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#258 – The First Thing I Ever Wrote About Poker
I’m trying to work my way though a backlog of material from London. The main piece is about final-table day at WSOP-Europe. Ty Stewart, who with Jeffrey Pollack runs the WSOP for Harrah’s, let me trail him for the day to write about the final table from his perspective. It’s going to be a great piece but it’s taking some time. I also have an entry in progress about visitng the Tower of London with Chris Ferguson then eating two dinners, one with my writing heroes and friends Tony Holden, Al Alvarez, and Des Wilson (along with Al’s wife Anne and Tony’s wife Cindy), and the second dinner for Annie Duke’s birthday at what was supposed to be the hottest restaurant in London.
Be patient, please. In the meantime …
… let me share with you the first thing I ever wrote about poker, from back in 1993.
This was from an old journal I discovered, the entry dated Sunday, July 11, 1993. I’d been playing poker for about a year. I didn’t play in any home games and there were no poker rooms within a thousand miles of Chicago. (Maybe closer to 2,000. This could have been before Foxwoods opened.) I had a busy law practice but took frequent trips to Las Vegas, sometimes with clients. I would also try to get in a few hours on the way back from trips to the West Coast, occasionally trying the poker rooms of L.A. and San Diego.
I was in Vegas on this occasion with my friend Tom, who, like me, was learning low stakes poker. To give you an idea of how different things were for poker back then, the Fremont had a poker room. And we wanted to check it out. This appears exactly as I wrote it up 14 years ago.
The Saddest Place On Earth: After dinner, we checked out the poker room at the Fremont. A dingy little room, they had two $1-4 hold ‘em games with a seat open, so we split up. I looked up and noticed the cameras poking out of holes in the ceiling grating. Not even the decency to put disco mirrors over them.
It was a very familiar group, mostly locals. The biggest talkers were seat four (a guy in a wheelchair), seat eight (a guy with a big tattoo on his chest), and seat nine (a guy with an eye patch). Between the war-gnarled veterans, Patch, and Chair, it looked like a poker game broke out in an infirmary.
There was one woman in the game, who looked vaguely like Jill Eichenberry, if Jill had spent the last twenty years turning tricks.
I kept a low profitle, vowed to play tight but aggressive, and talked a little about cigars with Tattoo. Then prostitute Jill Eichenberry left and Tom joined the game next to me, in seat six.
The game, sadly, came to life. Patch started talking about his brain tumor, assorted ailments, and various medicines. It ended with Patch and Chair trading seizure stories. Patch then talked about why he wears his eye patch only at night.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Another haven for the losers and broken down. I sat in one stall. In the stall next to me, huge billows of smoke were traveling over the divider, like someone was burning something. When the guy finished, he threw down the seat so hard the walls shook. When I went to reach for the toilet paper, I almost knocked over a beer bottle I had just noticed keeping me company on the stall. It was situated on a little ledge apparently built for exactly that purpose. There was probably more smoking and drinking going on in the toilet than in the bar.
When I returned to the table, Patch asked Chair how he liked being in the game with two women earlier. Tattoo said he thought prostitute Jill Eichenberry was kind of attractive. Chair then said that she sat next to him and was very friendly. They then discussed what they knew about her. What, is that the closest these guys ever got to a woman?
The second woman from the earlier game, a woman in a red dress with several moles on her face, returned to the game, sitting next to Tom in seat six. (Oh, they must have thought, the stories he’ll have to tell.)
Instantly, she had at least three boyfriends at the table. Patch got up from the table during a hand and got her a copy of Card Player. “Now that you’re a poker player, maybe you’ll want to look at this.” She didn’t know what to do with it, so she used it as a back rest. (She gave him a not quite polite look that said, “Does this mean we’re engaged?”)
I finally decided to take a ten dollar profit and leave. Tom, on short money, came with me.
This club is an illustration of why poker is dying in Las Vegas. These people aren’t putting money in the casino coffers in slots or blackjack. And at these small limits, with the slow pace of the game (I missed only two hands in the bathroom), it’s no wonder another row of slot machines looks attractive to the house. When that happens, and it will happen, just as it did to the Four Queens, these people will have trouble finding a place to go.
These guys were nice and their pain was real. It was very sad but I thought I’d break out laughing, if only to keep from crying.
