I think I'm going to throw up, part 2

From time to time I'm still pursuing my quest to play at least once in each of the poker rooms in the city. Yesterday morning I saw a blog post from a poker dealer that I know from his occasional play at the Hilton. He now teaches at a dealer school part time, and some people from the school were going to visit the Club Fortune casino, where a recent graduate had just taken a job. http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2007/08/still-no-colts-bar.html. I had never even heard of this place, but looked it up on a map on the web and found that I could also hit a couple of other yet-unvisited poker rooms on the way back up Boulder Highway, so I set out. This place is technically in Henderson, I understand, but is nearly to Boulder City. (See http://www.vegastexasholdem.net/poker/ClubFortune.htm.)

Club Fortune is kind of a dinky little nothing place. The poker "room" is, for now, just three tables in the middle of the casino, but I'm told that, like every other casino in the city, they're under construction, and within a couple of months they'll have a genuine room for poker.

Playing $2-4 limit hold'em there was fun, because the group that had assembled for that purpose was there just to have a good time and support/razz/overtip their recent graduate (who did just fine, by the way). As "S" writes in his follow-up post, http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2007/08/little-poker-and-big-storm.html, a good time was had by all. I sure had a good time watching S call with his pocket jacks to the turn, then give them up rather than throw in another $4, then see a third jack hit on the river. (Hee hee hee!) It was fun because nobody took the game seriously. Yeah, I usually take my poker pretty darn seriously, but $2-4 is an unbeatable luckfest, and it can be fun, as long as everybody understands and accepts that fact. It's when people take poker at that kind of ridiculously low level seriously that it causes problems. If you're actually trying to win money consistently at poker, you will fail and experience endless frustration playing $2-4. Those people sour the game. So it was refreshing to have a table full of people who understood that the winners and losers were to be determined mostly by chance, rather than skill. At one point, I made what I knew to be a bad call, and announced it as such. S, sitting next to me, said, laughingly, "Isn't that the whole point?" Yeah, on some days, I guess it can be!

Incidentally, this was the first time I've played at a place where smoking at the table is allowed, and nobody smoked a single cigarette the entire time I was there! Miracle!

Anyway, after that gang broke up, I went back toward town, next stopping at Jokers Wild, another place I had never been to before. It's not quite as bad as the El Cortez or Arizona Charlie's-Decatur, but it's pretty dumpy. Only one table going (a $2-4 spread-limit), and it was never full. It was as dreary an experience as $2-4 usually is, because of the usual factors (people with unrealistic expectations of consistently beating the rake, the abominable level of mindless play, suckouts being the norm, grouchy players, indifferent management, etc). Nothing different here than anywhere else.

But--to finally get to the point of this post--I did see something there that I've never witnessed before. You know how some clerical workers, particularly those of a certain age, have an ugly little habit of licking a thumb or index finger in order to leaf through a stack of papers? Well, I saw a poker dealer at Jokers Wild doing that for the cards. Why? Because they were stickier than average (as were the chips).

It made me shudder. Think of all the ickiness that players bring to the table on their hands and spread all over the cards and chips. Imagine getting all of that crud on your hands, then LICKING your thumb to help you get a good hold on the corner of the card. Not only should this be patently disgusting to the dealer, but we get to watch him add his saliva to the mix of filth that's already on the cards. No wonder they get sticky. All I could think when watching this was one word, a whole bunch of times:

ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh

To the Jokers Wild dealer (you know who you are): Dude, you is NASTY!

Incidentally, I also tried to hit another place listed in Card Player magazine's online database of poker rooms (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_room): Nevada Palace. But I walked around the place twice and didn't see anything resembling a poker table. I found one online report that says they do a daily tournament, then basically close up: http://www.vegastexasholdem.net/poker/NevadaPalace.htm. If so, I can't imagine why they even bother offering poker. Anyway, it's probably not worth the trip out there.