Mesquite-flavored poker. Part 3--Oasis

The room

As suggested by the security guy at Virgin River (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/mesquite-flavored-poker-part-2-virgin.html), I drove over to the Oasis. Once again, I was favorably impressed with a Mesquite poker room. It's surprisingly large (I counted 15 tables), plenty of space between tables, elevated from the casino floor level. It's open to the casino floor, but far enough away from things that smoke and noise are minimal. I love the maroon-colored felt on the tables.

When I walked in at about 5:00 pm, they were just breaking up the only game they had going, so it looked like I wouldn't get to play. But the floor guy suggested that I try the 6:00 tournament. I wasn't really in the mood for a tourney, but I was hungry and had to eat, so the timing would be about right. I grabbed a magazine from the rack and went to Denny's (inside the casino). Finished just in time to sign up for the tournament.

The tournament

This was a rebuy event. I've done lots of tournaments with one rebuy, but I don't think I've ever played in an unlimited-rebuy one. There's a reason I avoid them: the ability to rebuy cheaply mostly takes away one of the tactics I rely on most, which is forcing opponents to difficult decisions for all of their chips. But since it was the only action available, I took it. Two tables, 20 players, four would be paid. Entry fee was $35 for $1000 in tournament chips, with unlimited $10 rebuys for the first hour (though you had to be at or below $1000 to rebuy), plus an optional $20 add-on for $4000 at the end of the rebuy period.

A comment on this structure: It's stupid, particularly the size of the add-on. You can see that chips are half the price then. This means that in the last hand or two of the rebuy period, here's what all except the biggest-stacked players are going to think: "Well, I've got 2000 in chips. I'm definitely going to rebuy. My chances against the big stacks are not much better with 6000 in chips than if I go broke now and start over again with just the 4000 add-on. But if I win a multi-way all-in pot at this point, then I've got a fighting chance." So, predictably, the last two hands become an all-in fest, with one lucky soul becoming one of the big stacks. It pushes luck to way too big of a factor.

The competition was unbelievably soft. There is just no question that I was the best player at the table. I realize that sounds like bragging, but it isn't--it's a comment on how bad everybody else was. For me to be the best tournament player at a table, with my extremely limited tournament experience, is saying something about the other players, not about me. There was not a single player there who had "raise or fold" as his main mode, with "call" being an occasional tool. Instead, it was a game of limp-limp-limp, bet-call-call-call-call, check-check-check-check, bet-fold-fold-fold. Complete and utter passivity. The only thing that distinguished the players from each other was that half of them were loose-weak and the rest tight-weak. I was chip leader for most of the first five levels, until a series of three nearly consecutive suckouts felted me in about 13th place.

The idiot

The guy on my immediate right turned out to be one of those idiots who somehow earnestly believe that unlucky outcomes are attributable to the dealer (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/idiots-blame-dealer.html). In one hand, he limped, I raised with K-K, it got folded back around to him, and he re-raised. The limp-reraise always smells of aces, but this was the loosest player at the table, playing about 75% of hands, and raising with a third of those. Besides, in a low-buy-in event, where the running ratio of average stack size to blinds is not high, it's virtually impossible to escape if you're on the bad end of AA vs. KK. So I push all-in, and the idiot calls. He has 10-10. To me he says, "Nice hand" (even before the five community cards are dealt). Then, nodding toward the dealer, he says, "It's typical of what John always does to me, fucking guy." He is not kidding. I just don't get how players can harbor that kind of moronic belief. Yeah, pal, he stacked the deck between hands when you weren't looking, just so that you'd lose. It's all a conspiracy against you. (Of course, it wasn't a conspiracy when that same dealer later delivered him a runner-runner flush, after all the money was in, to make his pockets 8s beat my flopped aces and tens, the first of the three hands that were my downfall.)

Cash game

Enough players had been knocked out by then that a cash game was about to get started, so I stuck around a little longer and got a seat in it. It was, again, a $4-$8 game. Like at Eureka, the table was very soft. I would peg two other players as being on par with me skill-wise, and, unfortunately, they were the two seats on my left. But they were both card-dead, so didn't cause as much trouble as they otherwise might have. Even though I'm by no means a limit specialist, I cleaned up, even without any extraordinarily lucky run of cards--uptick $138 in an hour and 20 minutes.

