Plaza: Another stinky dump

Since I got on kind of a roll of finally knocking down my list of poker rooms not yet visited, I decided to hit two more of them in one night. The Plaza, downtown, was the second stop, but I'll talk about it first.

They've moved the room sometime in the past year, because I once stopped in there when they had no game going, and the tables were out in the middle of the casino floor, roped off. Now it's near a corner, with a little half-fence around its perimeter.

There are four regular tables plus one small one that I assume is for stud games. (In seven-card stud, every player gets his own seven cards, so it's rather difficult to play ten-handed, there being only 52 cards in the deck. So stud tables are smaller, to hold just seven or eight players.) There was only one in use, for a $2-4 limit hold'em game. Ho-hum. But I dutifully played for my hour.

The strangest thing about this room, as you can see from the first image above, is that it has limited hours. I don't recall seeing this in any other poker room in the city. I was there, and they really did shut down the game at 1:45 a.m. so that they could close up and get the employees out by 2:00--even though the game was still going strong (well, with seven players anyway). Very peculiar.

The other notable thing was how smoky it was. I'm home now and I positively reek. Leaving out the couple of places where smoking at the tables is allowed, this is absolutely the highest concentration of cigarette smoke I've yet encountered. It's strange because the casino was nearly empty, yet there was always a visible haze of smoke in the room. It's as if they had installed a diabolical ventilation system that sucked all of the cigarette smoke from the casino floor and blew it out into the poker room. I don't know how else there could have been that much of it. It was truly awful. My eyes were burning, and that hasn't been so even at Arizona Charlie's and Boulder Station, where people were smoking at the table.

I might have guessed it would be that way from the third peculiar fact: there's a cigarette vending machine right inside the poker room! Kind of a hint, eh?

One notable, memorable thing happened there that was unprecedented for me, though it had nothing to do with the room per se. I got bored and threw in a straddle, which I do maybe once out of, say, four or five whole sessions of poker--which is to say, very rarely. And this time I picked up pocket aces! Of course, the story isn't allowed to have a happy ending. I didn't improve and got sucked out on by a guy with 5-6 offsuit who flopped two pair. Oh well. At least now I can say that I've had the experience of pocket aces on a straddle bet.

The Plaza is one of five poker rooms that is within easy walking distance of my apartment (others being the El Cortez, Fitzgerald, Golden Nugget, and Binion's). I wish it had some redeeming quality, but I found none. As with most badly-run rooms, players were allowed to talk openly about the hand in progress, with not even a hint of disapproval from any dealer. I hate that.

In fact, let me list the qualities shared by a whole bunch of rooms that I've played in once, and don't expect ever to return to: Out in the open casino floor, with no shelter from smoke and noise; rarely any no-limit game going; only the lowest limit game(s) going; only a handful of tables; horrible quality of play; mostly inhabited by life losers; players primarily there to socialize and/or try to hit a high-hand jackpot or bad-beat jackpot; mostly players who seem generally unhappy with life, with few smiles and laughs ever seen; marginally competent dealers; little or no effort to enforce even basic rules; physically dirty, dingy, icky places to spend time.

That roster of dismal qualities is basically shared by the following places: El Cortez, Plaza, Gold Coast, Arizona Charlie's, Jokers Wild, Rampart, Texas Station, Tuscany, as well as the now-closed Fiesta Rancho and Stardust. They're all just dreadful, worthless places. There are a bunch of others that I don't like much, but at least have some redeeming value that I can point to, so that I can give them a C- or D+. But this list of eight (so far) are the dregs, the crap that sinks to the bottom in an ocean of poker rooms.