In a miracle profound enough to rival the Virgin Mary making an appearance on a pile of hashbrowns at the local Waffle House, I have been witness to a supernatural wonder that cannot be explained away by mere scientific method.
Over a year ago, during March Madness II, I was picking up my friend Dawn one day out in front of the Shark Reef entrance at Mandalay Bay for an afternoon of buffoonery. Just as she got in the car and tried to put up the electric window, it came off track, again, eliminating the ease at which I could deploy my primary backup to the broken air conditioning unit. In other words, the damn window wouldn't roll up right, and it liked to whistle whenever I got above 30 mph or so. I'd had it fixed twice before, but some cosmic force in the universe preferred that my passenger-side window remain off-track, so I decided not to fight it and just let the window remain in it's trackless happy place, since that's where it seemed to prefer.
Oh, it would go up and down, but not without much wear-and-tear on the motor and actuators, but I figured it wouldn't be my problem for very long.
Well, here it is over a year later, and I still pimp around in the Sled on a daily basis. As long as I keep adding power steering fluid and antifreeze every few weeks, it just keeps on cruising. About once a month I take it down to the car-spa and massage all of the bird shit off of it, and every two weeks I even double it's blue-book value by filling it up with gasoline. As much as I bag on it, it's actually been a very good car.
So with all of the little things wrong with it, imagine my surprise this morning when I left for school and pushed the button to lower the window and it went down smoothly and silently. I was so shocked that I actually got out of the car and walked around to see if something else might have gone wrong, but no--the window was mysteriously back on track and working like it was brand new.
It's a Festivus miracle!
And I'm gonna remember it when I finally trade the old girl in--it might be worth a few extra bucks toward my new truck. But my sweet ride just keeps getting sweeter.
Anyhow... Poker school is winding down. I took my final written exam today, and only missed one question out of 45. Not too shabby. My final evaluation is on Friday afternoon, so tomorrow I'm going to work on all the hard stuff, like today I got tripped up dealing a huge Hi-Low hand in Omaha with three side-pots. It's about the worst type of hand I'll ever deal, so tomorrow I'm going to practice practice practice.
I know that I said I was going to write last night, but the truth is that I was so tired when I finally got home for the evening that I just went straight to bed around 9:00 without dinner or my usual night-off rum drink. I'd gone to school at 10:oo in the morning, practiced all day, and at 4 o'clock we did a dealers' no-limit tournament. Two tables, 18 people, everyone did 15 minutes dealing, and while you were dealing, your stack was anted and blinded down.
By the time we got down to a single table with 9 people, I was the chip leader and on the button. Three people limped in for the big blind, which was $200, so I went all in with a pair of Jacks. Everyone folded around to the second highest stack, an Asian lady who speaks absolutely NO English except for 'All you can eat, baby' every time she wins a hand. She called with Ace-Five offsuit. No problemo. The board was all rags except that there were four hearts. Guess which five she was holding...
Yep, she was out of position and called a $10,700 raise with a weak ace... and won. I felt like giving her the Phil Hellmuth 'If it weren't for luck, I'd never lose a hand' speech, but I knew that she probably wouldn't understand, anyways. I had her covered, but only had $1200 left after that and basically got blinded away while waiting to catch a couple of decent cards to play.
Once I was busted out in 7th place, I stuck around to help deal the rest of the tournament for the remaining players. Talk about a great experience--I probably learned more in that four hours than I did in the entire previous week. Now I can deal no-limit holdem fairly easily. In fact, it's much easier than a cash game since you don't have to figure a rake.
But once it was over at 8pm, I was wiped out. I'd been at school for ten hours straight, and dealing for most of it. That's a couple hours longer than my regular shift at work, so I was spent. That's why I didn't make an update last night.
So I got a good ten hours of sleep, got up this morning and made a pot of coffee and headed back to school for more. It was a pretty dull day this time around, and although I damn near aced my final, I only spent about 40 minutes or so in the box dealing, so I cut out around 2pm.
Under the guise of investigating the room I'd like to work in, I went down to the Plaza. All they had going were $2/$4 cash games, plus the single-table sit-n-go's. Basically, you signed in, and as soon as they'd get 10 players, they'd have a one-table tournament. $35 to buy in, and the winner gets $225, second place gets $75. So I signed up to play in one of those (gotta tune-up for the World Series event in June). I raked the first pot I got involved in, but unfortunately my pocket Queens ran into pocket Kings shortly thereafter and I went out in 8th place. Ouch.
While waiting for the next tourney to start, I went and did a little 'networking' with the cardroom manager. He was a nice guy named Ronnie, but he told me that although the website shows that they have openings for poker dealers, right now they have a freeze on--they're too slow (Just like everyone in Vegas in April. This town is DEAD right now). But he told me to put in the application because that could change next week. While talking to him, he introduced me to the lady who is the scheduling manager, and between the three of us we had a few laughs, so I think they liked me. About twenty minutes after that I was just watching the tournament wind down and he came over to talk to me again, asking me about school and such, basically giving me the screening interview, so I'm hoping that business picks up soon because I'd really like to work at the Plaza poker room. It's just got a cool vibe, and y'all know I'm a downtown kind of guy.
In the meantime, I got asked to deal a satellite next weekend for a seat at the WSOP Main Event. I don't know any of the details yet, just that it's next Saturday and the winner gets a 10K seat at the big one. I don't know which casino it's at or even what time it starts. Hopefully I'll have that info tomorrow, and I hope it's an afternoon tournament so I can deal it--I have to go to my real job that night.
Also, a couple of the guys I go to school with got hired to deal at the WSOP from beginning to end, and said that the Rio is needing 600 dealers for the Series and so far have only got 150. If that's the case, they're likely to start taking folks with scheduling conflicts like myself who could only deal during the day. If that happens, I wouldn't be able to take part in that first event, but instead of costing me $550, I might actually make a little money as a dealer instead of a player. We'll see how it goes, if it goes at all.
So that's the news from this end. School is good, the job is good, the car is still running, and my Captain Morgan shirt arrived yesterday.
All is well in Las Vegas.
Mikey
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