I hate The Rio Hotel.

For the first time in three years I will not be cashing in
The WSOP Seniors tournament. But that’s not why I hate the Rio.

Of course, I will be happy to tell you
about the three hands that brought me down…

But that still won’t be why I hate The
Rio.

The Seniors tournament attracted so many people this year that
they couldn’t accommodate them all in the four giant ballrooms usually used for
tournaments. So we were spilling out into any unused space in the casino. My
first table was a makeshift set of tables placed lovingly beside a Taco
restaurant, where all kinds of hoi polloi can just observe us like we’re llamas
at a petting zoo.

This is where disastrous hand number one happened.

Disastrous Hand #1

Very early in the tourney, blinds are still $100. I’ve built
my 20K starting stack to a healthy 28K just through aggressiveness and bluffs.
I’m on the Button with a pair of 8’s and 6-7 players limp the $100 bet. You how
ai feel about limpers. I raise it up to $700. SB and BB fold and the guy in Seat
One asks the dealer how much is it to play? The dealer says it’s 700 and the
guy meekly puts out 2 black one-hundred -dollar chips and an orange $5000 chip.
He clearly meant to call, but instead of a $500 chip he put in $5000. Problem.
It was an honest mistake, but this is The World Series of Poker. We’re
literally playing for millions of dollars. Mistakes are not tolerated. The
floorman is called over and after analyzing the situation, he declares that unfortunately
for the poor shmucksy in Seat One, the bet has to stand. Everyone else folds of
course and it’s back to me. Well, what would you do? There’s only one play. I have
to exploit his idiotic blunder and shove my 28K. This guy has about 15K behind.
He should eat his mistake and fold. That’s what he should do. Instead he ponders
forever and then says “what the hell, I call”

“What the hell, I call”.

You know
you’re finished when you hear those words. He turns over AJ, hits his Ace and I’m
down to 8 thousand chips.

But that’s still not why I hate The Rio.

Disastrous hand #2

I painstakingly build my tiny stack back up to a respectable
18K and look down at two red queens. I raise pre-flop and get one customer.
Flop comes J54 all hearts. Delectable flop for me. I have an over-pair and a
high heart as a saver. I bet. He shoves, and I have to call. He has JJ. No heart
on the turn or river, and I’m out. QQ gets beat by JJ all the time. It’s a bad
beat, but it happens.

That’s still not why I hate The Rio.

I take a little breather to “cool off” at the pool. It’s 105
degrees and I’m in jeans and a t-shirt.

It’s still early in the day, plenty of time to re-enter the
tourney for another $1000.  Which I do.
The saving grace is that at least I should get seated in one of the main
ballrooms where I’ll be able to watch The Raptors game while we play. That’s
normal. There should be sports on in the poker room. Poker players are sports
fans, and moreover we are often bettors. We’ll wager on anything, golf, basketball,
cricket, who Marcia Brady was fucking behind the scenes on the set of The Brady
Brunch (spoiler alert, it was Greg).

But instead I’m seated in some auxiliary room that, out of
complete desperation, has been fashioned into a card room. The floors are bare
wood, exposed bricks on the walls, and an air shaft on the ceiling covered by a
green garbage bag. Are they kidding?! This The World Series Of Poker! Whatever this room was originally sanctioned for, it didn’t
involve public consumption.

Anyway, I flounder to maintain my 20k stack until the dinner break
at 5:00 PM. My friend and colleague, Jim Hess, an excellent talent manager (and poker player) in from Los Angeles, somehow snagged a highly coveted table for us. He and I and his very nice friend
Eric, a lawyer from LA via South Africa – or as he would put it “South Ifrica”
so ironic that these people don’t know how to pronounce the name of their own
country – have a lovely Chinese meal (except for the inedible food and the abominable
service) and then, dinner break over, I go back to the broom closet they have me playing in.

Meanwhile the Raptors game has started and I’m seeing none of it. 

Finally, finally, they decide to close down this lame excuse for
a card room and disperse the 400 players in it to various tables around the
convention area. Mercifully I’ll be moved to a place I can watch the game! The
moving process was ridiculous to the point of embarrassment, and bordering on
surreal. A tall skinny balding official, looking like a camp director in an
ill-fitting suit, held up a sign that said “Follow Me” (I’m not kidding) and 400
“seniors” literally followed him on a winding 15-minute walk to the main convention area
like mindless lemmings. Onlookers gawked at the travelling AARP unit. They
might as well have had us hold onto a rope like preschoolers. It was nothing
less than mortifying. 

