Another poker dump, and a study in contrasts

I am determined to eventually play at least once in every poker room Las Vegas has to offer. Today I scratched another one off the list: Arizona Charlie's-Decatur.

It will save a lot of time if I just say "ditto" to nearly everything I previously wrote about the El Cortez (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/armpit-of-las-vegas-poker.html). The ACD poker "room" is just two tables roped off from the surrounding slot machines and blackjack tables. It doesn't even have a sign, so you can wander around the casino for quite a while before finding it. I had to ask a security guy, because I went around the entire perimeter and never saw a poker room or even a sign pointing to it--guess they wouldn't want to draw undue attention to it.

The main difference from the El Cortez is that ACD allows smoking right at the table. Today was only the second time I've sat in a game with smoking going on at the table. Fortunately, I was on an end seat, with a reasonably powerful desk fan right behind me, so I was upwind of all the smokers--which was literally everyone else in the game.

The other difference from the E.C. is that they were spreading a semi-normal hold'em game: $4-8 limit, with the unusual but not bizarro $1-2 blinds. I managed to lose only $26 in the course of an hour. I was actually ahead for most of the session, until losing one huge pot. After I flopped top two pairs, I pushed as hard as I could, but got called down and beaten by a backdoor flush. Now, this in itself wouldn't be too unusual, except that on the flop this guy had no pair and no draw, other than the runner-runner flush, yet he called a bet and a raise before the flop, and another bet and raise on the flop, with a suited K-5.* For readers who aren't obsessively into poker, I'll just say that this is seriously stupid play; in order to win, he had to get a club on the turn (about a 20% chance of that) and a club on the river (another roughly 20% chance), something like a 4% chance of both events happening. The point here isn't to complain about the beat or to garner sympathy, but to illustrate the level of play going on at ACD.

One elderly guy almost perpetually looked either asleep or dead. I kept wanting to suggest that the poker room manager call the paramedics to check his pulse and see if he was still alive. But then he'd stir a bit, scrape something out of his ear, look at it, and flick it on the floor. I thought that dead people probably wouldn't do this--at least not as often as he was doing it.

After my obligatory hour at ACD, I hopped over to the gorgeous Venetian, to put in a few more hours towards their 50-hours-in-August tournament promotion. What a contrast. It's hard to imagine two poker rooms farther apart on the scale of classiness. The Venetian is the top Editor's Choice on the only site (as far as I know) dedicated to comparing and commenting on Vegas poker rooms, http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It's also usually one of the top two as voted by contributors to that site. See, e.g., this visitor's review, which I think is spot-on (except the part about Cassandra--sorry, but I just haven't paid much attention to the cocktail waitresses, other than to note that too many of them have gone way too big on the breast implants; it's kind of hard not to notice that): http://www.allvegaspoker.com/player_review_2382.html.

Arizona Charlie's-Decatur is like the anti-Venetian. If they were to come into physical contact, they would annihilate each other in a universe-shaking explosion. (Stephen Hawking, if you're reading this, please feel free to comment on the repercussions of such contact on the space-time continuum.)

I picked up my mandatory $1 and $5 chips for the souvenir collection, but when I look at them again some day, I expect that it will give me a shudder of disgust at the memory: "Ewwwwwwwwwww, I actually sat in that nasty room for an hour? What was I thinking?!"



*Probably the most thoughtful and refined guide to profitable selection of starting hands for a game like this is Lee Jones, "Winning Low Limit Hold'em" (3rd edition, 2005). K-5, suited or not, does not appear anywhere in his charts of recommended hands to play from any position. In other words, the consensus of studious, long-time winning players (yeah, it's a single-author book, but Jones has had a ton of input over the years his book has been in print, and he comments pretty profusely on how and why he has changed his mind on some points, after thoughtful comments from other pros he respects) is that K-5 (actually, any K with lower than a 9 kicker) is a dog in every situation, with a negative expected value over the long run (i.e., you'll lose more than you win playing it). So calling a raise before the flop was already pretty boneheaded, let alone calling another bet and raise after the flop when he had not improved.

Addendum, August 21, 2007: During a session at the Venetian today, I finally spotted the aforementioned "Cassandra." I can see why she caught the writer's attention. She is truly an exotic beauty--Hawaiian, maybe. Still, attractive women are about a dime a dozen in Vegas, and even if a place had a monopoly on gorgeous young women serving drinks, that would make for a pretty piss-poor reason to choose a place to play poker.

The armpit of Las Vegas poker

In 1962, Edward Albee famously shocked audiences, certain religious folk, censors, and the Pulitzer Prize committee with his play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", in large part because one of the main characters, Martha, has an attention-grabbing opening line: as she and her husband, George, enter their modest home, she disgustedly proclaims, "Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!"

Surely that line will occur afresh to all right-thinking, serious poker players upon their first experience with the poker room at the El Cortez hotel and casino.

I haven't done any poker room reviews in this blog, mainly because they all have their merits and demerits, and where one likes to play is a highly subjective call; my preferences aren't any better or worse or more objective than anybody else's. But this place deserves all the negative attention I can bring to it.

