Suggestion

I think the first person to sign up for a sit-and-go tournament should be rewarded with, say, an extra 10% starting chip stack, or maybe a 10% reduction in the buy-in. Sometimes you sit for a long time waiting for others to show up. Acting as a catalyst to get the game started is certainly worth something to the online sites to have people willing to do that. That's how it would be if I ran the world.

Just wondering

Is there any reason you couldn't run a tournament in the new "Rush Poker" format? On a first run through my brain, none occurs to me, but I might easily be missing something really obvious.

How to make poker more fun

I have an idea for how to make hold'em better.

Rather than the dealer pitching cards around the table one at a time, he takes two in a row to give to each player. Additionally, the dealer looks at them first and arranges them with the higher card on the bottom, then carefully slides them to the player with that order undisturbed.

Can you see why this is a great idea? Assuming you lift up the cards so that you see the bottom one first, you will never be disappointed by what the second card is. Never again would you see a lovely king, followed by a wretched four. If you see a king first, you would know that the other card awaiting your eyes can only be another king or an ace! Happy days!

I don't care that this would slow the game down to about half the current pace. The avoidance of that big letdown would be worth it.

The next Olympic gold-medal hurdler could be a poker player

I'm an idea man. I'm full of it, er, them.

Like right now I've got this great idea for how to assure the United States Olympic dominance in every track and field event that involves sprinting, hurdles, and the steeplechase: We recruit poker players.

You see, when a poker player is away from the table temporarily, on a restroom break or dinner break or whatever, and is just heading back to continue playing, it suddenly becomes a matter of life and death to get to the table in time for the next hand. If from a distance he sees the dealer pulling the deck from the Shufflemaster, he will break into a sweat and a sprint, and cover the remaining distance to the table in a dead run.

Mind you, this isn't just the young, healthy kids we're talking about here. This includes the old, the fat, the lame, guys who haven't voluntarily exercised since the Truman administration, and those who are coming back from a cigarette break with their oxygen tanks dragging behind.

I mention the steeplechase and hurdles because that's the other amazing thing about witnessing this surge of adrenaline. These guys can leap tall buildings in a single bound. They can jump over chairs, tables, and the half-walls that surround many poker rooms. Remember the Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza is at a children's party when fire breaks out, and he pushes all the kids down in his mad rush for the door? You see the same thing with poker players desperate to get back to the table. They're absolutely ruthless in their blind dash.

This phenomenon is really only remarkable for those who are stuck. Winning players are a lot more casual about returning. But have a guy lose his first four or five buy-ins, and you've got an Olympic athlete on your hands.

I realize that this is completely insane behavior. Think about it this way: Suppose you need to catch a bus. If it's the last bus of the night, and your destination is an impossible distance away and you've just got to get there, and there's no train or taxi, and you get to the bus stop just as that last bus is pulling away, you well might run for your life and scream for it to stop and throw rocks at it to get the driver's attention, etc. But suppose you knew that, rather than being the last bus of the night, this was a route on which another bus came along every two minutes, rain or shine, day or night. Wouldn't you be inclined to look at the departing bus with a shrug and say, "Oh well. The next one will be here soon"? Of course you would. Because that's what a rational human being would do.

But a poker player who is stuck for a large amount of money loses the ability to reason in such a calm and detached manner. To him, the cards the dealer is putting out right this instant are all that matter. He just knows that they are the pocket aces that will win him the huge pot that turns the session around. Of course, it's just as likely that it will be the pocket kings that lose everything to somebody else's pocket aces, but that possibility does not occur to the stuck player. All he knows is that, by all that is holy, he needs to play this hand, and Lord help anybody or anything that stands in his way.

So here's my idea. Put old, fat, butt-smoking, arthritic poker players in the U.S. Olympic team. When they line up to start the race, all the other competitors will laugh and relax, thinking they've got it cinched. But we have a secret weapon. You see, just before the race, our degenerate gamblers will have been playing poker, in a game that they don't know is rigged, so they're doomed to lose. They'll be down $1000, $2000 just when they get the call to report for the race. Then we fit them with one of those virtual-reality headset things. It will project in front of their eyes an image of the poker game they just left, with the dealer just about ready to begin the next hand.

