Time to stay away from the Rio

I went to the Rio tonight, thinking that I might be able to get one more normal poker session in before the place becomes a WSOP madhouse. Nope. Too late.

All but one of tonight's dealers were substitutes, brought in for the event. None of them knew the house rules. One of them was literally on his first day as a dealer anywhere.

Thousands of things irritate me, but I'm actually very slow to anger. This dealer, though, brought me to the brink. He was painfully slow, getting out only seven or eight hands per down. He didn't know how to make change. He left the amount of money in the tray wrong after every down (according to the excellent Rio regular dealer who had the misfortune of following him around--"He drives me crazy!"). He didn't know that he was supposed to prevent string bets/raises. He had no idea what to do with missed-blind and "absent" buttons. He thought that maybe a player who had missed three sets of blinds had to make up all of them at once. He flashed cards with every deal. He forgot to burn cards. If somebody asked him something, everything had to stop while he talked, because he couldn't even hope to accomplish two things at once. He forgot to move the dealer button--EVERY time. He usually forgot to take the rake until after pushing the pot, then would ask the player for some chips back to pay the house. He knew less about poker rules than an average player--for example, he insisted that when two players were both all-in, they had to turn their cards up before he could put out the turn and river cards (which is true only in a tournament, not a cash game).

It was the most excruciating experience with a dealer I've ever had. Out of literally thousands of hours of live poker, he was far and away the worst I've seen--so bad that nobody else even comes in a close second place. I've had a fair number of dealers on their first day out of school, and they were all slow, but they knew what to do, and would get things mostly right. That doesn't bother me--in fact, it's kind of cute and fun to watch. But this guy tonight, well, if he passed any sort of audition to get the job, it must have consisted of nothing more than checking to be sure than he had a pulse. I cannot imagine that he had to demonstrate actual competence or proficiency in dealing.

As I was leaving, I spoke to the poker room manager and told him that if that dealer ever again sat down to work a table I was at, I would simply get up and leave, rather than suffer through that experience again, that he was absolutely not ready to be put in charge of a table on his own. Unfortunately, my complaint/observation seemed to fall on deaf ears. The response I got was "Yeah, probably half of the dealers we got for the series aren't really ready." Oh, well, that's a fine explanation. There was no apology, just a "I can't do anything about it" kind of reaction.

So that's the end of my playing at the Rio until the WSOP is done and they get their normal staff of fine dealers back in the box. It's clear that the Rio doesn't care about making poker an enjoyable experience for its regular players while the series is in town. It's obvious that they don't care about my business, so I'll take it elsewhere.

I pity people who pony up $10,000 to enter one of the championship events, and get stuck with the dealer I saw tonight, making every possible error and putting out half or a third of the number of hands that the rest of the tables are getting.

It may be that all of the Harrah's--oh, excuse me, it's now all of the Caesars--properties will be like this until July. I'll check in with a couple of others and let you know.