My turkey came a little late for Thanksgiving (zero poker content)

My sister, long a fan of the NFR, is in town for the rodeo. So yesterday I had lunch with her clan, then she and I went bowling at Sam's Town. As you can see above, even after having a small steak for lunch, there was room left over for a little turkey! I'm not sure I've ever hit three strikes in a row in my life. (Unlike Gadzooks; she can pull it off in her sleep.) Sadly, on the second game I reverted to usual humiliating style:




There is good news on the horizon, completely unrelated to the above, except that the crappy cell phone camera shots reminded me of it: A new phone is on the way. It's this lovely wine-colored LG Vu model:





See full review here. I had thought that I would have to wait a year or two to upgrade to a fancy, newfangled, touch-screen smartphone with web browser, because of the costs. But yesterday I found a great deal on the thing: Zero up-front cost (well, aside from a $36 activation fee), and a monthly plan that includes unlimited web access for only $8/month more than I'm paying now. And I get to dump Sprint, whose lousy service and call quality have been bugging me for way too long. (Not sure AT&T will be better, but they couldn't really be worse.)

There will be some transition time while I get used to all the bells and whistles, but before too long, when I have occasion to snap a photo and post it here, you won't have to squint to see it. The new phone has a 2 megapixel camera, as opposed to the 0.3 MP camera in the current phone. Might even get some videos out of the thing when needed. Whee!

New poker room at Sam's Town

As I was leaving Sam's Town after the movie today, I noticed that the poker room has moved. It's just across the hall from the old location, but now open to the rest of the casino, rather than being mostly closed off. As regular readers will anticipate, I strongly dislike it when casinos make this move, because I so dislike noise and smoke. But the new room otherwise looks more nicely appointed than the old, and much less crowded. I didn't stop to play, so a full review will have to wait for another day. For now, you can at least see some blurry, low-resolution photos of the place.

What's the deal with "Deal"?

My occasionally spacey sister left some of her clothes in a drawer in her hotel room at Sam's Town last week. Housekeeping found them for her, and today I had to go pick them up so I can mail them to her. I had noticed in the local movie listings that the newest poker movie, Deal, directed by Gil Cates, Jr., was showing at only two places, and one of them was the cinemaplex at Sam's Town. It seemed like destiny. So I went to the 3:00 showing. At 2:55, I was the only one in the theater. It would have been an unprecedented experience to see a movie in a theater completely alone, but five other people came in at the last minute to ruin the opportunity.

I was prepared to hate this film. I even posted last fall that it was probably going to suck. The initial reviews have been far from kind; Wicked Chops Poker quoted these review snippets:

"Deal has to take the title of the worst film ever about the game and that
includes the how-to videos with Joan Rivers impersonators you see in your Vegas
hotel room." - Erik Childress, efilmcritic.com
"One
of the most cliche-ridden and generally misguided films of not just the year,
but the decade so far." - Brian Tallerico, Deadbolt.com
"Director/co-writer
Gil Cates Jr. gives us a by-the-numbers execution of a by-the-numbers story,
which would barely be movie-of-the-week material but for Reynolds's 'star
power.'" - LA
City Beat
"A poker movie that has the dubious honor of being even worse
than Lucky You." - Gary Thompson (but not the Gary Thompson?), Philadelphia
Daily News

In a later post, the same site noted that the film had received a perfect 0% on rottentomatoes.com (i.e., not a single good review), which doesn't happen too often. Similarly, I see that metacritic.com finds an average review score of 35/100, and not a single one better than 50 (see here).

So, like I said, I was prepared to hate it. After all, I've hated most of the poker movies I've posted about here (click the "movies" label at the end of this post or along the left-hand margin to see them all), and griping about things that I don't like or that are just plain bad is, well, it's kind of my whole schtick here, y'know?

But I have to say--it wasn't all that bad.

Sure, it managed to pull together every cliche you might imagine--the hooker with the heart of gold, the washed-up, has-been poker great of yesteryear trying to mount a comeback, the brash, young internet poker whiz who has to learn about live poker tells and whose family disapproves of his playing, the inevitable teacher-versus-student finale for the championship, etc. Also, it definitely takes a while to get going. You can see the "surprise" ending coming from a mile away (especially if you've seen Lucky You, which should sue for plagiarism). And nobody's going to be winning any Oscars for this baby. I could also note the oddity of the World Poker Tour suddenly being broadcast live, and with Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten doing commentary all the way through, rather than just at the final table. Also, there are small poker continuity problems, such as the community cards being swept away at the end of a hand not being the same ones that were shown in close-up as the hand progressed.

But on the positive side, the soundtrack was pretty enjoyable (including tracks from Delbert McClinton and Lorrie Morgan), and you get to see Shannon Elizabeth in her underwear. (Her part, incidentally, is so insignificant that it could have been edited out without disturbing the plot--except that then we'd miss out on seeing her in her unders.) Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari play themselves, and do very well. That sounds like it should be a laugh line, but it's not. The pros playing themselves in most other poker movies come off far stiffer and more uncomfortable than they are in real life, but Phil and Antonio look, sound, and act just like they do everywhere else you've seen them--relaxed and funny. Most importantly, the poker itself doesn't suck, and there's a lot of it, neither of which could be said about many so-called poker movies.