But at least I’ll get to watch the game, right?

Wrong. 

I am deposited into this “secondary” ballroom where …you
guessed it – there are no TV’s and worse, my particular table is up on a stage which
was built for keynote speakers and midget juggling acts, not poker. The lighting
is akin to that of Arnie Zajdner’s basement where we used to play poker 35
years ago (Arnie would insist on us reusing the plastic
straws and cups in a game where thousands of dollars were being won and lost every
night. How prescient that seems given today’s plastic crisis.)

Disastrous hand #3

My stack which had once been as high as 47K is now at a
low-ish 31K with blinds at 400/800. From middle position I see AJ in my hand
and raise to $2500. I get two callers including the Big Blind who has a stack
similar to mine. Flop comes J83 unsuited, a very good flop for your hero. Into
a pot of about 8500 I make a generous pot-sized $8500 bet. Why fuck around,
right? The first caller folds and the BB calls. The turn is a 10. I don’t see
how that helps him, unless he’s sandbagging me with trips, so I shove my
remaining 18K, and he immediately shouts out a call and turns over an
insurmountable Q9 off suit, for a straight. So let me understand this. This
guy called me pre-flop with Q9 and then called off half his stack on a
post-flop bet of 8500 with Q9 and a board that read J83? Soooo what? He knew a
TEN was coming? Sometimes you make your own luck. And sometimes you’re just a
fucking idiot who got lucky. Either way, I’m out of the WSOP for this year.

You know I’m happy to tell you when my play is wanting. That was not the case this year.

I’m still not finished with why I hate The Rio, honestly what a shit show!

But wait, there’s more!

The good news is I got to the Sports Bar to watch the last
five phenomenal minutes of The Raptors glorious victory and got to celebrate
with hundreds of fans, most of who were rooting for the Raps BTW.

Jim was still in the tournament so I wandered around The Rio
looking for a sweet spot to play some Blackjack. Here’s a little secret. When
choosing a blackjack table, I usually look for one with one or more lovely ladies playing at it. That’s
natural, I don’t have to explain myself. But at the Rio? Good luck finding that
table. I don’t want to sound judgmental, but the clientele here is a bunch of
unattractive, out-of-shape, low-class, slobs. I suppose that’s the very definition
of judgmental, but there ya go.

I finally settle on a
table with two players, a pot-bellied, horse-faced Alabaman, and a Kris Kristofferson
doppelganger. In the first few hands I notice the dealer is a bit rude to these
guys who  clearly have been patrons of the table for a while now. Now, being rude to other
people is a bad thing. Being rude to
Rich Caplan is whole new level bad. I bet $50 (two green chips) and I get a
slightly complicated 19 on four cards. The dealer pulls a slightly complicated
18 on five cards, and she moves to take my chips. 

I say “Whoa”. That’s all. I
didn’t raise my voice. Or move to strike her. I said “Whoa”. 

She says “Relax” in a not
friendly tone. “I wasn’t taking your money. I was just going to separate your
chips to count them.” 

Lookit. You don’t COUNT things in twos. Twos are just
observational. COUNTING is a term reserved for things that are three or more.
Everyone knows that.

“Did you just tell me to relax?”

“ Well you thought I was…”

“No, did you just tell a customer to relax?”

“You said…”

“Cash me out”.

And she did. And I left.

Her pit boss was standing right there. I hope she cut her a
new one, but somehow I doubt it. Probably they just rolled their eyes as I walked
away and said something disparagingly racist about Jews, or Italians, or
Greeks, or Puerto Ricans, or whatever they mistook me for.

Anyway, I Ubered back to the Wynn where people are quiet and
civil and attractive. I sat at a table with three very friendly, severely drunk
guys who pretended they were Raptor fans because they had Nova Scotian lineage,
or something. They were soon replaced by two comely women in their 50’s who
were sloughing at my table playing 300-400 a hand, while their respective
husbands were a few tables over playing 3 or 4 thousand a hand. We ordered some
Vodka, had a few laughs, and heeding my advice on every hand, they slowly went
broke while I won $400 which put a small dent in the $2000 I lost playing
poker.

But today’s another day. And I tend to make the most of it. Up with the birds, I had little workout in the exercise room this morning, a little frozen Acai breakfast (soooooo good), a little time by the pool (where I wrote this blog, so forgive any grammatical errors, please)  and then off to
The Planet Hollywood to meet Jim where we will play in a $600 Seniors event. A much smaller affair, but those
are the ones I excel in.

Speak to you later.