Guys love strippers and strip clubs, and that’s always been one of the big draws for places like Las Vegas. We’ve been going there for years, and we’ve spent plenty of time at some of Vegas’s legendary strip clubs. Old favorites include Olympic Gardens and Crazy Horse Too.

Things have chaged quite a bit, and they have certainly become more expensive. But if you do it right, you can have quite a time with your friends in Vegas strip clubs (or of course on your own!).

Strippers in general can be the ulimate party girls . . . that’s what they’re paid for!! But if you have some game (or you’re a high roller) you can sometimes get them out of the club for even more fun.

With that backdrop, a few of us recently spent some time in Vegas and hit several of the clubs. Here are some of our observations.

Sapphire

We had heard great things about the changes in Sapphire so we made this our priority stop, and frankly we were pleasantly surpised. They’ve remodeled the place, so it’s not smaller and more intimate. So overall it’s a pretty easy floorplan to manage.

What stood out was the quality of the talent. The place was loaded with beauties who were all very eager for attention. We were also impressed with the variety. Many of the clubs are packed with Latinas, which can be great if that’s your cup of tea, but variety is critical if you want to please all your customers. That wasn’t a problem here. Two blonde and athletic twins stood out!

Like many of the clubs, you can call them for a ride, which let’s you avoid the cover charge assuming you tip the driver. We recommend trying this for all the clubs.

One quibble we had involved the main stages. They just don’t get enough of the dancers in the rotation on the main stages.

Overall, the experience here was our favorite so you can’t go wrong with Sapphire.

Spearmint Rhino

This has been a top club in Vegas for years, and based on our visit it’s still going strong. This place always has tons of girls, and most are very attractive. They do a very good job of screening the talent. It’s much darker than Sapphire which creates a different vibe. But it’s also a bit easier to find a dark corner for some intimate dances.

Overall, this one is still a very solid choice.

Crazy Horse III

This was by far the biggest disappointment of the trip. It was epensive, dark and very quiet. No dances on the floow – you had to go the back room. Not ideal! If you have a ton of money to spend that can be fine, but it makes the general vibe very boring and dead.

We remembered the legendary Crazy Horse Too, so maybe we had distorted expections. But this is nothing like that old classic club.

We wish we had more time to visit more clubs. We heard that the Peppermint Hippo was also a good option. We’ll try that one out next time!

The New York Times has published an in-depth profile of Thomas Goldstein and it’s worth a read for anyone who is interested in the world of high stakes poker.

It’s a wild story of a man who was at the top of his game as a lawyer who had a successful practice arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He basically had it all. But then he got involved in the world of poker and found that his aggressive courtroom style translated to the game of poker. He could play without even looking at his cards, as he would go overboard bullying and bluffing other players.

Goldstein went deeper and deeper, to the point that he was winning and losing tens of millions of dollars. The numbers here are just crazy. Of course he loved the lifestyle as well, as he indulged in having multiple sugar babies while concealing everything from his wife.

Now he’s been indicted for tax fraud and mortgage fraud. Of course he’s fighting it, but the case has exposed his scret life, and the secret world of high stakes poker.

Check it out!

Cheating is the last thing you should have to worry about at a high stakes private poker game. Perhaps that’s naive, but the minute anyone suspects a game may be rigged, then there’s a chance that poker game withers and falls apart.

Recent news however suggests that cheating may be a real issue, particularly with some games run by the mob.

If you’ve followed the NBA this season, you’ve probably heard the name Chauncey Billups—not for his coaching the Portland Trail Blazers to a surprise playoff push, but for the bombshell federal indictments that dropped on October 23, 2025, tying him to a sprawling gambling conspiracy.

While the betting angle has rocked the NBA, with accusations of leaked injury reports and lineups for prop bets, the poker side is where things get truly cinematic, exposing how elite private games, often glamorized as playgrounds for celebrities and tycoons, are ripe for sophisticated scams.

At its core, the allegations paint Billups as a key player (pun intended) in luring high-rollers to illegal, invite-only poker nights in luxury spots like New York lofts and Las Vegas suites. These weren’t your casual home games; stakes ran into the hundreds of thousands per hand, drawing in Wall Street execs, tech moguls, and fellow athletes who trusted the “NBA family” vibe Billups brought. But according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, it was all a setup orchestrated by organized crime associates who used sophisticated methods of cheating.