Nice touches

Let me mention just a few other admirable things I noticed about the Oasis poker room:

• As you can see from the last photo above, they have 50-cent chips instead of using half-dollar coins for making change from the pot when the house rake requires it. Every time I play in a place that uses silver, I wonder why they don't have 50-cent chips. Chips would be easier to handle for all involved. This is the first time I've seen a casino actually go that way. I like it. The only problem is that they won't cash out the last odd chip at the end of your session, so you either give it back as a tip or you've got yourself a souvenir.
• I love what they do with their magazine rack. Not only do they have four of the five publications I like most (Card Player, Bluff, Poker Player, and Poker Pro, lacking only All-In), but unlike any other casino I've seen, they keep the last three or four back issues of each one available. That way, if you're not a degenerate who goes to poker rooms with my kind of frequency, you can read and/or take home issues you might have missed. Nice touch.
• I have to applaud one dealer for something he did during the tournament. This is the same one--John--that had earlier been the target of the idiot's cursing. The idiot was in the big blind. A standard tournament rule is that if you're not in your seat when the deal is completed, your hand is automatically dead. This helps prevent slowing down the game, and also helps prevent people from possibly getting advice from other people before sitting down to a hand. Anyway, the dealer notices that the idiot is away from the table talking to somebody. As he's putting out everybody's second card, he goes out of his way to tell the player that he needs to get back or his hand will be killed. The idiot doesn't react quickly enough, and arrives about two seconds after the button got his second card. The dealer could easily have let it slide, but instead did the right thing and took back the idiot's cards, politely saying, "Sorry I have to do this, but it's the rule." Of course, Mr. Idiot can't blame himself, and says, "Great. He screws up and I have to pay for it." Huh??? Hey pal, even after you swore at him for an unlucky outcome, he went beyond the call of duty to try to cut you a break! He didn't screw anything up--he just enforced the rule properly. Kudos to him.
  

Like the Eureka, the Oasis is nice enough (and apparently profitable enough) that if it were in Vegas, I would definitely make it a regular stop. For the little town of Mesquite to have two such decent places speaks well for it.

Mesquite-flavored poker. Part 2--Virgin River

After pocketing a tidy little profit at Eureka, I headed across the street to the Virgin River casino. Soon after entering, I saw an overhead sign pointing the way to various places within the establishment, including "Poker room." So I walked in the direction indicated by the arrow. Kept walking that way until I saw another sign telling me the poker room was back in the direction I was coming from.

Hmmm. Must have missed it, I thought. So I did a 180, and went back the way the second sign said. I looked carefully for other signs I might have missed, or for a corridor that would take me to the poker room, or for a couple of poker tables camouflaged among the blackjack tables. Nothing, until I encountered the first sign again, pointing me back where I had just been.

Now I'm getting seriously irritated. I mean, I know that poker gets the lowest priority of any type of gambling by most casinos (because they make little on it compared to the revenue generated by the same number of square feet of slot machines), but it's a little ridiculous to make the room INVISIBLE!

After a third trek across the expanse between these two signs, without seeing anything that suggested poker, I asked a security guard where the poker room is. He said, "At the Oasis" (which is another casino down the road a mile or two).

Yep. They closed the Virgin River poker room. BUT THEY LEFT UP THE FRIGGIN' SIGNS DIRECTING PEOPLE TO IT!

Completely unacceptable, V.R.C. I'll understand if you don't want to pay for all new signs, but at least get somebody to climb up on a ladder and put white tape or paint over the portion of the signs that point to a non-existent poker room.

A pox on your lousy casino.

Mesquite-flavored poker. Part 1--Eureka

When I moved to Las Vegas in the summer of 2006, I stopped briefly in Mesquite on the way down. I went into the poker rooms of the Eureka and Virgin River casinos. Both looked pretty dingy, like the other depressed, worthless rooms I've visited lately. Neither of them had a game going, so I didn't stay long.

On my way back to Vegas yesterday after a short Christmas trip to Salt Lake City, I decided to give Mesquite another try. I went to Eureka first. I was very pleasantly surprised. It's a brand-new poker room. It's open to the casino, but at the far end, so smoke and noise is quite tolerable. As you can see from the photo, the tables are really nice, including cupholders, autoshufflers, and a player tracking system built in. They have coffee and water available without having to wait for the cocktail waitresses.

They had two full tables when I arrived at about 2:30 on a Wednesday (the day after Christmas), which is more than I would have guessed. Both were $4-$8 limit hold'em games, which also surprised me--usually I would expect one or both of them to be $2-$4 or $3-$6. There really is a difference in these games, though logically there shouldn't be. In my experience, $2-4 is usually a loser, because it's so hard to beat the rake; $3-6 is about a break-even proposition; but I can actually make money with some consistency at $4-8. There is no earthly reason that people should play the games differently, but they most definitely do. At $4-8, it is actually possible to push an oppnent hard enough that he'll fold rather than call a bet just out of curiosity or stubbornness or "the hope that springs eternal from within the human breast." (Extra super double bonus points for readers who can identify that quotation without resorting to a search engine. Hint: Think baseball.) So having $4-$8 games means that I'm actually happy to play, rather than just passing the time at a game that annoys and frustrates me. It's the lowest level at which one can really play poker, in any meaningful sense (i.e., it's out of the no-fold'em gutter). I actually bluffed a few times, and it worked! Try that in a $2-4 game.