I particularly liked the one truly surprising aspect of the big showdown at the end--the way that the Burt Reynolds character adjusts for the fact that his protege has apparently picked up on a tell that he has. It's daring, brilliant, dramatic, and even plausible, given the circumstances. (Which is why I'm not going to tell you what it is here.)

I suppose that overall it's somewhat duller than Lucky You, with fewer characters and fewer diversions from the main plot, but it also avoids most of the things that drove me crazy about Lucky You (getting poker stuff wrong, relationships that don't make sense, unlikeable main characters).

I think the movie's strengths and weaknesses are summed up best in this paragraph from the review that Wesley Morris wrote for the Boston Globe:

But "Deal" doesn't really care about the characters as much as it does the
World Poker Championships, where Tommy and Alex end up. Once we get there the
movie becomes interesting because Cates understands the game and its dramas a
lot better than he understands people and theirs.

Incidentally, I saw previews for two non-poker-related movies that both look excellent: Hamlet 2, a comedy, and American Teen, a documentary.

Today's helpful hints, miscellaneous

1

If you order the "Fudge Cake Collision" at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian, bring a friend to share it with. Or two. Or three. It's that big. (See above.)


2

Try the jerk chicken at Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" restaurant (inside the Flamingo) sometime. Very tasty. I hadn't eaten at that place before, and it was really quite nice. I liked the continuous-running Buffet music videos playing on a big screen. Different atmosphere than you'll get anywhere else in town.


3

If you should happen to lock your keys in your car in a casino parking garage--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--their security people will not open it for you, quoting some rot about liability for damages, but will helpfully hand you the telephone number of a locksmith. A mere 45 minutes and $45 later, you can be on your merry way.


4

If you pre-pay for a line or two of late-afternoon bowling at a local set of lanes associated with a hotel-casino--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--and then decide that you could do one more before heading off for dinner, and so you go up to the desk to pay for another game, and it happens, unbeknownst to you, to be close to the time that they will be starting their league night activities, they will not politely say something like, "I'm sorry, but we have league bowling starting in about 15 minutes, and can't have any new games start now," but instead will convey that same basic message to you in a startling mixture of incredulity and exasperation, with a combination of body language, facial expression, and tone of voice that will unambiguously convey that you are a complete idiot for not having known in advance that you couldn't start a game after 4:30, due to their league commitments, because, after all, doesn't everybody on Planet Earth know that already, you imbecile?

(I believe I just broke my own record for longest sentence there. Good thing I'm not back in junior high school, with the assignment to diagram the grammar of it.)


5

The musical dancing-waters fountain shows in front of the Bellagio really are nice to watch--no matter how many times you've seen them before--whatever song they choose to choreograph. (Hmmm. Seems like we need a different word for what it is they do. Maybe "aqueograph.") If you're entertaining out-of-town visitors, it's a near cinch that they will enjoy it.


6

The "Poker Shrink" (http://www.pokerblog.com/tags/poker+shrink) has a blog entry pointing to a BBC Science site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml) on which you can look at 20 smiles and test yourself to see how good you are at discerning the genuine smiles from the forced ones. He points out that while this specific ability is not necessarily useful for poker, it is part of a whole package of being able to gain insight into people's emotional states from non-verbal manifestations. I got 16 out of 20 right. It's an interesting way to spend five minutes of your life.

Casino club cards

This may actually be the most trivial thing I've found to complain about yet. But it annoyed me this week, so it gets a post.

All of the casinos have membership club cards. It's worth having them if you spend a lot of time in casinos, because they make you eligible for various prizes and discounts. Typically, they are also what poker rooms use to keep track of your hours of play for purposes of food comps, freeroll tournaments, etc.

When I leave the apartment to go play poker, I often don't know where I'll end up, so it wouldn't work for me to just pick up the one or two or three that I think I might need to use that day and take them along. It's much more convenient for me to keep them all on a keyring and just cart the whole mess of 'em with me wherever I may wander. (Downside: Presenting to casino employees a comprehensive collection of such cards bound together gives one the distinct appearance of a problem gambler.)

And therein lies the problem for some of these stupid cards. Note, for example, the one from the Silverton (top image). Notice that the only hole in it is a big ugly one that I had to gouge into it myself with a pocket knife. That's the only way I could string it onto a keyring.

Most of the club cards have a hole pre-punched in the lower right-hand corner. They don't intend this for the convenience of those nut-jobs among us who carry about 50 of the things at a time. No, they're made for attaching a lanyard so that patrons can wear the thing around the neck. You see them all the time, sitting at slot machines, with what looks like an umbilical cord joining machine and player. (I'm not sure which is the mother and which the fetus in this image. It's kind of icky either way.)

Surely there are a lot fewer cards accidentally left in slot machines this way. Which is why I can't figure out why the little hole isn't a universal feature for such cards. In addition to the Silverton, I've had to drill my own hole in cards from Orleans, South Point, Suncoast, Tuscany, and Wynn. It's ridiculous.

