New Silverton poker room

I was at the Silverton briefly today and noticed that the new Cantor-operated poker room appears to be on the verge of opening. Sorry for the crappy photo quality; I didn't notice I had blurred the shots until I got home.

I hear rumors...

...that the Silverton will soon be re-opening its poker room, under the management of Cantor Gaming.

...that the Plaza, too, is planning to re-open its poker room.

...that the Lady Luck casino downtown is including a poker room in its current renovation.

Mind you, I have no reliable source for these things. They're just rumors I've heard recently.

We shall see if any of them comes to pass.

Another one bites the dust

The Silverton is the latest casino to close its poker room:

http://www.vegaschatter.com/story/2012/2/3/142946/9137/vegas-travel/The_Last_Cards_Have_Been_Dealt_At_The_Silverton_s_Poker_Room

While it wasn't as icky a room as the one at Fitzgerald's, I can't say I'll miss the place much. I played there only four times in my five years in Vegas, and it was always a nitty locals joint. Just not much reason to head out there, other than the cool fish tank (which I've heard has also gone away).

New poker room at the Silverton

I went to the Tropicana tonight, thinking that I'd put in a few final sessions there this week before they close the poker room doors permanently. But the place was dead--not a single player anywhere.

So instead I drove out to the Silverton, thinking that perhaps they had their new room finally open and ready to go. After all, it's been a year since they moved out of the original room, and when I was there in early October they had up signs promising to have the new place open in November.

I was lucky--they just opened the new room Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't have my real camera with me, since I had not expected to be going out that way, so you'll have to settle for the low-resolution photos from my crappy cell phone camera.

The new room is not bad. There are five tables with autoshufflers and the card-swiping player management system. I like the colorful felt. I also like the brown velvet arm rest. The cupholders are inexplicably small--too small to hold the cups in which they serve coffee, which seems incredibly boneheaded to me. (Doesn't really affect me, since I don't drink coffee, and the holders are just barely big enough for a water bottle. It just seems like a really poor design.) I like the "racetrack" configuration they use, with a solid wood surface on which to stack chips, though I realize I'm in the minority on this point. There are seven big-screen televisions, which is adequate for a room this small. The chairs are awful--probably the worst point of the new room. They are like padded kitchen chairs. No wheels, no swiveling, no height adjustment, no back adjustment. I felt like they were too high, and I had to bend forward uncomfortably to lean my elbows on the nicely padded rail. (As I've said before, I realize that saying things like this makes me sound impossibly nit-picky. But when you're spending several hours at a stretch in a place, details of how comfortable the physical setting is can make a huge impact on how pleasant or unpleasant the whole experience is.) They still use a paper list instead of computerized, but that's probably OK for a room this small. The restrooms are close--maybe 20 yards outside the poker room. The room is in an entirely new expansion section of the casino. It looks like the poker room is immediately adjacent to where the parking garage will open to the casino, which is nice.

About half of the long wall separating the poker room from the slot machines is open. Smoke and noise were not a problem tonight, but the place was dead. I don't know how it will be when it's more crowded.

Beverage service was very slow. One dealer explained that they haven't yet finished building the bar that will be in the expansion section, so the waitresses are having to trek to the far end of the casino for the drinks. Presumably, then, the pace will quicken in the near future. They are also planning to have food service at the tables, though that, too, isn't ready yet. There's a Johnny Rockets also opening in the new section. Yum!

When I arrived at about 8:15 p.m., there was one tournament wrapping up, one $2-4 limit hold'em game, and one $1-2 NLHE game (buy-in $50-$200, $4 max rake). I joined the no-limit game, of course, as the fifth player. We did get up to eight or nine players at one point, but then the 9:00 tournament started, and enough people left to play in it that the game broke up.

I more than doubled my money in that time, though. But I have to confess that it was ugly. Most of my profit came from a hand that I misplayed badly. I paid way more for a draw than was mathematically right, even considering implied odds--and I knew full well that I was doing so and that it was idiotic. But my luckiness exceeded my stupidity, and I hit the stone-cold nuts on the river. I'm not proud of it, but I didn't give the chips back, either.

The biggest practical problem with the Silverton poker room will, I think, continue to be its limited range of opponents. Even though my table was short-handed, I recognized no fewer than four of the same people I faced back in October! They all knew each other well, it seemed. Whether there is a NLHE cash game going on a weekday is always uncertain, and they seem to break up easily even after they start. That's a big limiting factor in how interested I will be in driving out there frequently.

In short, the new room is at least as nice as the original room was, and hugely better than the temporary rooms were. Now if they can just keep the seats occupied more regularly, they might have something there.


By the way, do you know how to tell when it's autumn in Las Vegas? The Silverton aquarium has giant pumpkins in it!

Silverton--a casino with fish

Went out to Silverton tonight. The giant aquarium there is one of my favorite places in Vegas. If you can tune out the slot machine noises, it's a rare bit of tranquility in a city of cacophony. This was the first time I happened to be on scene when one of the mermaids came out to greet the people. I kept waiting for her to meander over to my side of the aquarium, but she never did, so I didn't get a picture of her up close for my readers. Sorry. They cheated me. But you can still see glimpes of her in some of the photos above. As for the fish, well, the stupid things just wanted to keep swimming, rather than hold still and pose like I wanted them to, and blurriness was the inevitable result.

