#439 - WSOP Notebook #12 - They Made Me a Dinner I Couldn’t Refuse

[written June 6, p.m.]

Last night (Thursday), during the $2,500 Mixed EOB, I got into a rules dispute with another player. It was a minor point, and I was right, but the guy didn’t want to let it go. Because he had a reputation for busting the balls of other players and dealers, I wouldn’t let him off the hook. Whenever he would try to get in the last word, even by mumbling, I would ask him to repeat what he said, and then I would repeat the rule, as it had been announced earlier.

It was no bloodbath, but I never fight with players or dealers, so it was a big thing to me. I mentioned it to my friend Paulie during a break and he was horrified. “You know that guy’s mobbed up don’t you?”

I thought he was kidding, but he insisted it was true. At the end of the night, when I said goodbye, he said, “You might want to have someone else start your car for a couple days.”

I’ll admit I was a little paranoid, when I was running late for the 5 PM start of the $1,500 Limit Hold ‘Em event today (Friday). One of the toilets in the Compound broke and I went to a local hardware store to find a replacement part for the flushing mechanism.

I couldn’t find it and realized, in my panic to leave for the tournament, that I hadn’t eaten all day. Then I saw a hand-scrawled sign for “Pizza by the Slice” at the end of the strip center and decided to make a quick stop.

I’m about 99% sure the place was a front for some kind of illegal activity. When I ordered two slices of pepperoni, the guy at the register was stuck for how much they cost. Then he stared at the menu painted on the wall as if it was in a foreign language, which I think it probably was: English.

Then it was clear, even though he was sitting in front of the cash register, and apparently had nothing else to do, that he did not know how to operate the cash register. He punched some buttons and told me that two slices of pizza were $6.57. I pointed out that each slice was $2.10 so it didn’t make sense. He started over, pushed more buttons, and the new total came out as double the old total, $13.14. I told him again that was incorrect. He tried a third time and confidently announced the price of the two slices of pizza was $26.28.

I was tempted to just pay the twenty-six bucks for the pizza because I had only a few hundred dollars with me and couldn’t afford too many more mistakes on his part. And it was getting perilously close to the 5 PM start for the tournament. Instead, I suggested maybe the register was broken. He then fished out a calculator to figure out manually the cost of two slices of pizza at $2.10 apiece. At this point he asked me how much Nevada sales tax was. It turned out nobody in the restaurant knew how much Nevada sales tax was. Eventually I handed him $5 and said, “Keep the change” as I was confident there would have been change.

I rushed out of the store with two slices of pizza, got into my car, and drove quickly toward the Rio. I took one bite of the pizza and discovered it tasted (and looked) exactly like the Tombstone pizza that was in my freezer back at the Compound.   After the one bite, I abandoned my dinner and figured I was lucky it didn’t taste like something worse.