I had a pretty good day at school today, working on the harder stuff before the final evaluation tomorrow afternoon. I'm still not as good as I'd like to be, so I'm going in early in the morning to practice even more for a few hours. No sleep for Mikey tonight.Also, I've been helping out a new student for the last couple of weeks, an Asian girl named, well, I can't pronounce it, so we just call her 'Sara'. Anyhow, she's come along pretty well, and we're all amazed that when she got here to Vegas four months ago she didn't speak a lick of English. Now she speaks it better than one of the Cuban guys I work with who's been here six years. But not only that, but she'd never even heard of poker before she got here, much less had any idea how to deal it, so you've got to respect the effort she's making.
But she's doing fairly well, and has progressed enough that we talked her into dealing a party over at the Rio tonight. She was afraid to at first (she's self-conscious about her English), but with enough prodding she agreed to do it. I would've gone too, but I have to work. The funny thing was, she didn't even know she got paid for it, she thought it was just for school. Once she found out that she'd get $20 an hour instead of the $6 per hour she makes every night in the restaurant she works at, she was all over it.
She didn't have any dealer clothes, so today at lunchtime I took her shopping for a new white shirt and black shoes. There are a couple of outlet-type stores on Maryland Pkwy just a couple miles from the school that tout themselves as casino dealer suppliers, so we headed up there and got her a nice white shirt for $25 and then walked over to the shoe outlet and picked up some plain black flats for fifteen more. Now she's all set.
I hope she does well and doesn't get discouraged. But I talked to a couple of the other guys that are going to be there and they said they'd keep an eye on her and help her out on their downtime.
After that, she took off to go to work and I spent a little more time 'in the box'. I can say with confidence that I'm more than ready to deal Texas Holdem in a live setting. My game is solid and I have no problem calculating and taking the rake smoothly enough that it's barely noticed. So I've got 90% of the skills I'll need down cold, but stuff like sidepots on Omaha Hi-Low are still a royal PITA, along with the obsolete requirement to deal 7-Card Stud. There are only a few rooms in Vegas that even offer it anymore, and if they do, they're lucky to have one table open for more than a couple of hours on a weekend.
I remember going to Casino Arizona back in Scottsdale a few years ago--before poker really started booming. They always had lots of Stud being dealt on the weekends, and I had a few buddies who wouldn't play anything else. But now, it's all Holdem, all the time, everywhere. I don't mind dealing stud, not one bit, but dealing it in a classroom where nobody folds because they're playing with fake chips really sucks ass. Who wants to read six hands at the showdown? Not this guy. So I grin and bear it and nod along like it's important, but I know that once I get a job, it'll be a rare treat to deal it, if at all.
Also, I got more details on that gig next weekend they wanted me to deal--it's in an office park somewhere up in the northwest valley, hell and gone from my neck of the woods. We got the address faxed to us and one of the gals in class has a GPS in her car so we ran down to find out where it was... Apparently, it's a pretty big deal too, a freeroll where the winner gets a seat at the Grandaddy of 'em all. But I found out that it goes from 9:30 in the morning until around 4:30 in the afternoon, so I signed up to deal it. Should be another $140 on top of that night's tokes.
But tonight, it's not about live poker. Nope... I'm sure I'll be back in Chinatown cracking jokes and doing my usual rotation of WPT All-In Holdem, Pai Gow, and 3-Card Poker until around 1am or so, and then it's off to the dice pit for the balance of the evening where I spend my time gawking at cocktail waitresses or trying to read the scores crawling along the bottom of the TV in the bar while the occasional random player wanders up and takes a rip at the dice.
Should be a good time, as usual.
Mikey
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