance in those shoes.

But when this gal was helped up by her girlfriends, I noticed another reason she might have fallen over.  She had enormous breasts, quite liberally exposed. She was pulled up right in front of me giving all the guys on my side of the table quite an eyeful as she straightened up.  Ahem.  As she moved on, I turned to the player on my left and said, “Well, no wonder she fell over.”

Although there were only guys around, he was very restrained with his response.  “I’m not saying anything.”

But on my third night there, a Sunday night, I got the absolute primo seat to enjoy the scenery.  I was at the table closest to the Slut Parade line, facing said line.  The dealers chair was practically up against the rail that separated the poker room from the rest of the casino.  This was the absolute best table to sit at if you wanted to see the greatest number of sluttily dressed women you’ll ever see in the flesh in your life.

There was some good poker played by yours truly before the SP started forming, and that story will eventually be told in a future blog post.  But for now, I can say that once the girls started lining up, no one at our table was really playing poker.

For a brief time the table thinned, we were six-handed and I wanted to see if we could a rake-reduction until more players showed up.  So, choosing my words carefully and purposefully, I said to the (male) dealer, “Can we get a rack-reduction….I mean a rake reduction?”

One guy came to the table and sat with his back to the line up, right next to the dealer.  He was distracted by the scenery behind him, so much so that he spent pretty much his entire time with his chair and head turned, only occasional facing the table to check his cards.  “I’ve got the wrong seat” was one of the first things he said.

He had started with $100 and hadn’t played a hand when, facing a raise, he just shoved his entire stack across the betting line, saying, “This is the first hand I’ve played, I’ve been here for awhile, I can’t concentrate on the poker, so I’ll just shove.  And then get out of here.”

But nobody called and he stayed.

Not long after, the seat next to me opened up.  I tried to get this guy’s attention to tell him he could move next to me and have a better view, without having to have his head turned the whole time.  But somehow, I was unable to get his attention before a woman took his seat—kind of a waste of a prime girl-watching seat.  And actually, another woman took a seat on the other side of the dealer.  One hand, I limped into a pot.  I have no idea what I had, but it must have been worth a limp.  The woman to my left limped as well, and it folded to the other woman at the table.  She raised to $10.  Folded back to me and I folded.  The other woman called.

I don’t remember the hand but when it was over, I explained to the dealer, “I wasn’t about to play in a raised pot against the only two people at the table who are actually paying attention to the poker."

But the woman to my left disputed that.  “We’re distracted too.  There are some good looking guys there too.”

I said, “There are guys there?

“Yes, of course there are guys there.  They’re looking to get laid.”

She had misinterpreted my comment.  I wasn’t disputing that guys would be going to the club and I understand the reasoning.  I knew this was not a lesbian night club.  I was merely trying to point out that it was impossible for me to even notice anything but the hot girls.  If the five most famous men in the world stood right in front of me, I would have been incapable of noticing them.

The other woman pointed out that not only were there good looking guys distracting them, but some of the girls were actually distracting to them too.

Understandable.

One guy at the table noted that this was the tightest NL table he’d ever seen.  No one was raising, no one was even calling.  He likened it to a 2/4 game.  Another guy said that he had absolutely no read on anyone at the table—he had not followed a single hand since he had gotten there.

I told one of the male dealers that they should really have made this particular table a 2/4 table so it would be less dangerous.  I kind of wished I was back playing 2/4 right then.  I commented to a couple of the male dealers as they took their seats, with their back to SP behind them, that it was too bad they didn’t have eyes in the back of the head.  One said, no need, he’d just strain his neck turning around constantly to check out the action.

Meanwhile, the guy who had made the $100 shove explained, with his back to us as he checked out the girls, “I’m 33 years old and I know I’m acting like I’m 21.  But I’m from Portland.  You don’t see anything like this in Portland.”

I said, “You know, right now, we’re all 17.  Check that, right now, we’re all 13.”  Everyone agreed.

This guy was commenting on the women he was seeing.  I couldn’t hear much of what he said, but he was apparently saying things like, “the girl in red is hot,” and “the girl in black is awesome.”  Apparently he was revealing his predilections, which included a strong preference for large derrieres.   The dealer at one point said, “All I hear out of this guy is incoherent grunts and colors. ‘Uh….red….oh…blue.”  I did hear him say, when he noticed a woman who was especially top heavy, “Oh, I wish what was going on with her on top was also going on with her in back.”  When the player next to me saw me taking notes (about the poker), he asked if I was keeping track of this guy’s tastes in women.  I assured him I was not.

A topic of discussion was the guys trying to figure out how some people—women mostly—were being sent to the front of the line while others stayed in the same place in line for a long time. 

“Is it decided by how hot the girls are?  Hottest girls get sent straight to the front?  Maybe they have a scale there and weigh them?”

One guy said, “Oh my god, they actually let one gal go to the front with flats.”

I said, “You’re looking at the feet?

“Well, I’m looking at the whole outfit.”

That’s about all the comments I can remember from this evening.  As I said, poker from this session will be discussed later.  And as I tell additional stories from this particular trip, more vignettes about the Slut Parade will be sprinkled throughout the posts I do about this Vegas trip.  Consider this your introduction to The Slut Parade.

((For more on the Slut Parade, see the follow up post here.  And for an idea about what the Slut Parade is like on Halloween, see the post here.  And if you want to know what it was like on New Year's Eve, see here.  AND....added 4/16/15, a review of the "new" Slut Parade at Caesars Palace can be found here.))