Vegas VIP: Having a Bachelor Party in Las Vegas

by Jake Gosselin | Jul 15 2008

I recently broke with my Las Vegas bachelor party tradition and handed off all the planning and heavy lifting to the bachelor party professionals at Vegas VIP. Since I consider myself an expert in the art of hosting a Vegas bachelor party, it was with a little hesitation that I handed the reins over to them.

They have various bachelor party packages that you can choose from that include everything from golfing to strip clubs to brew pubs. Our bachelor, let us call him Rob for anonymity's sake, is the kind of guy who likes to get drunk in a pub and have women dance naked in front of him. That's simple enough. We opted for a modified bachelor party package that saw us starting the evening by being picked up in a limo from our hotel and being driven to the Gordon Biersch Brewery for food and beer and then getting limo service to the Sapphire Strip Club.

The night started beautifully with us leaving the Rio. Anytime I'm going away from the Rio it's a good thing. I can't stand the Rio, but that's where I had to stay since I was down in Vegas covering the World Series of Poker which unfortunately takes place in this dank pit of a casino.

The VIP limo was sleek, stylish and a great place to start drinking. The driver was a beautiful woman with razor sharp wit. So the night started well.

She drove us to our first stop and we stumbled out into the dying Vegas sunlight, and there before us was an oasis in the desert of beer mediocrity: the Gordon Biersch Brewery. Waiting at the entrance was our Vegas VIP host, Dan. Dan introduced himself and led us inside where our seats were waiting for us.

Since our meals had been preordered weeks in advance, all we had to do was sit down and point at the beers we wanted to drink. We managed this quite well and the beer and food began to flow. Flash fried calamari, tomato basil pizza, baby greens salad, our choice of an entree followed up by chocolate cake.

This bachelor party tale comes with a couple warnings and this is where warning No. 1 comes in: Don't eat too much. You need to eat something so you don't get sloppy drunk too quickly, but if you eat too much, you could end your night right there. Too full to drink more and sleepy from a giant meal, you will be left to nod off in a corner while your buddies tear up the night.

As part of our Vegas bachelor party package, we were allowed, nay, obligated, to drink as much beer as we could in the two hours we spent at the micro brewery. The beer there was fantastic (I'd like to give a special shout out to the Bock and the Marzen) and none of us had a problem at putting back an average of one pint per 15 minutes. We were loose. We were limber, and we were ready for the next stop. Dan met us again and directed us to the limo waiting outside.

Next up was the Sapphire Strip Club. The Sapphire, it turns out, is the largest strip club in the world. It’s also definitely one of the best in Las Vegas. Dan brought us in through the VIP entrance and we were then led to a table reserved for us. It was there that I watched my fellow bachelor partiers descend into stripper madness. As a broke married man, I was left to observe the ensuing debacle. The strippers with their heightened sense of smell (for money) quickly pick up on my cheapness and descended on the rest of the table like lions on a fat, fresh antelope.

This is where warning No. 2 comes into play. As one of my companions, let us call him Davin for anonymity's sake, found out, strippers take credit cards. When combined with large amounts of liquor, this can be a deadly combination.

Davin found himself in the VIP room with a stripper not once, but twice. He was so thoroughly charmed that he simply handed her his credit card and acquiesced to her every suggestion. I have no idea whether any state laws were broken up there, but I'm pretty sure that at least a few ethical and possibly hygienic ones were.

When Davin returned from his first trip upstairs, he had a grin so wide and enduring I was afraid his lips might crack. When it was time for all of us to go, he made a quick last minute decision to return to the VIP room instead. Sadly, we were forced to leave him behind as we knew he wouldn't be back until Visa pulled the plug on him. As we left, I whispered a prayer into the night: "God speed Davin, and may the Patron Saint of Strippers, Hunter S. Thompson, smile on you tonight."

From there, we went back to what we did best: gamble. We returned to our go-to casino for Craps on the Strip: the Paris Las Vegas. I'm not sure what kept bringing us back to Paris for Craps. Was it the $10 minimums? Was it that Craps is French in origin? Was it that the waitresses now recognized us and knew that everyone in our party tipped well and always made sure we had two drinks each? Whatever the reason, it was the casino of choice when we wanted to play Craps.

Now, most people don't know how to play Craps and never bother to learn, and that's a huge mistake. The thing about Craps is that it's not only the most entertaining game in a casino, but it also has the second best odds in a casino (next to Blackjack), assuming you play it correctly.

So we lit the table up and rode a few hot rolling sessions that recouped most of the group's strip club losses. Craps, it has been said, is a party at a table, and that night did not disappoint us. We bought a few Cohiba's from the cigarette girl and went on to punish our livers like the good little bachelor partiers we were.

We found Davin the next day wandering shoeless through the Rio casino. He had drunk through the night and exchanged phone numbers with a stripper whom he reportedly had made a sushi date with.

We led Davin to bed and assured him that if his stripper truly loved him, as he claimed, she would understand if he didn't answer his phone for a few hours (she had said she would call him for a sushi lunch date). He passed out and dreamed of Coronas, casinos and exotic dancers. Crumpled in his fist was a wad of papers. We unfolded them and couldn't believe what we saw: They were all the receipts from the strip club that added up to an unfathomable, ungodly sum, too great to repeat here. My keyboard just doesn't have enough zeroes.