Vegas 2009 Recap - Part 1

Spring time in Colorado only means one thing to most soft tip dart players. Vegas Baby, Vegas. We start counting down the days shortly after New Years. You can ask any dart player who is headed to Vegas, and they can tell you roughly how many days are left until departure day. This years Vegas Invasion was one for the ages, a classic.

Things did start off a little rough for a lot of our darters from Northern Colorado this year, as we had a HUGE spring storm move through the area on Thursday. After rented vans, stops at Jiffy Lube, cancelled flights and Cab rides from Mesquite, everyone finally arrived in Vegas safely. I was the lucky one. Due to work, I was not able to leave until Monday morning. My flight left and arrived on time, and I even managed to sleep for about an hour on the plane.

Upon my arrival at The Riv, our normal pre game tailgate party commenced in the room. Let me tell you, there is nothing like Bud Light and Standards ( a well poured DOUBLE Jack and Coke) at 8am on a Monday morning to kick off the weeks activities. For those who don't know, NDA Internationals is a long week. Mornings start very early (8am start times) and becasue of the fact it is Vegas, the nights end up being really late ( 3am-ish or later) Monday we were playing Team Cricket.

My team- Amy, Sylvia, Alex and I, went into this tourney with a lot of confidence. In fact, I have never been as relaxed and prepared as I felt we were this year coming into a tournament, especially Internationals. I don't know what the hell happened to us, but the wheels completely fell off the bus of Team DILLIGAF. We spent most of the day playing from behind, trying to back close numbers, and missing numbers that normally come easy to us. Needless to say, things didn't work out so well, and we did not advance to the second day of the round robin. To say the least I was extremely disappointed in our performance. I really felt that Cricket was our best chance as a team to get into the final 16, and cash a check. Better luck to us next year.

We finished off the night with our poolside BMW Players party, we drank A LOT, and ended up with a ton of beer in our room for the rest of the week.

Tuesday and Wednesday were now days off since we didn't advance. Tuesday we didn't do much of anything. My friend Bino and I took off walking down The Strip. We stopped and had Lunch at Stripburger - it isn't quite as good as In-n-Out Burger, but definitely helped get rid of the hangover from drowning our sorrows on Monday night. We ended up at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, so we did what any normal person would do - Drank some Marg's. Cabbed it back to The Riv to watch friends and wives play in the Mixed Doubles Combo Event. No one really did that well in this event either.

The good thing about Tuesday night was we got spend a great time hanging out with our good friends from Canada. We have the most fun with these guys every year, and let's just say they know how to drink. I also got the pleasure of watching Ray "The Razor" Carver throw darts Tuesday night. He is an incredible dart thrower, and it was a pleasure to get to watch him.

Wednesday was another day with no plans except the arrival of my wife. We watched a little bit of The International Challenge. Congrats to the Men's Team USA for taking first place. The Women's Team USA lost the title for the first time in five years, but still had a strong showing in second place. My wife arrived late Wednesday afternoon, and it was all over after that. By the end of the night, we were all in our room playing Three Man with the boys from North of The Border. The beers were flowing all day long. I got mixed up in a game of Beer Darts by the pool. Thank God Kym showed up when she did, or I could have been passed out by 6pm.

Thursday morning we started the Team 501 section of the Tournament. We threw a lot better and came out of the day the third seed, only 3 games back. We actually beat the team that got the one seed in heads up play. Everyone played pretty solid throughout the day, and i was feeling good going into the second say round robin.

That is enough for now. Coming up in Part 2 - The players party, our friends from Canada, day two round robin, Britney Spears and hangin with Uncle Mikey and Rachel from Montana.