Let's have a Fiesta!

I had only played poker at Fiesta Henderson once before tonight (on May 25, 2007, to be exact, according to my records). There wasn't much to impress me--all locals, only two tables going on a Friday night, and those were a $2-4 game and a $3-6 game.

But there's a new sheriff in town. Fiesta hired James Klosty just before the Hilton poker room closed, and he also took with him Ken Franco, who had been a shift supervisor at the Hilton. So I thought I would check in to see how they were doing, and what they might have done with this little room.

The good news

I have to say I was favorably impressed. I was surprised at all of the promotions they have going, because I usually expect to see announcements of such things in print. Tight advertising budget, I gather. But they have progressive high-hand jackpots (capped at $599 for quads and straight flushes, uncapped for royal flushes, with the club royal currently over $2000), a progressive bad-beat jackpot (aces full of tens beaten by four-of-a-kind or better; currently at over $20,000); and a weekly $1500 freeroll tournament for just ten hours of cash-game play. James told me that they give more back to players through these promotions than any poker room on the Strip, and that's quite plausible.

Another one will be starting soon. Since details haven't been made public, I'll just give you a hint of it: 20 seconds to grab as many chips as you can from one of those plexiglas drums that they usually use for drawing random names or numbers for prizes. That's unlike anything I've heard of a poker room doing before. Might be interesting.

The room itself is a bit noisier than is my preference, but it's nowhere near as bad as, say, Bally's or the MGM Grand. Cigarette smoke wasn't bad enough that I noticed it while playing, though there was a little adhering to my clothes after I left. Sort of middle-of-the-road on that front. It would be even better if they didn't allow smoking at one end of the room.

They have a coffee machine and water cooler for players, so that you don't have to wait for (and tip) a waitress. I like that, especially since it took nearly 45 minutes from the time I asked for a bottle of water until it arrived (before I noticed the water cooler on the other end of the room). They will serve meals while you play, which often isn't so at the smaller poker rooms.

I was surprised at how busy the room was: four full tables at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Two were $2-4 games and two were $3-6 games. By about 6:00 a no-limit game started, and I migrated over to it. It was an unusually tight game, one of those where you have to pick up the table and shake the chips off of it to make any money. There were four pretty good players there, ones on whom I had little if any edge, which also surprised me. They weren't just textbook tight, but mixed things up nicely, good at sniffing out bluffs and making fairly thin value bets.

In the $3-6 limit game they had a feature I've never seen or even heard of before: "overs" buttons. Here's the definition from the best poker dictionary I know of (http://www.poker1.com/mcu/pokerdictionary/mculib_dictionary_o.asp):

overs button (n phrase) A button designating a player who will play at a higher limit when only those who have such an arrangement remain in a pot. Two or more players in a 20-40 game, for example, might agree that when either only they are in a pot or when others fold causing only them to remain, they will play 100-200. Each player so agreeing gets an overs button.

I always like learning new things about poker--especially now that I'm experienced enough that it's tempting to think I know all the tricks.

At F.H., the overs button transforms the game to no-limit whenever only players who have chosen to have one of the buttons are left in a hand. Since I almost always prefer playing no-limit to fixed-limit, I immediately agreed to take an overs button, and was one of four at the table who did.

But after thinking about it for a while, I surrendered it back again. I don't think it's strategically sound, at least for my style of play. Starting hand selection is different enough for low-limit and no-limit that I'm not thrilled with the idea of changing in the middle of a hand. It also seems sort of perverse that you can only charge an opponent $3 on the flop for him to be able to catch his flush or straight draw on the turn, but he can then charge you whatever he feels like to call if he hits it (because on the early streets, there is probably at least one player without an overs button, so the game is limit, but on the later streets it's more likely that the field will have been narrowed and the only players left both agreed to the "overs").

I was very glad I reliquished the button when I hit a series of rivered bad beats; I could see if opponents really made the hand they were representing for only one large bet. Of course, the other side of that argument is that if we had been in a no-limit situation, I might have been able to make it too expensive for them to draw. Still, I think I'd rather play either limit or no-limit for any given hand, not change it up in the middle of a hand. I don't mind casinos offering this variant, though, since nobody is obligated to participate; basically, every player has veto power over whether it will be in effect for any hand he's in.

The gripes

I consider it my self-appointed mission to complain about things in the world of poker, so I would be untrue to my calling if I didn't blow the whistle on things I think F.H. should do better.

They only have Card Player magazine, as far as I could tell. More variety is better.

There are no signs pointing guests to the poker room. It's on the second floor, an escalator ride up from the main casino floor. But even the sign directly above the base of the escalator--the sign that tells you all the things to be found on the second floor--doesn't mention the poker room! This is really shoddy. People shouldn't have to ask where anything is in a casino; it's not that hard to make good signs and maps. There's no reason for this, other than cheap and/or lazy and/or indifferent casino management. If you're not going to spend money promoting the poker room in print, for heaven's sake at least help people who are already there find the place!

I ran into yet another dealer who couldn't resist alerting everyone to a potential jackpot situation. It's been a bad month for this nasty habit (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/another-dealer-injecting-himself-into.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/not-talking-about-hand-in-progress.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-up-with-dealers-this-week.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/another-dealer-who-cant-keep-out-of.html). This time it was a dealer named Ron. When there was both a pair and three parts of a straight flush on the board, he told the table, "We're in bad beat territory!" With the bad-beat jackpot as high as it is, this kind of announcement can severely distort the action, if there happens to be a player who didn't know about the jackpot or didn't notice the possibility on the board. Maybe somebody has the quads and got so excited he didn't see the possible straight flush, until the dealer points it out. This is just not right. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Our no-limit table had chronic problems with the Shufflemaster, so bad that eventually it devolved into just hand shuffling. Apparently it wouldn't have helped to switch the machine out or move us to another table, because, we were told, all the other machines were just as faulty. C'mon--it's just lame to have equipment not work on such a widespread basis and have no means of backup. Similarly, the drop box for the rake kept getting jammed. If this is a one-time thing, no big deal, but I was led to believe that it's a long-standing, ongoing problem. Well then, get it taken care of, so that the game doesn't get stopped over such a silly little thing! Such things aren't serious enough to turn an otherwise pleasant poker session into a negative one, but they shout out the message that the casino doesn't care very much about the game or the poker room's patrons. I suspect that malfunctioning equipment in other parts of the casino wouldn't get neglected for weeks on end.

For reasons that aren't at all obvious to me, Kem brand cards (the most commonly used in Vegas casinos) that are printed with green-colored backs seem subject to wear a lot faster than their other colors. And sure enough, the green deck at our no-limit table had scads of cards with whitish rubbed-out patches. If there's just one such card, it can easily be replaced. But maybe a third or half of this deck had unique markings. I didn't think that anybody was paying attention to them, but if somebody cared to take the effort, he could easily and quickly learn to distinguish several cards by the wear patterns on their backs, and thus gain an advantage over opponents. This was not subtle; it was obvious, and surely every employee of the poker room who handled that deck noticed it. So why didn't any dealer take the initiative to replace the deck? A standard part of starting up a new table is supposed to be inspecting the backs of the cards, precisely to find such defects. Poker rooms should take decks this badly worn out of play permanently, rather than wait for a player to complain about the cards being identifiable.

Nevertheless, even with these faults, it's a nice little room. For me the biggest obstacle to frequenting it is that it's such a long drive from my downtown apartment. There's not much to be done about that fact. But if it were closer, and if the action were consistently there at times I'd want to play, there's nothing about the room or its management that would deter me from becoming a regular, and there's much to like about it, even for a grump.