Newest poker room in town: Eastside Cannery

I stopped at the Eastside Cannery late this afternoon for its opening day, not realizing that it didn't open until 8:00 p.m. That's why I ended up going on down the road to Sunset Station to see their new digs. (See immediately preceding post.) I had my good camera with me, and took a few daylight photos of the exterior before I left.

Coming back a little after 8:00 was insane. I've seen traffic jams on the Strip and on the freeways around town, but never before on Boulder Highway. I had no idea the opening would be this big. There was no parking open anywhere. People were parking at any business within half a mile and walking back, and the masses of pedestrians were causing gridlock, as they used to do all the time on the Strip, before the elevated crosswalks were installed. It took about 20 minutes to advance 100 yards or so to the same road leading to the self-parking lot that I had used earlier in the day. When I got there, I aborted. I could see that it was bumper to bumper all the way in, and all the way out, too. Since people couldn't possibly be leaving after having had their fill of the new casino (it having been open for less than 30 minutes at this point), that could only mean that turning down that road would mean inching forward, only to either get turned away because the lot was full, or inching painfully through a full lot, with virtually no hope of any spot opening up soon.

Instead I made a last-second decision to plow northward to Sam's Town, maybe a quarter-mile away, and zip into their parking garage and walk back. Lots of people were doing this. I ducked inside Sam's Town and bought a chocolate malt at their ice cream shop. Not only did I feel like having a chocolate malt, but I felt that this made me a sorta-kinda legitimate Sam's Town customer for the evening, so that taking up one of their parking spots for a couple of hours was sorta-kinda OK, even though most of the time was spent at their competitor.

The exterior of Eastside, as you can see, is strikingly unusual. I think people will either love it or hate it. I kind of dug it. It's mind-blowing that this radically new place was, just a few months ago, one of the ugliest dumps in town, the Nevada Palace. I would not have believed it could get transformed so thoroughly in so little time.

One of the photos above is a colored ice sculpture replica of the building. Cute.

The colored lights on the outside are intriguing. They are constantly shifting colors and patterns. It's really quite lovely, I think. I took a video clip of it, and will try to post it below, but I don't know how well it will show the effect. It's more pronounced from a distance, for some reason, and I was really too close. If there is no video posted below, it's because it didn't show up well enough to bother with.

Inside the casino was just as insanely crowded as the traffic outside. I can't figure this out. People, it's just like every other casino in this city! There's nothing here that you haven't seen and done before! Why do you all feel compelled to be here within the first couple of hours of its opening? Surely you can't all have blog posts to write about the experience!

The line for signing up for a club card stretched for at least 100 yards in both of two directions. The wait must have been way, way, over an hour. Again, it just blows my mind that so many people feel some compulsion to be there, and especially to wait so long for a stupid club card so that they don't miss out on whatever little scraps of rewards the casino might give them for a couple hours of punching slot machine buttons. Don't you people have anything better to do than wait in a line?

Fortunately, the poker room had runners that would take players' driver's licenses and go get cards made. This was a really nice service, and much appreciated. There was no way the wait in line was worth the couple of bucks of comps that I might have missed out on by not having a card, so I was prepared to do without for this visit. It was nice that I didn't have to give that up. They also gave me the nice t-shirt shown above, as well as a spinner card protector (shown above next to the poker chips). It's a nice little trinket, though nowhere near nice enough to replace the one-ounce silver dollar that I have become so fond of.

The poker room has eight tables. As with Hard Rock and Sunset Station, they are really nice ones--big (maybe too big), with unprinted blue-green felt. No autoshufflers, for some reason (cost, I'm guessing). Chairs are just so-so, kind of average dining-room chairs. No wheels, no adjustments available.

Sadly, they chose not to enclose the room, when it would have been quite straightforward to do so, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of the total renovation. The room is kind of oddly shaped, with five sides, and two of them are fully open to the casino floor. Noise and cigarette smoke are real problems here, and will be one of the main factors limiting how often I visit the place, I'm afraid. They could so easily have made plexiglass walls, allowing curious onlookers to watch and work up the nerve to enter and play, while giving players the comfort of clean air and low noise. It's obvious to me that poker players' comfort was not a high priority for the building's design team.

There are a few TVs, but neither the number nor the size that we've become used to in modern poker rooms.

