Rampart poker room--what the city hasn't been needing

The most recent poker room to open in the Vegas area is at the Rampart casino. I decided to give it a try tonight, thus reducing to five the number of card rooms I have not yet played in.

Sadly, the place is pretty worthless. There appear to be only three poker tables, and they're stuck out in the middle of the casino floor, not separated at all from the blackjack and craps tables. It would be easy to walk by and not even notice them.

They had one table going, never full, and it was a $2-$4 limit hold'em. Miraculously, I managed to book a win, which is pretty rare for me playing ultra-low-limit. (It's not that I exactly suck at the game; it's just really hard to keep ahead of the loss from the rake and tips.) I netted a $4 profit in an hour and a half or so of play. Wheeee!

Like most of the places that treat poker as an ugly stepchild, refusing to give it its own space, the Rampart poker room is smoky, noisy, and has marginally competent dealers. (One had no idea how to handle anything about the blinds that got even remotely out of whack, which was happening all the time as people drifted in and out of the game.) Like any $2-$4 limit game, the quality of play was just atrocious, really painful to watch and participate in.

(Story: I limped in with several others on the button with A-7 offsuit. Yeah, I know, it's a dog of a hand that I should have just thrown away. No lectures needed here. The flop was A-8-3. It was checked around until the guy on my right bet. I raised to find out where I was. He reraised, and he was a pretty tight player who I hadn't seen put in a reraise the whole session up to that point. That told me what I needed to know. I folded face-up, and he showed me A-8, for flopped top two pair. An elderly woman across the table from me scowled as she looked and me and scolded, "That's not a good hand to reraise with." I felt pity as I stared into her clueless, lifeless eyes, but I didn't respond. If I were inclined to give lessons at the table, I would have explained to her that I spent $4 to learn that my ace was not ahead. Had I just called, I would then pretty much have also had to call what would inevitably have been a second bet on the turn and yet another on the river before getting to the showdown and learning then that my ace was no good. That is, I learned this useful piece of information for $4, instead of the $10 that this fine player probably thought I should throw at it.)

There are scads of these crappy rooms all over this city. If you were taken to one with your eyes closed and tried to guess where you were by looking around, you'd have a hard time of it, because they're all the same. They have no character, no soul, no raison d'etre. I can't think of a single reason that I would go to any of them a second time.

But they did give me the lovely cap pictured above. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

(Bonus points for readers who catch and can identify the classic movie dialog reference in that last paragraph without clicking on this link to reveal the answer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080487/quotes.)