The cheating methods? Straight out of a spy thriller. Indictments detail:

• X-ray vision tables: Custom poker tables embedded with hidden cameras and X-ray tech to scan players’ hole cards from below, feeding real-time intel to colluding “house players” (shills posing as amateurs).
• Rigged shufflers and marked decks: Automatic card machines programmed to deal favorable hands, plus decks with invisible ink readable only by accomplices’ special lenses.
• Collusion via signals and apps: Subtle hand gestures, coded texts, or encrypted apps to tip off partners about bets and folds, ensuring the house always won big—allegedly fleecing victims of over $10 million since 2022.

Many pros suspected these games were rigged, as losers were beating professional poker players. Most others, like high rollers who loved access to professional athletes and celebrities, had no idea.

These revelations show how low some of the mob operations have sunk. They will also likely have a big impact on private games in the future, with players being much more cognizant of how to avoid being cheated.

Be careful out there!

A series of errors, bad calls, fluke plays and dumb decisions led to an epic comeback by the Jaguars.

But at 27-0, nobody really thought that was possible. So one high roller placed a money line bet for the Chargers to win the game, laying down $1.4 million!!, just to win $11,200!!

In many ways this was easy money, and high rollers do this all the time. But sometimes you can get crushed.

Darren Rovell tweeted out the details of this epic bad beat:

And you thought you had a rough day?

We’ve all been there. You’re playing blackjack and some idiot at the table keep making idiotic decisions. And sometimes those decisions negatively affect your hand. If you’re betting big dollars, that can really hurt.

More often than not, someone at the table will get really pissed off at the novice player, and that often leads to silly shouting matches.

Avoid being the angry player at all costs.

This scene from the television show “Entourage” offers a good example of why you shouldn’t get angry.

Vince and the gang head to Las Vegas when Vince is offered $100,000 to host a party. Ari comes along with them, and he and Vince agree to split winnings and losses. Vince loves blackjack and has a knack for it. Plus he doesn’t get frazzled easily, even when he loses the $100,000 and more. Ari is a maniac, so he’s going cray watching Vince try to make a comeback.

Things come to a head when Vince gets a pair of eights. He splits, get another eight, splits again, and then gets a three, which leads him to double down. The hand is worth over $300,000.

Meanwhile, the idiot player at the end of the table decides to split kings. Naturally, Ari freaks out and yells at him, while the guys pulls two tens, which easily could have been the bust cards for the deal, who had a three showing.

But the dealer flops over an eight, and would have had 21 had the idiot not split his tens. Instead, the dealer draws another three instead, before pulling another ten to bust.

The lesson is simple. The idiots, can just as easily help your hand as they can hurt your hand. You’ll always remember the hands where they hurt you, but they can help as well. It’s all random, so don’t let it bother you.

Which leads to the next lesson. Getting angry is never helpful when you’re gambling. You want to strip out your emotions, not get distracted by them.

Just watch lunatic Ari in this clip. Of course the guy is a caricature of an emotional gambler, but you never want to be anything close to that.

If you love poker, you probably enjoy the characters you meet along the way as well. Also, all the different setting from back room games with friends to upscale private settings. It’s part of the fun. Unless you’re one of those players who can’t control him or herself. High stakes poker, like any form of high takes gambling, can crush souls and ruin lives. The key is to enjoy the thrill of this intoxicating game without letting it destroy you.

In “Molly’s Game” we get a glimpse into the world of private, high-stakes poker games in Los Angeles and New York. It’s a world filled with celebrities, athletes, beautiful women and plenty of booze and drugs. It’s a target-rich environment if you’re a smart and disciplined player. But for many others it’s a seductive trap that can often lead to a spectacular crash.

Warning: spoilers will follow.

The film is based on the true story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a young and beautiful Olympic-class skier who ran the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested by the FBI. When she got started in LA, her games had a buy-in of $10,000. In New York the buy-ins ballooned up to $250,000. For years she made her money on tips for her and the lovely hostesses she hired, keeping the game legal. By the end she was hooked on drugs to keep her awake and she started taking a rake, which made her game illegal. She got sloppy, and in the end it cost her. She eventually found herself being woken up one morning by FBI agents holding automatic weapons.

She wrote a book about her experience which was adapted into a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Naturally, Sorkin added quite a few dramatic scenes and composite characters to the story along with the crisp and witty dialogue we’ve come to expect from him. But the film is true to many of the details from the book. The players who attended her poker games in LA included huge stars like Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

The celebrity angle is key. Molly used this to recruit new players. Poker players love a challenge, and the allure of playing with big stars helped Molly build a hugely successful game. In the film, Sorkin uses a composite character called Player X (Michael Cera) as the famous actor. Player X loves to destroy lives, and relishes humiliating other players using his skills. And this is a key lesson – if you’re going to be star-struck, you don’t belong in these games.

