Pocket guide

A bunch of copies of this book were in the magazine rack in the poker room at Mandalay Bay when I was there yesterday. Last week I saw somebody in my Twitter feed mention having picked one up at Treasure Island, I think.

It's a guide to the poker rooms of Las Vegas. Each room has either one or two pages, with details about location, contact information, games spread, tournament schedule, and promotions.

Nothing in the book indicates who compiled or published it, or why. At first glance you'd think that it's paid for by advertising. But the only ad anywhere is the back cover, which is a splash for the Venetian poker room.

A printed book is a strange medium for this kind of information these days. The details change so fast that the book was guaranteed to be out of date the day it hit the stands. And it was. Two of the poker rooms it lists have already closed (Jokers Wild and Aliante Station). One promotion listed expires December 15, another expires at the end of November, and several more at the end of the regular NFL season, further assuring that the book will very quickly be hopelessly outdated. The entry for the Suncoast poker room mentions a promotion that was good only during August!

Even All Vegas Poker, a web site dedicated to tracking what's going on in the city's poker rooms, has difficulty keeping up with the ever-changing promotions and tournament schedules. My understanding is that they call every poker room manager every week to see what's new. My guess is that it's rare that a single day passes without at least one piece of information found in this book changing. When most people are carrying around a web-enabled smart phone, a book like this just doesn't make much sense.

And, by the way, you'd have to be Captain Kangaroo to have a pocket big enough for this "Pocket Guide," which is 5 1/2" by 8 1/2".

Whoever published it also could have used a good proofreader. The table of contents lists "The Strip" a second time instead of "Off Strip" for a section header. It calls the Eastside Cannery the "Eastside Canner." There are odd errors inside, such as a reference to free meal as a "compliment buffet." Fremont Street is misspelled as "Freemont" all three times it appears. The plural of "ace" is written as "ace's." "Please" is spelled "Pleas."

This book is just an all-around mystery. Who produced it? Why? And if you're going to bother with putting such volatile information out in a book format, why such a bad job of it?

Once again, the world baffles me.