Friday, January 27, 2006

Pai Gow Nightmare

I'm just waking up this morning, haven't even had any coffee yet, but I wanted to relate this story while it was still fresh in my head.

I was dealing on the $20 Pai Gow table late last night/early this morning, and there were only 3 players at the time. Two gals had $10 Fortune Bonus bets up, along with their regular $20 bets, the other guy was just betting a buck on the bonus.

Anyhow, as I'm dealing out the cards, the gal who got hers first picked 'em up and set her hand and told me that she has a flush. Nice--a $40 bonus. But before I get all of the cards dealt, the Shufflemaster malfunctions, jams up, and I can't deal out the last two hands. It's an automatic misdeal anytime that happens, so I called the floorman over to tell him, and I collected all of the cards. She wasn't too happy with me, but them's the rules. Not my fault, nothing I could do about it.

So we pull all the cards out of the machine, make sure it's working again and no cards are chewed up, and put the next deck through. Nobody's bets have changed because of the misdeal. So the machine is happily humming along, I deal out all the cards, mine included, place the marker on top of my hand, then sweep up all the unplayed hands.

The other girl is all excited, and shows me that I dealt her a Four-of-a-kind. Nice--that'll pay a $250 bonus. I told her it's because I'm making up for the previous hand misdeal. Then, her friend--the one who just had the flush--told me that she's got a straight this time. Ok, things are looking up.

I waited for everyone to set their hands, removed the marker from my cards, turned them over, fanned them out across the layout, and something is immediately wrong.

I only had six cards instead of seven.

Uh oh.


Floor!

Yep, you guessed it. Another misdeal. Talk about some pissed-off people. Instead of $310 and winning hand payoffs, we had to sweep up all the cards and replace both decks. None of the hands could be paid. I was a little bummed about the situation, but again, machine malfunction is an automatic misdeal. Nothing I could do about it. So they left my table, angry of course, but the new cards worked fine after that--not a single hiccup.

But after I got off that table, I told the shift boss about what happened and they said they'd replace the machine right away. Problem solved, but damn, four-of-a-kinds don't happen very often--it sure sucks to lose out on one due to a technicality.

On a happier note, I had a fun group of people follow me from table to table for a couple of hours--it was four dealers and one floorperson, from the new South Coast Casino. They were day-shifters out on their night off doing a little gambling, and we had a lot of laughs. And being dealers, they tipped very well--I was dropping $10 to $20 per hand in my toke box, so that helped a bunch. And it was nice to make some contacts. The floor guy told me to come see him whenever I'm at the South Coast and he'll hook me up with free dinner anytime. I think I may have to take him up on that offer.

Finally, since it was a weeknight, the casino pretty much emptied out around 2 am and we had more dealers than tables. A few dealers took the Early Out option, but I'm trying to avoid doing too much of that. And now that I'm officially full-time, they can't send me home. So I was doing 20 minutes on, 20 minute break for a couple of hours, until they sent me over to the dice pit where I stood on an empty game until 3:40 this morning. I got the 'last break', so I got to clock out and go home a few minutes ahead of everyone else.

Not a bad night at work.

Mikey

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