The second image above (from Sam's Town) is a partial solution. There's a hole along one edge of the card. (It might be a bit hard to see; it's on the right, next to the dice.) This certainly suffices for the lanyard folks, and would work on a keyring, if they all did it the same way. But this is a minority approach (I see the same pattern on Riviera and Venetian). It doesn't work on a keyring to have two different places for the holes, because the cards don't line up neatly. So for those, I had to drill a second hole.

The majority, fortunately, take the approach shown in the final image above (which I just picked up tonight at the Rampart). That's how they should all be. Neat and simple.

It's just a little hole in the corner, all you casino executives. I'm really not asking for much here.

Faux betting lines

Some poker rooms have a line on the felt, and chips pushed forward aren't considered legally bet unless and until they cross that line.* The traditional rule, before a recent vogue of betting lines, was that forward motion with chips constituted a bet.

I don't care a whole lot whether a place uses a betting line or just the standard forward-motion rule, though on the whole I tend to think that betting lines cause more problems than they solve, and open more room for angle-shooters than they close, as expressed in this rant by Paul Phillips: http://extempore.livejournal.com/90346.html.

But I am baffled beyond words by the handful of poker rooms that have designed into the poker table felt what looks for all the world like a betting line, is assumed by all the players to be a betting line, and gets treated by the players as a betting line, only to have a dealer at some point in the festivities point out that it is not, in fact, a betting line. No, it's only decoration that happens to look exactly like a betting line.

It is no coincidence that I chose a photo of a Planet Hollywood table to illustrate this post. I was reminded of this gripe by playing there Saturday night. You can see in the picture what would look like a betting line to anybody who has seen them used before. But PH is far from the only guilty party on this point.

Listen up, poker room managers: If you don't want to have betting lines used in your facility, and you don't want players to assume that there are betting lines in use, then, maybe I'm just crazy to think this, but here's an idea: DON'T DESIGN INTO YOUR POKER TABLES WHAT LOOKS LIKE A FRIGGIN' BETTING LINE!!!

And you want to hear a wrinkle on this that's even worse? I was playing at Sam's Town tonight. I've only played there twice before, so I don't have the house rules down pat. The line on the table looked to me like it was probably mere decoration, because it was unusually far inboard--that is, one had to reach an unnaturally long way to reach it, suggesting to me that it wasn't really used as a betting line. When it was my turn to put out a blind, I put it at a normal spot in front of me, several inches short of the line, and asked the dealer, "Is that a betting line, or is it just decoration?" The oh-so-helpful dealer said, "Yes." I politely asked for clarification. He said he really didn't know, that when he had asked that himself in the past, he got told different things by different shift supervisors, so he didn't want to commit himself on whether it was a betting line or not, and if there was a problem or I wanted a definite answer, he'd just call the floor person to answer it.

Gee, thanks. Nice to know you can count on the dealer to clear up any ambiguities like that. Hey, pal, are you also a little unclear on whether a flush beats a straight or the other way 'round? I mean, I can sympathize that it would be strange to be told different things on different shifts, but if that happens, then for heaven's sake, take the initiative and go to the poker room manager to get it set in stone one way or the other. I understand that as a dealer you're the low man on the totem pole, but have some pride in your work, dude! If you see a problem, do what you can to get it rectified, rather than say, "It's not my job," and wash your hands of it. You would be doing every employee and every patron a favor by getting it cleared up--and you'd make your own job easier, too. Rather than having to repeat the speech you gave to me every time somebody asks, you could confidently say, "It's a betting line," or "It's just decoration," be done with it, and move on.


*Some places, mostly run by Nazis, say that every chip that crosses the line is automatically bet, even if you don't release it. That is, you have a stack of ten chips in your hand because you were shuffling them; you reach across the line and drop one chip from the bottom of the bunch to constitute a call; you bring your hand back with the other nine chips still in it; and then WHAMMO, you're informed that you just raised the entire amount that is in your hand, because "they went across the line." What makes this kind of house rule even more retarded is that it is never enforced consistently. There will always be some dealers who enforce it every time, some who completely ignore it, and others that will enforce it only if another player asks them to, which basically means that you get a new set of rules every 30 minutes, or at least every shift change (because the floor people are just as inconsistent about it as the dealers). Nazis, every last one of 'em.

Another dealer who can't keep out of the action

After writing twice recently about dealers who can't resist the urge to insert themselves into the game (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/not-talking-about-hand-in-progress.html and http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-up-with-dealers-this-week.html), tonight at Sam's Town I saw another variation on the theme.

This time, a woman raised before the flop, then bet out on the flop and again on the turn, after which the dealer commented, "She's betting like she really has something!"

Yes, again, it's a pretty obvious conclusion to draw, but, again, it's wholly improper and unprofessional for dealers to act as if they're TV commentators talking to an audience.

Dealers, it's really simple: Keep the f*$%# out of the action! Is your job so boring that you just can't bear not being part of the game?