The El Cortez is easily the nearest place that I could go to play; it's only a block north of my apartment building. I've avoided it for the 9 months that I've lived here because I knew that it was one of the few remaining Vegas poker rooms that allowed players to smoke at the table, and I just couldn't stand that. But I read recently that they had joined the non-smoking bandwagon, and so today I decided to give it a whirl.

Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!

Let's talk about the smoking thing first. It's only a little better than it would be if smoking were allowed right at the table. The "room" isn't a room at all, just a little nook in the main casino, three tables right next to a bunch of slot machines. Five or ten feet is all one has to move to be in the smoking area. The tables, by the way, still bear the scars of the smoking era--the cheap vinyl rail has so many cigarette burn/melt scars, it looks like the lunar surface.

The tables are ancient. Whatever layer is under the felt has warped badly (probably from absorbing liquid from spilled drinks). The taut felt over the top no more hides these flaws than spandex bicycle shorts hide the cellulite on a 300-pound cyclist. My chips looked like I had stacked them drunk; no two stacks were parallel to each other, because the surface of the table was so uneven.

What can one say about the clientele? I'll try to quantify it. Their average age is about ten times their average number of remaining teeth. The place must really liven up the day the Social Security checks hit the mail. I've honestly never seen so many scooters, hearing aids, oxygen tanks, and cataract glasses around one poker table. The game was constantly slowed down by the hard-of-hearing asking, "What's the bet? What? WHAT? I can't hear you!" and the hard-of-seeing asking what cards were on the board. In my experience, it's pretty damn rare that at age 45 I'm the young gun at the table.

And I'll just add two more words, trusting that the reader knows whereof I speak, without the need to elaborate in nauseating detail: Body odor.

One elderly woman kept announcing what cards she folded whenever she would have made a pair with the board. After the third time--with the dealers, of course, saying nothing about it--I tried to tell her that that was against the rules. Her only response--and I am not making this up--was, "What? I can't hear you." I asked the dealer to enforce the rule about discussing the hand while it was in progress. The dealer got the same response as I did. She finally called the floor over to caution this fine patron of the game. It was obvious that the floor person did this only as a perfunctory obligation, given the complaint, but actually thought it was a point that didn't matter one little bit. The rest of the table looked at me as if I were from Mars for caring about such things. Rules? There are RULES?

When I was there, two tables were in use, both spreading the most ridiculous structure of hold'em I've ever seen--sillier, even, than the Luxor's bizarro $50 min/$50 max, 1-1-3 blinds game. At the El Cortez, they play a strange mutant spread-limit game: $1-3/$1-6. There is a single blind, which the player posting can make $1, $2, or $3. Raises/bets on the first three rounds are then $1-3 spread, with the larger range ($1-$6) applying only on the river. Among the octogenarian crowd, this produces infinite potential for confusion on every bet, every round, every hand. Half of the game is spent getting the pot right.

For the most part, the posted blind is just $1, and nearly the whole table limps in. This game would play almost identically, and move a hell of a lot faster, if they instead made the structure like this: Everybody puts in $5 blind, then gets their down cards, then the five community cards are put out all at once, and the hole cards are revealed. Winner gets the pot.

The reason this would have the same result is because nobody ever folds. Role of skill? 1%. Role of luck? 99%. Importance of position? Zero. Importance of being able to deduce an opponent's hand? Zero. Probability that the best starting hand will hold up? About 10%. Importance of selectivity in starting hands? Nil. You really can't even call what happens "sucking out," because it's the rule rather than the exception. It really would be more efficient to run it like the lottery that it is, and abandon the pretense that what they're playing is poker.

To make it even better, you can buy in for just $20--and you'd better believe that they do. Lose a hand, buy another $20. They also let even smaller denominations of currency play, so the dealers get the fun job of counting out the 1s and 5s that players toss into the pot, to replace them with the equivalent in blue chips. It's just like the worst home game you've ever been in, except a lot slower, smellier, with worse play, and the participants are drunker. (I won't venture a guess as to what fraction of them are really just there for the free drinks--but the number must be substantial.)

My guess is there isn't a single player there who can, over the long run, beat the rake by enough to average, say, more than $5/hour profit. My $100 got sucked down to nothing over the course of 90 minutes, though it was up significantly for a while. That's neither a complaint nor a boast, because the outcome either way is almost completely independent of skill.

With all the past and current smoking going on there, it's a small miracle that the El Cortez hasn't burned down yet. And though I would never advocate arson, I'll just note that if it did ever get torched, the poker world would be better off for it, and I would send up a little prayer of thanks to the firebug.

I have not yet been to every Vegas-area poker room (at my last count, there were 51, and I've played in 38 so far), but I have a hard time imagining that there is any overall worse room than the El Cortez. I will henceforth refer to it only as the armpit of Las Vegas poker--and I would dub it that even without the B.O. problem mentioned earlier.

Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!


Addendum, July 31, 2007

I just ran across one of Jennifer Tilly's columns from Bluff magazine (see here). She says, "At the El Cortez there is not much to see. A far cry from the glitz and glamour of the Bellagio, it resembles a bus station. There are rows of penny slot machines, and a shoe shine chair. The poker room smells of disinfectant, and has a distinct Wild West feel. It seems like the kind of place where you could get hit by a beer bottle if you’re caught bluffing."