Vegas on the Fast Track – check out the Vegas monorail system
Las Vegas Monorail
The traffic on the strip is anything but Vegas on the fast track. The Casino owners on the strip love it that way as they wish to keep you right where you are – in their casino, restaurants and shops. If like most visitors you want to explore the strip we recommend you forget about renting a car or hail a taxi and consider staying at a property on the strip where everything you’re interested in is in easy walking distance.
Alternatively, if you want to move around a lot, consider a hotel such as the SLS Las Vegas or the MGM Grand with a monorail station on property. The route of the Vegas monorail parallels the Strip between Tropicana and Sands Avenues and then cuts east to the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Westgate Las Vegas before continuing to the last stop at the SLS hotel. Trains run approximatively every ten minutes between 7 a.m. and midnight on Monday, until 2 a.m. Tuesday – Thursday, and until 3 a.m. on weekends. The trip on the Vegas monorail from one end of the line to the other takes about 15 minutes and includes seven stops. The fare for a single one-way ride is $5. The one-day-fare (24 hours from first use) is a much better deal at $12. The three-day unlimited travel card is $28. The Vegas monorail is a godsend to convention and trade-show attendees. Tourist, especially families visiting with small children too will enjoy the comfort of a fast and air-conditioned commute on the Las Vegas monorail, especially during the summer months. Check out the Las Vegas Monorail map for hotels located along the route and up-to-date pricing and specials.
Speed counts not only on the Vegas Monorail
Speed counts in the casino, too. In blackjack, the idea is to deal as many hands as possible per hour. The game combines chance and skill and the players compete against the house (the dealer). Much has been written about winning at blackjack. It’s been said that by keeping track of cards played (and thereby knowing which cards remain undealt in the deck), a player can raise his or her bets when the deck contains a higher-than-usual percentage of aces, tens, and picture cards. In practice, however the casino confounds efforts to count cards by combining several decks together, “burning” cards (removing undisclosed cards from play,) and keeping the game moving at a fast pace. For more tips on the need for speed in Vegas read Bob Sehlinger’s article in USA Today.
Bob Sehlinger
Bob Sehlinger is the author of the Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas. The book gives honest and outspoken advice and rates over 100 hotels and casinos – the most offered by any guidebook – plus proven strategies for getting the best rate. Enjoy in-depth critical reviews of Las Vegas’s 70 best shows and nearly 30 top nightspots. More than 70 restaurants are reviewed, plus the best buffets rated and ranked. Last but certainly not least 50 pages offer gambling tips, including how to play, recognize sucker games, and cut the house advent to the bone.
About the author: Bob Sehlinger, a Lowell Thomas Award-winning journalist, is best known as the creator and producer of The Unofficial Guide series. He is credited with being the first to apply research techniques from the fields of operations research and statistics to travel guides. Among other projects, he was able to develop mathematical models that could save theme park patrons more than three hours of standing in queue in a single day.
Bob Sehlinger is founder and co-owner of Keen Communications, a book publishing company that includes Menasha Ridge Press, Clerisy Press, and Wilderness Press. The author of 27 books, Sehlinger is a past president of the Publishers Association of the South, and has served at the invitation of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Information Service on educational missions for publishers in Hungary, Romania, and Russia.
Vegas Monorail picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Larry D. Moore CC-BY-SA-3.0
