Home Cookin'

Since it's my night off, and I'm not sampling the culinary delights of the employee dining room at the casino, I decided to give the pots and pans a workout. I made garlic-lime grilled chicken, rotini pasta with a jalapeno cream sauce, and rounded it out with a serving of store-bought coleslaw. The chicken turned out excellent, and I have enough leftover to make some pretty damn good nachos this weekend if I so desire. The pasta, although servicable, didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, and the coleslaw completely sucked ass. The entire container ended up in the trash after a couple of bites. Why can't anyone out there make coleslaw as good as KFC?

But it was nice to get back and spend some time cooking something besides breakfast. I just wish I had a place with a decent kitchen--this one is pretty outdated, and the stove has issues with deciding which burners it will allow to work if you wish to use more than one at a time. Even though the stripper house I lived in when I first lived here smelled like a litterbox and my shiat kept getting stolen, I really liked that gas stove in the kitchen. I miss that.

Now that the dishes are washed and I'm finishing up my apple juice, I'm thinking of splashing a little rum into a glass of diet coke, grabbing a cigar, and heading out to the chaise lounge out by the pool to spend an hour or so watching the planes on approach to McCarran. It sure beats channel surfing.

I made it to school today for another four hours of poker instruction--I spent my time in the box dealing Omaha Hi-Low, which is probably the toughest game on the dealer. Nobody folds, everybody raises, and there are usually at least five sets of cards to read at the showdown. Plus you get the added bonus of having to split the pot, not to mention any sidepots that might happen along the way.

But I did well, not messing up once while taking the rake or getting the jackpot out of the way, so I can tell I'm close to 'competent enough to try for an audition pretty soon'. In all my years of playing poker, I never once tried to count the pot as it was being built up, but now it's just about all I do all day. And it's getting much easier.

So I figure another week or so before I'm ready to leave the nest and try an audition somewhere. A bunch of guys that don't have jobs yet have been out to the Rio this week for the open auditions for WSOP dealers, but that's seven weeks of hell, and since I already have a job, there's just no way I could do it. I'm sure the money will be great, and the experience will be amazing.

Now that I'm here, I think I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and enter one of the WSOP preliminary events. The first event on the calendar is the Casino Dealers No-Limit tournament, with a $550 buy-in. That's the cheapest one available, so I might as well give it a shot. Only five hundy for a shot at a bracelet? I'd say the pot odds are telling me to make the call.

Of course I'll post my adventures for everyone to read about.

Mikey