Bang! The starter pistol goes off, our pokeristas are running like Secretariat, and we nail gold, silver, and bronze, while the muscular, tanned, elite athletes of every backwater third-world banana republic on the planet are left in the dust.

We can't lose.

What Las Vegas has been needing

I've had an idea brewing in my brain since shortly after I moved here and started playing a lot of live casino poker about a year and a half ago. There's no way that I have the time, the financing, or the technical expertise to pull it off myself, so I'm just throwing it out into the ether for any entepreneur to pick up and run with.

We need a centralized web site with continuously updated information as to what games are currently being spread at the city's 50+ poker rooms.

Many times when tourists find out that I live in town, I get asked where they will most reliably be able to find a 7-card stud game, or $10-20 limit hold'em, or whatever. I can only guess.

If you read trip reports (there are new ones almost daily) on http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, you'll frequently see visitors commenting that they went to a particular poker room, but it was dead or didn't have the game or limits they wanted to play, so they had to walk down the Strip to the next casino.

I've sat near the poker room desk often enough to know that the brush or cashier has to handle lots and lots of phone calls asking what games are going on.

Since I generally prefer the smaller poker rooms, I have had times that I have had to call four or five places to find one that had a no-limit hold'em game going. It's a big time waster.

All of these problems would be eliminated, or at least reduced, if we could log on to a web site and get that information.

I envision being able to specify a game and limits, and have the site spit out a list of all of the casinos currently spreading that game, with a notation of how many tables they have going. Alternatively, I could enter my current location, and ask for a display of all of the live games within a certain radius, for example, 0.5 miles (if somebody wanted to see what was within walking distance, say).

Obviously, the big sticking point would be getting the poker room staffs to keep their data frequently updated. Maybe I've got on my rose-colored glasses, but I think they would have sufficient motivation to do so. Letting people know what games they have going brings in more business. It also avoids giving people the sour taste in their mouth that results from taking the trouble to go someplace only to find that there's no action, and have to move on. Third, I think it would take less time for a casino employee to occasionally update their list of games than to answer all the phone calls they get requesting that same information. Finally, poker rooms could advertise on the site, with information about current promotions, etc.

I'm psychic. I can tell what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Grump, wouldn't the casinos be inclined to fib, and say that they have games going even after they've broken up, just to bait-and-switch people in?" Well, they might, if given no reason not to. But I propose that the site be open to feedback from users. On http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ you can get a pretty good feel for how places treat their poker-playing customers from the aggregate reports they compile. Big sites like eBay and amazon.com's used-book dealers also get useful (though admittedly not foolproof) profiles of merchants' reliability through massed reports from purchasers. As I see it being set up, if, say, Caesars Palace were found repeatedly to be claiming to have games running that weren't (and this could be either through deliberate false advertising or simple failure to keep their list adequately updated), angry site users who wasted their time going there would quickly shame Caesars into cleaning up their act, or risk losing business.

Whoever owns and runs the site could generate income from all sorts of poker-related advertising.

I think that once a critical mass was achieved, such that the majority of poker rooms was actively using the site, it would become a significant competitive disadvantage for the others not to join in. The usefulness of such a site would clearly expand over time, as more and more consumers start carrying and relying on web-capable cell phones, such as Apple's iPhone. It is a general fact of life in this century that people will more and more be expecting--even demanding--real-time information in ways that are easier to access than making a tedious series of phone calls. Look at movie theaters as an example. Nobody calls around to theaters these days to find out show times. Even using newspaper ads to get that information is going the way of the dinosaur, as web sites can compile, update, and distribute it much faster. The way poker rooms now inform customers of their offerings is stuck in the stone age.

Maybe someday registered users could even put their names on waiting lists through the site, but that introduces a whole 'nuther level of complication and problems that I would avoid at first. It would be sufficient to have poker room telephone numbers listed so that once you've decided where and what you want to play, you place one call to get on the list while on your way there.

So that's my million-dollar idea, given away for free to anybody who wants to do the hard work of getting it implemented. That's just the kind of guy I am, ya know?