I liked the cocktail waitresses' uniforms. They were attractive without being embarrassingly revealing, as so many are. (This was true at Sunset Station, too, and I forgot to mention it.)

Rake for now is capped at $3, plus $1 for funding a freeroll tournament. There are no high-hand or bad-beat jackpots, apparently. There is a dollar taken out of each pot to fund a $40,000 monthly freeroll tournament, which I believe is shared between Eastside, Cannery, and Rampart. It requires 60 hours of play, which is a lot. You can get more starting chips in the tournament, as well as possibly a $100 bonus, for occupying the poker room chairs beyond the 60-hour minimum.

In one of the strangest opening-day glitches I've ever seen, the brand-new tables had slots for dropping chips (to fund the tournament) that were not large enough to accommodate a standard poker chip, so the dealers were having to use beverage cups to collect them instead!

It was a great pleasure to be using all brand-new chips and brand-new cards, on brand-new felt, while sitting in brand-new chairs and walking on brand-new carpet. That obviously won't last long, though. In fact, somebody had already spilled a drink on the felt by the time I sat down at about 9:10 p.m. What a doofus.

I got seated next to a guy who had the longest mullet I've ever seen. His "party in the back" went down past his shoulders. Weird look. He was one of those personalities that I can't stand, with an ever-present need to impress others with how knowledgeable he was. For example, in one of the first hands after I joined the table, there were two diamonds on the flop. First player bet and was called in three places. Mr. Mullet said out loud, "Somebody is on a flush draw." Wow. You, sir, are a friggin' poker GENIUS! What--can you see right through the backs of their cards??? I am SO impressed!

Moron.

The dealers were a mixed bag. One seemed to be making a lot of newbie mistakes and was too slow. But two others were excellent. A guy named William was one of the best I've seen anywhere: fast, communicative, precise, in control, friendly, good sense of humor, alert to every little thing going on at the table. Just superb in every respect. The one following him, Heather, was on her first day of a regular job, though she had several weeks of tournament dealing under her belt. She was surprisingly fast for being that new, and an absolutely delightful personality.

I unfortunately dug myself a hole on my first hand. I flopped bottom two pair and on the turn got all the money in against a guy who had top pair and wouldn't let it go. The river brought him a third 10, and I was busto early.

But the poker gods apparently conferred and decided that that had been a lousy thing to do to me. I was basically stagnant for 90 minutes or so, but then made my entire night's profit in two hands: consecutive flopped sets. First, my jacks cracked another player's unimproved pocket aces, and I doubled up. On the very next hand I had 6-6, flop 10-6-5, and felted a guy who moved all in on me, holding A-10.

I think that is the third time I have had pocket pairs flop sets in consecutive hands since moving to Vegas two years ago. (Once was at Harrah's, another time at Monte Carlo.) Let's run the numbers on that happening, shall we? You get a pocket pair one time out of 17. Given that start, you then flop a third card of that rank 10.8% of the time. So having a pair and flopping a set happens, on average, once every 157 hands. That then means that it happening twice in a row is expected only about every 24,777 hands. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that it has happened three times, given that rarity. Yet more evidence that my unlucky streak is well past.

I didn't feel like putting in another marathon session, and cashed out just before midnight, up $111 in about 2 3/4 hours of play. Not stellar, but it will do--especially after starting out down my first buy-in five minutes into the game.

I heard a nice zinger at the table late in the session. The young woman to my right rivered a straight to suck out on a guy who had flopped a set. (From the way the two of them had been chatting, they apparently knew each other.) She put in a small raise that he immediately called. When the hands were revealed, and it became apparent what had happened, she said, "Sorry." He looked disbelieving. "You're sorry?" She replied, "Yeah. I'm sorry that I didn't get more money out of you."

It was laugh-out-loud funny. Her line was clearly both said and received with a smile and no ill will, which made it all OK. I loved it.

The final photo above is a band that was playing in the lounge on my way out. They were doing a really bad rendition of "Lady Marmalade." Atrocious. I have no idea who they are, but somebody in Eastside management used horrible judgment in selecting them for opening-night performance.

So that's my initial impression of the Eastside Cannery, the newest poker room in Las Vegas. It's really unusual that we've had the Hard Rock, the Excalibur's re-opening with the electronic tables, and now Eastside, all in just one week. I'm hardly the first to observe that it is the nature of this city to be constantly new and changing, reinventing itself. It's fun having a front-row seat to watch the births and rebirths.