Fun & Gaming

Best fast hangover cure

The Atlantis’ OUTSIDE elevator
3702 S Virginia St., 825-4700
OK, it’s 11 a.m. on Saturday. Friday evening, night and early Saturday morning are a blur—too many mojitos at Tonic. Your head- and body-aches are crippling. You might as well face it: You’ve got the mother of all hangovers. Everyone knows the only true hangover cure is a hair of the dog, but even the slightest sip of a Bloody Mary or a red beer can send weakened weekend warriors down the slippery slope of another all-day runner. Here’s what you do. Drive over to the Atlantis, have a nice greasy breakfast in the coffee shop—maybe ham steak, eggs, hash browns with a side of pancakes. Go to the elevators on the north side of the casino and hop in the glass one. Push the button for the highest floor. If you suffer from acrophobia at all, the combination of heightened respirations, palpitations, ham molecules and adrenaline will blast the pain away. Not that anybody over here has tried it or anything.

Best place to prep for the next World Poker Tour at the Reno Hilton

Your friend’s living room
After the popularity of Celebrity Poker Showdown on the Bravo network and the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel, No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker has become a popular game in some Reno circles. If you want to get really good, your best bet is wagering at a friend’s house, where the stakes aren’t high and you can buy in for $5 or $10, rather than the $5,000 required to buy into world tour games like those at the Reno Hilton. Playing at home also gives the peace of mind of knowing that your losses aren’t going to a casino but instead to a guy who’s got a wife and baby at home or maybe to a guy who just needs to buy the latest Xbox game. There’s no cocktail waitress bringing free drinks, but a $6 12-pack of Pabst shared among friends is worth a night’s worth of free Jack and Cokes.

Best place to make a wish

Fountain of Fortune at the Eldorado Hotel Casino
345 N. Virginia St., 786-5700
It’s not surprising that casino resorts in Nevada often choose classical and Renaissance art to decorate their buildings. Those artistic styles convey beauty and grandeur. While no casino could ever compare to the magnificence of the Roman Coliseum or the Parthenon, that doesn’t stop casino owners from trying to put themselves on the level of these masterpieces. Eldorado goes for a Greco-Roman look with its indoor fountain, located in front of its Roxy restaurant and right before the casino meets the Silver Legacy. The running water offers a soothing element to all the bleeping slot machines. Tourists even take pictures of it, as if it were some ancient fountain unearthed in the middle of a modern casino. While you probably don’t pray to those gods, it couldn’t hurt to toss a coin and ask Fortune to reward you with a jackpot. On the other hand, if you’ve already left some cash on the tables downstairs, you can consider that your offering to Lady Luck.

The best tourist attraction tourists seldom see

W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum
Folks who look for museums in Northern Nevada are often directed to the Nevada Museum of Art, the National Automobile Museum or the state museum, but in this mining state, the mining museum gets overlooked. It’s on the ground floor of the Mackay School of Mines at UNR at the north end of the campus quad. Not just a collection of rocks—though those are certainly there—it includes mining machinery, historic photographs, maps and a mock-up mining office. (The museum once included a black-light booth in which kids delighted in seeing minerals that were not otherwise visible revealed on the surface of rocks, but it broke many years ago and for some reason never got fixed.) This museum doesn’t have the chrome/tile/glass personality of some of the museums mentioned here. The feel is of hardwood floors and polished wood display cases, of the warmth of light bulbs instead of the chill of fluorescents. A decade ago, those who love this museum worried that, when the Mackay building was gutted and rebuilt, the museum would be updated and “improved” to the impersonality of modern museums. That did not happen, and it remains as welcoming as ever.