Entertainment while you play

Played at Bill's again this evening. One of the sidelights of playing there is that if you time your visit right, you get to hear Big Elvis, who sings in the lounge maybe 30 or 40 yards from the poker room, so it's not hard to listen in. (They have the good sense to shut off the canned overhead music while he is performing.) According to Big Elvis's web site, he's there Monday through Friday at 3:00, 5:00, and 6:30 p.m.






When the game broke up unusually early at Bill's, I walked next door to the Flamingo. They had something going on I'd never seen before: Performers from the Flamingo's "X Burlesque" show (see review here) were dancing to loud music just inside the door. (Sorry for the blurry photos. They wouldn't hold still.) Maybe this has been going on for a long time, but never while I've been there. It appears that other girls from the show--or at least ones dressed as if they might be in the show--do some blackjack dealing in this area near the wide-open front door of the casino. As at Bill's, the poker room is close enough that you can listen in on the music, but you can't see the dancers from the tables. Probably a good thing--might be a bit too distracting. I liked Big Elvis's music better anyway.

Sorry, no interesting poker stories from tonight. I came home with more money than I left with, which is always plenty interesting to me, but not especially to anybody else.

Oh, but wait--I do have a story, though not much to do with poker. Bill's takes the rake in half-dollar increments, so you sometimes get 50-cent pieces back as part of the pot. You can also play two of them as if they were a $1 chip. Somebody did that, and I noticed that the sheen of one of them looked quite different from the other. I'm fairly sensitized to the appearance of real silver, because of having my one-ounce silver coin always in use as my card protector, and I thought this half-dollar looked much more like silver than most. And when the dealer picked them up and put them in the tray, replacing them with a $1 chip, the "clink" was definitely different from the usual cheap, tinny sound that American coins have been making since they stopped using silver and copper, and instead went to crappy metals like nickel and zinc. I could even see in the dealer's tray that the second one down looked different on its edge. So I asked the dealer to sell me two half dollars from her tray (she probably thought I wanted to use them to tip the cocktail waitress or some such thing). Sure enough, the second one was a 1968, when the alloy used was still 40% silver (see here for coinage history). It's about one-eighth of an ounce of silver, so, I dunno, something like $2 worth, that I purchased for 50 cents.

When Shamus was in town for the World Series of Poker and we played a little poker together at the Palms, he mentioned in his blog the next day about how observant I seemed to be at the table. Nobody had ever said this of me before, though I do try hard to pay attention to what's going on. I suppose it's true, given my irritating (to the dealers, anyway) tendency to be able to identify cards from tiny rub marks or creases I notice on their backs, pick up and later blog about snippets of other players' conversations, get grossed out by untidy dealers' ear and nose hair, notice illegally small raises, spot all sorts of nervous tells in opponents, etc. Now I have to add to the list that I notice the peculiar look and sound of coins in play! There are undoubtedly more important things to be noticing, but one really can't help what things catch one's attention.

The strange thing is that I'm completely obtuse and unobservant in life outside of the poker room. My friends will tell you that I can walk past some prominent object a thousand times before finally noticing it and asking them, "Has that always been there?"

Wow. This post really veered far from where it started. Sorry for rambling.