Mesquite-flavored poker. Part 1--Eureka

When I moved to Las Vegas in the summer of 2006, I stopped briefly in Mesquite on the way down. I went into the poker rooms of the Eureka and Virgin River casinos. Both looked pretty dingy, like the other depressed, worthless rooms I've visited lately. Neither of them had a game going, so I didn't stay long.

On my way back to Vegas yesterday after a short Christmas trip to Salt Lake City, I decided to give Mesquite another try. I went to Eureka first. I was very pleasantly surprised. It's a brand-new poker room. It's open to the casino, but at the far end, so smoke and noise is quite tolerable. As you can see from the photo, the tables are really nice, including cupholders, autoshufflers, and a player tracking system built in. They have coffee and water available without having to wait for the cocktail waitresses.

They had two full tables when I arrived at about 2:30 on a Wednesday (the day after Christmas), which is more than I would have guessed. Both were $4-$8 limit hold'em games, which also surprised me--usually I would expect one or both of them to be $2-$4 or $3-$6. There really is a difference in these games, though logically there shouldn't be. In my experience, $2-4 is usually a loser, because it's so hard to beat the rake; $3-6 is about a break-even proposition; but I can actually make money with some consistency at $4-8. There is no earthly reason that people should play the games differently, but they most definitely do. At $4-8, it is actually possible to push an oppnent hard enough that he'll fold rather than call a bet just out of curiosity or stubbornness or "the hope that springs eternal from within the human breast." (Extra super double bonus points for readers who can identify that quotation without resorting to a search engine. Hint: Think baseball.) So having $4-$8 games means that I'm actually happy to play, rather than just passing the time at a game that annoys and frustrates me. It's the lowest level at which one can really play poker, in any meaningful sense (i.e., it's out of the no-fold'em gutter). I actually bluffed a few times, and it worked! Try that in a $2-4 game.

They're obviously trying to get more no-limit games going, because they have a promotion: Play five hours of no-limit, and they'll give you a room for the night. Not a bad deal--but the catch is that you have to find a no-limit game going!

The first place they had for me to play was when another player was going off for 30 minutes or so to eat. They allowed me to "play over" his chips. I had heard of this before, but I've never seen it done at any casino. They literally put a plexiglas box over the absent person's chips to protect them, and I put my chip rack on top of that to play. If there are any Vegas casinos that do this, I'm not aware of it. A regular seat opened up in the other game before he got back.

Both games were very soft and easy to beat with a textbook tight-aggressive style (with a few curveballs thrown in to keep them guessing). I made $96 in an hour and 40 minutes.

Dealers were OK, but made more mistakes than the best ones do, mainly because they obviously know lots of the regular players pretty well and get overly chatty, and thus don't pay enough attention. But no major problems on that front.

Blinds were only $1-$2, which is a bit odd for a $4-$8 game. I would much prefer the standard $2-$4 blinds to help inhibit limpers and/or build the pot more (hard to know which effect would prevail, but either one is a good thing).

They also used a half-kill, which I don't mind. But it operated differently from any I've seen before. (A "full kill" pot is one that is played for double the usual stakes; in a half-kill game like this, a "kill" pot is 50% higher than usual, so, in this case, the game transforms to $6-$12.) The usual approach is that if a player wins two hands in a row, the next hand is a kill pot, and the person who won two in a row has to post some amount larger than the usual blind to prime the pump. But at the Oasis, a kill pot is triggered by winning a pot of $50 or more, regardless of whether it's your first or tenth in a row. It's unconventional, but I didn't see any problems with it.

My biggest gripe was the management of the games. Specifically, they had two nine-handed tables, and two people waiting for a seat in one of them. They also had an interest list for an Omaha game. There were seven names on that list, including two from each of the current hold'em tables.

When I noticed this, I asked the woman at the desk why they didn't start the Omaha game, since that would free up seats for me and the guy ahead of me on the waiting list. She said, "We can't make the hold'em games short-handed to start Ohama." I pointed out that they wouldn't be short; each game would lose two players and gain one. When they deem nine to be a full table, you can't seriously think of eight-handed as "short." She said, "You don't know how these guys whine about not having full tables."

I told her, "So you'd rather keep five people waiting (two on the hold'em list and three on the Omaha list) than start a seven-person Omaha game and have two eight-handed hold'em games?" She said, "That's how we do things here."

This is nuts. People don't like waiting for a game to start, and they'll leave. Sure enough, that Omaha game never got going, because, predictably, the three who weren't already playing hold'em got tired of waiting. If you want to fill a game, you have to start it first--then other players will come and fill it out. If you wait until you have enough players so that nothing will be short-handed, well, you'll just never start new games, because it's virtually impossible to keep that many people on a waiting list just standing around patiently. I'm certain that the three people who never got to play at all left with a much worse impression of the room than the hold'em players would have had from temporarily having one empty seat at the table. That happens all the time and is no big deal; waiting around a long time for a game that is promised but never starts, well, that's a big deal to those whose time was wasted.

The final interesting thing that happened on this visit was a fire alarm. It happened just as I was leaving--literally the instant that I stepped through the door. In fact, I wondered if I had triggered some security thing, like when the alarm blares at you in the public library because they didn't de-activate one of your books.

I've heard lots of fire alarms in casinos before, and they're actually kind of funny, because nobody does anything. They just keep doing what they were doing before. Every previous time, a recorded voice has come over the PA system saying something like, "Our staff is investigating the cause of the alarm. We will notify you if you need to take any action." In other words, they give people permission to ignore the alarm.

But this time, the overhead voice was actually telling everybody to evacuate. By the time I got to my car, a few people were trickling out, but it wasn't anything like you see in a fire drill at a school, for instance. I think most people will keep playing their slot machines until the reels melt from the flames and won't turn any more. Even then, they'll complain that it was just about to hit.

I haven't seen any news of a big casino fire, so whatever happened apparently wasn't that big a deal. But it's the first time I've seen an attempted casino evacuation.*

All in all, Eureka has made a huge improvement in its poker room. It's nice enough that I would make it a regular stop if it were in town.


*I guess that's not quite true. In another lifetime (November 21, 1980, to be exact), I was living in North Las Vegas. I had no news source that day, but noticed some smoke to the south, and saw many, many helicopter overflights from Nellis Air Force Base. It was only later that I learned that what had been going on was the worst disaster in Nevada history, and the second-worst hotel fire in U.S. history. The helicopters were trying to rescue people from the roof. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Grand_Hotel_Las_Vegas_hotel_fire.