I did live in Vegas for a number of years in the 2000s and early 2010s.

There were upsides and downsides to it.

Upsides:

- Easy/fast to get to poker room, and therefore easier to leave if the games suck.

- Lots of 24 hour food options (these have since mostly vanished, unfortunately)

- Cheap rent (at least back then)

- Tons of younger women who liked older men, and not for gold digging purposes. (I wasn't that old then, but I was old enough to where this was nice.)

- Lots of people visit, so it's easy to catch up with out-of-the-area friends, without much effort on your part.

- Direct flights to a ton of places around the country

- No hotels necessary for WSOP

- No state income tax


Downsides:

- Depressing, full of degenerates with zero direction whose lives are in rapid decline

- Terrible summer heat

- Annoying wind in winter which always made it feel a lot colder than it really was (usually around 8 degrees cooler than LA, but that wind made a big difference)

- Terrible healthcare. I can't stress this enough. Horrible. Good thing I wasn't old yet.

- Remote. There are no outlying areas, and few surrounding suburbs. You leave the Vegas area, and it's empty desert in all directions.

- Schools are terrible, but fortunately I had no school age kids at the time.