Poker Room Attracts the Riffraff............

Quoted from Rod Smith's column Inside Gaming 2/26/06:

"It's not surprising that old-time high rollers at Caesars Palace are complaining, less than a year after the venerable Strip icon was taken over by Harrah's Entertainment. The new poker room takes space away from high-stakes table games and attracts the riffraff, they say. Harrah's also is squeezing more and more slot machines into the same floor space. That may be fine for slot players. But high rollers say the layout is a pain for players just trying to enjoy the casino."

This reminds me of Venetian employees boasting that "We don't do buffets and we don't do poker" as if either poker or buffets, or both, caused leprosy. Those Venetian employees are about to eat crow, although they will be eating them in a high-end restaurant and not in a buffet. I suppose they could eat those words table-side in the poker room.

Speaking of table-side-poker-room-dining, I can't think of anyplace I would rather NOT eat a meal. Take a few thousand germ encrusted casino chips, pass them around the table for months on end so that they carry traces of a few thousand people and then eat a meal without washing your hands. That sounds like something the dreaded riffraff would do, but you see it from all walks of life.

On Sunday as I was dealing, the player in the one seat was eating a burger. Twice, in quick succession, I removed some sort of substance from a card. Well someone had to remove the foreign substance and I was that someone. The guy in the 5s jokingly made some comment about me picking boogers off of the cards. The burger eating player, who is hearing-impaired (the pc way of saying old and going deaf) thinks that the 5s is saying that I was picking burger off of the cards. He got very indignant and started challenging the 5s. He acted like it was NOT possible that there was burger on the cards. Sooooo I say, loudly to compensate for the deafness, "George, he said I was picking BOOGERS! off of the cards, not BURGERS!"
Maybe you had to be there but it was funny in a sick sort of way.
Why are so many B&M poker related stories funny in a SICK way?
In any case, after that down I practically ran to the bathroom to wash my hands.
Just thinking about it makes me want to go wash my hands right now.


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Yesterday I'm dealing and Lou is in the 9s. He cracks open a fortune cookie and proceeds to "read" it to the whole table. "You will make a straight flush" he says.
On the very next hand, Lou flops 4 to a straight flush. He never "got there" but he made sure that everyone saw that he had indeed flopped an open ended straight flush draw.
In my best (read horrible) Asian accent I said "Fortune Cookie Wong!"
Sometimes I crack myself up. It helps me maintain sanity while trapped in the bizzare world of poker.

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Technical Difficulties:
Also yesterday as I push into a game, the shuffle master lid is closed. I have no cards. I looked around to see if anyone had grabbed the deck. There were no cards on the table. I yelled at the exiting dealer, but he had escaped. I finally opened the shuffle master lid to find BOTH decks of cards, all shuffled together, in the machine. Don't even ask me how that happened as I have no clue. The lid isn't supposed to close until you have inserted the "old" deck and removed the "fresh" one. I immediately called for a set-up. "Not right now" was the reply from the frazzled floorman. Well SHIT! I did the only thing I could think of......While the players waited patiently I sorted the green deck from the brown deck, counted them both down, placed one in the shuffle master and hand shuffled the other one. On with the game.
There is a first time for everything and that was the first time I ever halted a poker game in order to "make" a set-up. Typically a poker game stops for no one/nothing. A player could drop dead and end up face down in his chips and the chorus from the other 9 players would be just deal around him. I've heard it said that if the player is actually dead, then his hand is dead too. Push the pot to the "live" one and get on with the game............