went to Aces and Blades with Jenn tonight. it is a charity casino night with the Buffalo Sabres, the players are the dealers and there are all sorts of auctions and stuff. it was supposed to be a big group thing but then other people didn’t have money, couldn’t get off of work, or the event sold out on them (seems they sold 500 tickets, and ours were 494 and 495! just made it!) right away we were totally nerdy, walking from the parking ramp into the arena, behind the big team picture taking pictures of it hahahah. inside they gave everyone sabres “poker” dice, like yahtzee.
walked around a bit checking out the auctions. they had all sorts of things for the live auctions like, take a sabre player to school, ice time with the coaches, etc. they also had 4 blue seats from the aud signed by alumnis, and the coolest bubble hockey game ever! it was an ice bowl superchex with sabres and penguins players, and it was all autographed. so so cool, too bad i couldn’t have afforded to bid. there were lots of silent auction items, signed stuff, other sports stuff like A Rod’s 500th home run autographed photo (why?). then there was a chinese basket auction and each player and their wives, or apparently if they didn’t have sig others, 2 players, created the baskets. some of them were pretty cool with PSPs and ipods in them and stuff. too bad we didn’t win 🙁
we were checking out the food situation when the players came out to start the games, and upstairs was some weird poker game, and the money wheel! woo Vanek was the one relegated to the money wheel, and he had to have a lesson on how to do it LOL it was hilarious. Vanek being Jenn’s fav and no one really being up there we were able to get pics real fast and play a few spins without being pushed around. Teppo Numninen was on the weird poker thing. Back downstairs was all blackjack games, in groups of 4 mostly, with the other players. Walked around and took pics of Hecht for Adr1 and Kaleta for Eric. And apparently Kaleta was talking about me to the “pit boss” but I didn’t notice, Jenn did haha. We tried to play with him but no one was getting up. Ended up sitting with Nathan Paetsch and playing with him for a while. He was very fun and I won 14$ hahaha. Talked about seeing him at work and we told him to come find us next time. Eventually got up to walk around more and took pictures of each player at their table (except we forgot Peters, went back to get him and by this time it was 9 and it was their curfew so they were leaving, got distracted by taking a picture with Paetsch, and then Peters was gone). The players were all leaving pretty quickly so we dashed over to Pominville for Jenn to get a pic, cuz he is Megan’s fav player. The only players who stuck around the rest of the night were Tallinder and Tellqvist. (*edit* realized later that Max, Spacek and Lydman weren’t there, and who was the entertainment? none other than lance diamond, so it was my typical friday night ha)
the live auction was up after the games, so we went back upstairs for food, and after the auction was the alumni as dealers. we forgot that we should have just picked a table and sat at it to wait for the alumni, so again we didn’t have a seat. walked around to see who was dealing and i hardly know any of the alumni…gil perrault, lindy ruff, rob ray, james patrick, and matt barnaby are really the only ones i recognized, and some people who had jerseys on i recognized the names (shannon). there were 2 who were REALLY young and i just couldn’t figure out who they would be, so young and alumni…barnaby looked like alot of fun to play with, ray didn’t know wtf he was doing haha. james patrick was upstairs on the money wheel this time around haha.
cashed out our chips and headed out. we were going to meet people out for drinks but it didn’t really happen so we went to Towne for food and headed home. it was super fun, definitely will go again.