They're obviously trying to get more no-limit games going, because they have a promotion: Play five hours of no-limit, and they'll give you a room for the night. Not a bad deal--but the catch is that you have to find a no-limit game going!

The first place they had for me to play was when another player was going off for 30 minutes or so to eat. They allowed me to "play over" his chips. I had heard of this before, but I've never seen it done at any casino. They literally put a plexiglas box over the absent person's chips to protect them, and I put my chip rack on top of that to play. If there are any Vegas casinos that do this, I'm not aware of it. A regular seat opened up in the other game before he got back.

Both games were very soft and easy to beat with a textbook tight-aggressive style (with a few curveballs thrown in to keep them guessing). I made $96 in an hour and 40 minutes.

Dealers were OK, but made more mistakes than the best ones do, mainly because they obviously know lots of the regular players pretty well and get overly chatty, and thus don't pay enough attention. But no major problems on that front.

Blinds were only $1-$2, which is a bit odd for a $4-$8 game. I would much prefer the standard $2-$4 blinds to help inhibit limpers and/or build the pot more (hard to know which effect would prevail, but either one is a good thing).

They also used a half-kill, which I don't mind. But it operated differently from any I've seen before. (A "full kill" pot is one that is played for double the usual stakes; in a half-kill game like this, a "kill" pot is 50% higher than usual, so, in this case, the game transforms to $6-$12.) The usual approach is that if a player wins two hands in a row, the next hand is a kill pot, and the person who won two in a row has to post some amount larger than the usual blind to prime the pump. But at the Oasis, a kill pot is triggered by winning a pot of $50 or more, regardless of whether it's your first or tenth in a row. It's unconventional, but I didn't see any problems with it.

My biggest gripe was the management of the games. Specifically, they had two nine-handed tables, and two people waiting for a seat in one of them. They also had an interest list for an Omaha game. There were seven names on that list, including two from each of the current hold'em tables.

When I noticed this, I asked the woman at the desk why they didn't start the Omaha game, since that would free up seats for me and the guy ahead of me on the waiting list. She said, "We can't make the hold'em games short-handed to start Ohama." I pointed out that they wouldn't be short; each game would lose two players and gain one. When they deem nine to be a full table, you can't seriously think of eight-handed as "short." She said, "You don't know how these guys whine about not having full tables."

I told her, "So you'd rather keep five people waiting (two on the hold'em list and three on the Omaha list) than start a seven-person Omaha game and have two eight-handed hold'em games?" She said, "That's how we do things here."

This is nuts. People don't like waiting for a game to start, and they'll leave. Sure enough, that Omaha game never got going, because, predictably, the three who weren't already playing hold'em got tired of waiting. If you want to fill a game, you have to start it first--then other players will come and fill it out. If you wait until you have enough players so that nothing will be short-handed, well, you'll just never start new games, because it's virtually impossible to keep that many people on a waiting list just standing around patiently. I'm certain that the three people who never got to play at all left with a much worse impression of the room than the hold'em players would have had from temporarily having one empty seat at the table. That happens all the time and is no big deal; waiting around a long time for a game that is promised but never starts, well, that's a big deal to those whose time was wasted.

The final interesting thing that happened on this visit was a fire alarm. It happened just as I was leaving--literally the instant that I stepped through the door. In fact, I wondered if I had triggered some security thing, like when the alarm blares at you in the public library because they didn't de-activate one of your books.

I've heard lots of fire alarms in casinos before, and they're actually kind of funny, because nobody does anything. They just keep doing what they were doing before. Every previous time, a recorded voice has come over the PA system saying something like, "Our staff is investigating the cause of the alarm. We will notify you if you need to take any action." In other words, they give people permission to ignore the alarm.

But this time, the overhead voice was actually telling everybody to evacuate. By the time I got to my car, a few people were trickling out, but it wasn't anything like you see in a fire drill at a school, for instance. I think most people will keep playing their slot machines until the reels melt from the flames and won't turn any more. Even then, they'll complain that it was just about to hit.

I haven't seen any news of a big casino fire, so whatever happened apparently wasn't that big a deal. But it's the first time I've seen an attempted casino evacuation.*

All in all, Eureka has made a huge improvement in its poker room. It's nice enough that I would make it a regular stop if it were in town.


*I guess that's not quite true. In another lifetime (November 21, 1980, to be exact), I was living in North Las Vegas. I had no news source that day, but noticed some smoke to the south, and saw many, many helicopter overflights from Nellis Air Force Base. It was only later that I learned that what had been going on was the worst disaster in Nevada history, and the second-worst hotel fire in U.S. history. The helicopters were trying to rescue people from the roof. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Grand_Hotel_Las_Vegas_hotel_fire.