Another poker dump, and a study in contrasts

I am determined to eventually play at least once in every poker room Las Vegas has to offer. Today I scratched another one off the list: Arizona Charlie's-Decatur.

It will save a lot of time if I just say "ditto" to nearly everything I previously wrote about the El Cortez (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/armpit-of-las-vegas-poker.html). The ACD poker "room" is just two tables roped off from the surrounding slot machines and blackjack tables. It doesn't even have a sign, so you can wander around the casino for quite a while before finding it. I had to ask a security guy, because I went around the entire perimeter and never saw a poker room or even a sign pointing to it--guess they wouldn't want to draw undue attention to it.

The main difference from the El Cortez is that ACD allows smoking right at the table. Today was only the second time I've sat in a game with smoking going on at the table. Fortunately, I was on an end seat, with a reasonably powerful desk fan right behind me, so I was upwind of all the smokers--which was literally everyone else in the game.

The other difference from the E.C. is that they were spreading a semi-normal hold'em game: $4-8 limit, with the unusual but not bizarro $1-2 blinds. I managed to lose only $26 in the course of an hour. I was actually ahead for most of the session, until losing one huge pot. After I flopped top two pairs, I pushed as hard as I could, but got called down and beaten by a backdoor flush. Now, this in itself wouldn't be too unusual, except that on the flop this guy had no pair and no draw, other than the runner-runner flush, yet he called a bet and a raise before the flop, and another bet and raise on the flop, with a suited K-5.* For readers who aren't obsessively into poker, I'll just say that this is seriously stupid play; in order to win, he had to get a club on the turn (about a 20% chance of that) and a club on the river (another roughly 20% chance), something like a 4% chance of both events happening. The point here isn't to complain about the beat or to garner sympathy, but to illustrate the level of play going on at ACD.

One elderly guy almost perpetually looked either asleep or dead. I kept wanting to suggest that the poker room manager call the paramedics to check his pulse and see if he was still alive. But then he'd stir a bit, scrape something out of his ear, look at it, and flick it on the floor. I thought that dead people probably wouldn't do this--at least not as often as he was doing it.

After my obligatory hour at ACD, I hopped over to the gorgeous Venetian, to put in a few more hours towards their 50-hours-in-August tournament promotion. What a contrast. It's hard to imagine two poker rooms farther apart on the scale of classiness. The Venetian is the top Editor's Choice on the only site (as far as I know) dedicated to comparing and commenting on Vegas poker rooms, http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It's also usually one of the top two as voted by contributors to that site. See, e.g., this visitor's review, which I think is spot-on (except the part about Cassandra--sorry, but I just haven't paid much attention to the cocktail waitresses, other than to note that too many of them have gone way too big on the breast implants; it's kind of hard not to notice that): http://www.allvegaspoker.com/player_review_2382.html.

Arizona Charlie's-Decatur is like the anti-Venetian. If they were to come into physical contact, they would annihilate each other in a universe-shaking explosion. (Stephen Hawking, if you're reading this, please feel free to comment on the repercussions of such contact on the space-time continuum.)

I picked up my mandatory $1 and $5 chips for the souvenir collection, but when I look at them again some day, I expect that it will give me a shudder of disgust at the memory: "Ewwwwwwwwwww, I actually sat in that nasty room for an hour? What was I thinking?!"



*Probably the most thoughtful and refined guide to profitable selection of starting hands for a game like this is Lee Jones, "Winning Low Limit Hold'em" (3rd edition, 2005). K-5, suited or not, does not appear anywhere in his charts of recommended hands to play from any position. In other words, the consensus of studious, long-time winning players (yeah, it's a single-author book, but Jones has had a ton of input over the years his book has been in print, and he comments pretty profusely on how and why he has changed his mind on some points, after thoughtful comments from other pros he respects) is that K-5 (actually, any K with lower than a 9 kicker) is a dog in every situation, with a negative expected value over the long run (i.e., you'll lose more than you win playing it). So calling a raise before the flop was already pretty boneheaded, let alone calling another bet and raise after the flop when he had not improved.

Addendum, August 21, 2007: During a session at the Venetian today, I finally spotted the aforementioned "Cassandra." I can see why she caught the writer's attention. She is truly an exotic beauty--Hawaiian, maybe. Still, attractive women are about a dime a dozen in Vegas, and even if a place had a monopoly on gorgeous young women serving drinks, that would make for a pretty piss-poor reason to choose a place to play poker.