The film is loaded with lessons for high rollers and lower-stakes players as well. One character loses it after a bad beat. He’s a disciplined poker player, always playing tight and winning consistently over time. But then he goes “full tilt” after the bad beat, losing over $1.2 million in the process. Never let yourself lose control like that. If you let your emotions get the best of you, you’ll end up losing your money eventually.

Also, these high stakes games are loaded with degenerates. Molly loses her Los Angeles game when Player X gets angry with her. Molly discovers he’s staking other players, and he refuses to stop. He doesn’t like her rules, so he takes away all her players. He calls her on her cell phone, cackling with laughter as he tells her how f#cked she is. Apparently, in real life it was Toby Maguire who made that call, though he wasn’t the celebrity who took away her game.

But there’s more of course. One player who consistently lost big money in Molly’s LA game was simply recruiting clients to his hedge fund, which was actually a Ponzi scheme. He flips later in the story. And then we have the Russian mob once she brings her game to New York. In a scene pulled from her book, Molly gets beaten and robbed in her apartment and has a gun placed in her mouth by a mob enforcer. That’s what happens after you politely decline an offer of protection.

Chastain is brilliant in this film as Molly. She handles Sorkin’s dialogue with impressive skill, working effortlessly opposite Idris Elba and the rest of the impressive cast. Elba plays her lawyer Charlie, a fictional character created by Sorkin to help drive the story. Molly always looks gorgeous, flashing her lovely cleavage even when she’s dressing down, but she and the glamourous hostesses she hired never hook up with the players. It’s a rule that was critical to her success, and this was important to her from a personal perspective as well. She wasn’t a prostitute. But this becomes an issue when Player X resents the lack of personal attention.

In the end, we get to see a lot of the glamour surrounding these high-stakes private games, along with the potential pitfalls. Many of you won’t be able to resist this thrill if you can ever get invited to one of these games. Just be careful . . .

If you love the Super Bowl and you crave the ultimate high roller experience, a Super Bowl in Los Angeles is pretty damn enticing. LA is the ultimate destination spot for high end parties in a town filled with celebrities, and now they have a stadium venue that lives up to the glitzy LA lifestyle people want to experience when they visit this amazing city.

Check out this video for a cool overview of everything SoFi Stadium has to offer in terms of luxury for VIP visitors. Yes, you’re going to break the bank to party there, but what’s the use of being a high roller if you’re not going to spend it at events like the Super Bowl. SoFi Stadium is a $5 billion project that has set new standards for luxury in sports stadiums:

Kroenke built 260 luxury suites and more than 13,000 premium seats — and that official count seems low when you’re wandering through its seemingly endless succession of posh, shiny areas.

In keeping with the Southern California theme, a three-story “Beach House” club area is connected by an Instagram-bait staircase. Several large, connected suites called “Bungalows” sit just beyond the end zones, enticing rich fans with the chance to be a few feet from a receiver catching a touchdown pass.

And then there’s the Executive Club, a 75,000-square-foot corridor circumnavigating the field underneath the stands. It has everything from marble-paneled elevator banks and gorgeous lounge areas to four separate bars focused on a single beverage: champagne, tequila, whiskey and wine.

If you consider that you’re not getting into this place for the Super Bowl for anything less than around $5,000 for a ticket, you can imagine how much you’ll be dropping for the VIP experience. If you want a VIP Suite at SoFi for the Super Bowl, you’ll be dropping a whopping $1.2 million for the experience!

Of course, having the Los Angeles Rans playing in this game, in their home stadium, raises the stakes even higher. The celebrity community always loves a party, but having the star-studded home team in the Super Bowl adds even more excitement to the weekend. You could hardly come up with a bigger contrast between the Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. There were stories of how few Bengals fans were making the trip to LA for the game, but that shouldn’t be surprising given what we’ve covered here. Not many people can afford this crazy experience, and watching the game on a big screen TV with all your friends is still and damn good experience.

Still, Joe Burrow has some of the Hollywood flair that would fit this event. He comes from small-town Ohio but his Joe Cool image fits this Super Bowl like a glove. He’ll be lighting up a nice cigar if he wins the game. But the Rams are loaded with high-profile players, and the after parties will probably be even better than the pre-game parties if the Rams can pull this off.

The key of course is finding you’re way to the right party. What are you looking for? Celebrities? NFL legends like Joe Montana? We would lean towards all the LA hotties, model and actress wannabe’s and sugar babies that flock to La La Land. But that’s just us . . .

It’s hard to imagine any city topping LA for a VIP Super Bowl experience, until of course the Super Bowl arrives in Las Vegas!