I hadn't been to Silverton since December, when I reported that their temporary poker room was pretty awful. I thought it had been long enough that surely the new room was open by now, so I went out to try it. Nope. They have signs up saying it will be coming in November. Hard to understand that kind of delay. The Nevada Palace was closed, completely remodeled, and reopened as the Eastside Cannery in about six months. How long can it take to build a poker room?

In the meantime, they have moved the temporary poker room to another part of the casino. I think they are new tables, but I couldn't swear to that. (Memory is a little fuzzy.) They're nice, though. Still the same general problem of noise and smoke as last time, but it did seem less intensely smoky in this new spot. Whether that is because it's a better ventilated area (it was really, really cold, so this is a possibility), or just a coincidence that tonight not many people were standing three feet away with a heater going, I cannot say.

Yes, the "fish" in the title of the post is a deliberate double meaning. Made $288 in two hours, playing absolutely ABC poker, with never a single difficult decision to make. Could have done it in my sleep. It has me thinking that I should visit this particular aquarium more regularly.

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.

A blue moon in your eyes (non-poker content)

About the title of this blog post--you either get it or you don't. You either excitedly thought, "Cool, a post about the Sopranos!" or you thought, "What the hell is 'blue moon in your eyes' about?"

There was a big gaming expo here a month or so ago. The only news from it that caught my attention was the announcement of a Sopranos-themed slot machine. Now, I could easily go the rest of my life without touching a slot machine and not feel the loss. But with the best television show in history now off the air, anything new related to Tony and the gang will get my heart beating a little bit faster. Upon hearing the news, I vowed that I would deviate from my usual abstinence from the slots and give David Chase et al. one dollar of my hard-earned money when I first found one of these beauties.

And tonight it happened. While playing poker at the Silverton, I noticed a banner announcing that the Sopranos slot machines were here. When I was done playing, I went looking for them. As you can (maybe) see from the blurry pictures (some day I have got to upgrade to a phone with a better camera), they are arranged in banks, with a big TV screen overhead. The screen rotates between playing the show's famous opening (the drive from New York to New Jersey, with the song, but without the credits rolling), the current jackpot amounts, and photos of the Soprano crew with quotations.

The machines use mechanical reels rather than video-simulated ones, but don't bother with an arm to pull--just a button to press. In addition to more traditional slot-machine symbols on the reels, there are photos of the main characters, plus a few locations, like Barone Sanitation and Satriale's Meats, that can line up.

As with most modern slots, there is a bewildering variety of ways the symbols can line up in various combinations to win, and if you really want to understand them, you have to crouch down and read about 30 paragraphs of fine print. I didn't bother. I inserted my $1, selected one winning line and ten credits (at $0.01 each) per line, which meant I would get ten shots at winning, for ten cents each. That's me, Mr. Big-time Gambler.

The first seven times I pushed the "spin" button, the only outcome was 10 fewer credits in my bank. But then....

I have no idea what combination I hit. It didn't look particularly special to me, but the machine started going crazy. In addition to racking up some credits, it gave me eight free spins. Unlike any machine I've played before (which admittedly isn't many), however, it started doing the free spins for me right then, just one after another, and it seemed that every one of them was hitting something and adding more credits and more free spins, which it also ran automatically for me. It felt vaguely like watching a nuclear chain-reaction in slow motion, and I was just hoping that it would spit out a "pay" ticket before it went all China Syndrome on me.

This went on for about two minutes. When it finally stopped ringing and dinging and spinning, it showed me having accumulated 430 credits.

Well, I know that this is as good as it's likely to get, so I cashed out my big $4.30 ticket and took it to the cashier's cage for my cash. I was willing to give the gang $1, but when they were nice enough (probably because I've been such a loyal fan of the show) to make me a winner by quadrupling my money, I didn't want to insult their generosity by just losing it back.

So I did what any good "wise guy" would do: I took the money and ran.

Thanks, T!

Silverton poker room

After an unbelievably lucky first half-hour at South Point (see post immediately below), I knew that it wasn't going to get any better than that, and I might as well stop playing before the luck shifted directions on me. I had to go almost right by the Silverton casino on my way back to I-15, it was still relatively early (midnight), and I hadn't played at the Silverton in about 18 months--since right after I first moved to Vegas. So I decided to see what was happening there.

They've re-done the roads and driveways leading up the casino, and I ended up parking in a different area than I had on my two previous visits, which meant I entered through another door--one right next to their giant aquarium. I had never seen this thing before. Maybe it's new, maybe it's been there the entire ten years the Silverton has been open. I really don't know. But I have to say, it's very, very nice. It's not as spectacular as the one behind the check-in desk at the Mirage, or the shark reef at Mandalay Bay, but it must be the third-nicest in town.

The poker room isn't what I remember. I liked it before, except that it's so far from my downtown apartment (which explains my long absence). It was small, quiet, cozy, isolated from the rest of the casino. Now, though, it's just a roped-off area, with the nasty smoke and noise from adjacent slot machines intruding. I hate casinos that treat poker that way.

Fortunately, though, when I asked what happened to the old poker room, I was told that it's being expanded, so the current digs are temporary. It must be a big remodeling project, though, because I was told it would be another ten months before they move into the new room. I guess I'll wait another year before heading back there.