What a night! Thursday night was the end of the first full day of tournament activity and I am wiped out! I didn't get back to my hotel room until 5:30 AM!!
Now that the full events have started, more and more players are filling the Magnolia Room here at the Beau Rivage. Yesterday, we had 750 players in the room at noon, with many more expected as the tournament progresses. This weekend will be enormous, with well over 1000 players.
After the first night of dealing, I was feeling very good about my skills and went into last night with a lot of confidence. I began the night by dealing a few tournament tables of Texas Hold'em, but pretty soon I was moved to the cash tables.
The cash tables! This was my first chance to work them. These are where the real professional gamblers reside. They are men who carry wads of hundreds to the table to bet with. The players themselves dictate what games will be played. They play Texas Hold'em for sure, but they also play many other games as well and the casino happily obliges them by having dealers ready to deal any game they ask for.
For a dealer, the difference in dealing these games versus the tournament games is this:
- The dealer has a rack with chips that represent real money. These are the official chips of the Beau Rivage casino and you can turn them in at the cage (literally a caged-in area where the money is held) for real cash. The dealer is totally responsible for this rack and any shortcomings will come out of his paycheck.
- The dealer is allowed to keep any tokes (tips) that he receives. This is important because the dealer does NOT get credit for downs while dealing these games. Remember that "downs" are a percentage of the tournament dealer payouts. Every "down" a dealer works is $10 to $25 dollars, depending on the overall tournament take. Since a dealer is basically working cash games without being paid, the tips are his ONLY source of income.
So I sat down at my first live table, which was Texas Hold'em 2-5 No Limit. This means that the players' blinds are $2 and $5 and there is no limit to the amount they can bet. It is customary that after each hand, the winning player will toss a
chip or two to the dealer as a toke (a tip). Dealers on the cash games carry a locked box with a slot in the top. This box holds the tips, hangs readily off of a rail on the table, and is opened and cashed-out at the end of the night.
The Hold'em table went well, as I am used to dealing this game and I got some good tokes. After 30 minutes, I was tapped out (touched on the shoulder by the next dealer assigned to the table) and I went to the next cash table in the row.
I tapped the dealer, she stood up, and whispered to me, "This table is Omaha, HI, Pot Limit, $10-$25, with a Mississippi Straddle to the $50. Good luck."
Yikes! I know how to deal the game of Omaha, which is a more complicated, 4-down-card version of Texas Hold'em. I know how to deal pot limit, which is far more mathematically challenging than No Limit. But a "Mississippi Straddle"? I had no idea what that was. And 10-25 meant that this was a table for high rollers. But, no time to worry, boy, gotta sit down and deal!
So of course, I royally screwed up the first hand. The first two players posted bets of $10 and $25 and I started dealing out the cards and of course only gave them all two cards each. "Um, this is Omaha." So it is! Hehe. I gave them each two more cards. So I turn to the third player to get his bet and suddenly the $10 and $25 players pull their chips back and throw out $50 chips. Huh? Turns out that "Mississippi Straddle" means that each player must make a minimum bet of $50, even though they might have already posted their small and big blinds. Therefore, the action begins with player number one who is in the small blind of $10. Confused yet? So was I.
But I managed. I quickly got used to the game and off we went. Omaha players are amazing. Omaha is generally considered a game for "real" poker players because there is a lot more strategy involved and reading the best five-card hand out of nine cards instead of seven is vastly more complicated. These fellows were reading the hands faster than I ever could. Basically, they read the hands while I just dealt cards and handled chips.
This level of poker brought me to a new world of gambler. The minimum buy-in for this table was $1000. These men were sitting at the table with 6-inch stacks of $100 bills. There were individual pots of $4000, $8000, sometimes $16,000. They hardly bothered with the cumbersome chips as whole stacks of hundreds flew into the pot. As a rough estimate, I'd guess there was $75,000 in cash on the table. I was in awe.
The rest of the night was pretty much the same. I dealt 6 cash games and 8 tournament downs (approximately 7 full hours of dealing). I also got to deal the final round of a 260-person tournament. The last 8 players had been playing for 8 hours and they were exhausted. Rather than spending another two hours to determine a winner, they chopped the pot eight ways. "Chopping a pot" means the players divide the total winnings amongst themselves. Each player took home almost $5000 for a $125 entry fee.
I got back to my bed at 5:30 am. Two days down. Ten more days to go.
Side Pots:
- On my very first hand of the night, two players went all-in in the $125 Second Chance tournament I mentioned above. One had pocket queens, the other had pocket kings. So the gal with queens lost and was out of the tournament and her $125 in exactly 45 seconds. She was the first player out of the tournament.
- Lucky Dealer: I dealt quads (four-of-a-kind) five times last night.
- Biloxi weather: It is excruciatingly hot and humid here. I thought Atlanta was hot, but Biloxi is a sauna. Yesterday, however, we had big rain storms. Cool things off? Well, only while it rained! Back to the sauna again today.
- Cushion Revisited: On the very first table I dealt with my new cushion, I stood up and left it behind. I took about 30 steps and remembered it. I went back and the next dealer was already into a hand. Did I let him keep the cushion? Heck no! I made him stand up and give it to me. Hahahaha
- Oddest hand of the night: during the Omaha HI pot limit game, the players asked me to "run it twice", which meant dealing two cards each for fourth and fifth street. Basically, it was a way for the players to hedge their bets, similarly to splitting pairs in black jack. However, the same guy won BOTH runs and raked in a $16,000 pot. And gave me a $5 tip...thanks.
- Oddest question of the night: "Dealer, what was spread on the LSU game?" Yeah, I did know it and yes, LSU covered by a mile.
