Of poker and porn stars

Last night I played what is for me a marathon-ish session at the Venetian--just shy of eight hours.

This is always an odd and amusing time of year here in Vegas, with the confluence of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Adult Video News conference. Let me tell you: it is usually not difficult to tell who is in town for which meeting.

Take this guy, for example, who was sitting next to me at the poker table:




Zoom in on that wrist band and the pink emblem on it. Does that look to you like something issued by the CES? I think not.

Of course, if you saw the rest of him, you wouldn't need the wrist band to confirm your impression. That black shirt is tailored and pressed, topped by a chic gray Euro-scarf around the neck. This is not an electronics geek.

You could also note that his European wife or girlfriend, in the seat to his right, was wearing no bra, and a blouse open enough to make that fact clear. Again, not your typical peddler of the latest whiz-bang pocket computer. (Though, for all I know, whizzing and banging are, in fact, key elements of her job.)

I should note that the gentleman in the black shirt was an incredibly good sport. I put horrendous beats on him twice. First, my jacks cracked his aces when I flopped a set. But at least on that occasion I had the best hand when all the money went in. Unlike the second occasion. There, I had K-J on a jack-high flop and was confident I had the best hand. But he had limped in with pocket queens, presumably to deceive me in exactly the manner that it did. We got it all in, and I caught a third jack on the river to save my sorry butt. He just shook my hand and laughed it off. Whew! I think the typical CES attendee would be a little more uptight about such matters.

Sometimes you don't need to be sitting right next to people to be able to tell which meeting they're here for. Take a gander at this couple:



They appear to divide their income equally between gym memberships, plastic surgeons, and manicurists. (You can't see it in this photo, but the dude has perfect nails, including clear nail polish.)

Over the course of the night, I learned that the young woman--whose cups overfloweth, if you catch my drift, much more than you might think from how things look in this photo--goes by the name of "Phoenix Marie." I won't provide a link, but you can Google it. Be prepared for some VVVVVNSFW results, however.* The gentleman declined to give his name or say what movies he has been in (he was pestered on these questions to the point of rudeness by a young female dealer who had to wear a bib to keep from drooling all over the cards), but he is clearly "in the industry." His reticence was not because of general shyness, but a bit of gallantry. He said that he was here to support his girlfriend's career, and didn't want to divert attention away from her and to himself. They were both very nice, and he was definitely better at poker than the average tourist.

Incidentally, Ms. Marie is a stunningly beautiful young woman. I looked around for a few minutes at some of her photos and video clips, and they really don't do her justice. She's one of those people who turns out to be far more attractive in person than on film, for whatever reason.

When deciding on the Venetian for the night, I had thought that I would mainly be facing egghead engineering types flashing the latest gadgets. It was true that the halls and casino floor had more than the usual percentage of young Asian males flashing cutting-edge cell phones, but my particular poker table, at least, was attracting players who were here for the other convention.

I can't say that was entirely a bad thing. It did, however, make for some, uh, interesting table conversation. It also provided new shades of meaning to otherwise innocuous poker terminology. For example, when the dealer announces, "Three-way action".... oh, never mind.


*He told us this name while she was briefly away from the table. It sounded so obviously fake that I thought he might be pulling our legs, so I Googled the name from my spiffy new web-enabled cell phone. An image quickly popped up that was, well, the first of that genre to appear on my new phone. It did so just as a couple of people were walking behind me, so I quickly had to turn the phone face down on my lap. Not that those people likely would have either noticed or cared, but I really don't want to get known as the guy who is so pathetic that he surfs the net for porn on his cell phone between poker hands.