When Greg and Amy came out to visit me last week and we dined at the Winery, we spoke of numerous things, the business that Amy is in, and the business that Greg and I are in.  Some of it turned to the mind, what keeps us in places or puts us in places in our lives and why we find it all so fascinating.  We were on the subject of poker and the mental game and I said that was what kept me fascinated with poker all these years, the people and the mind game.

Amy asked me if I would have been better off or happier if I’d been dealing in a small poker room vs. dealing at Bellagio and the high limit.

There’s no need to even think before answering that one.  Small rooms tend to make one crazier because you find out everything about everyone – a lot of things you’d rather not know – and if they can’t find out everything about you, they act like they know, and they become too familiar with you, like you are the stray dog they picked up from the alley garbage can and they begin to treat you like family.  But not family like a cherished love; family like someone they can bare their soul too…and they do…and they also think you have to put up with them so their tirades or bad days are yours for the keeping too.

There is a certain insanity that goes with poker.  We all experience it, it’s the weeks and months that roll by when variance is stuffing everything into the toilet and punishing you for even thinking you know how to play poker..and you seem to get the shit end of it and the other guy gets the up end of it.  Add going to a local card room and seeing the same faces – staff and customers – and listening to the same tale you heard for the last year from the same person, and knowing what tone the whine is going to start in even before they open their mouth.

Then figure they want to punish you verbally or physically because you dealt them the beat – or they want you to make allowances for them and break the rules because they are a steady customer – or they want to borrow money because they lost their rent money while you were dealing to them…and you owe it to them, damn it!

And if the room you work in runs a jackpot or a points or hourly play freeroll tournament, get ready to deal 3 million hands an hour without ever taking a rake – or they are all grinding and want to chop when it’s heads-up.

And your supervisor has a hard one for the cute little chick that started playing there last week so she can get away with anything at the table.

And the cocktail waitresses have attitude and you can’t get them to do jack…or maybe they are doing Jack and that’s the problem.

And even though all the dealers are required to bus the poker room and pick up and assist with fills and getting chips for players, some of them won’t lower themselves…because it’s not their job.

And when the economy slows down and money gets tight, you spend a lot of dead time sitting and hoping those freaks you’ve grown to despise will walk through the door because you need to make a buck to pay your own rent.

Those are just a few of the small room scenarios that can make you insane when you deal to the same people for 50 years.

Dealing at Bellagio brought in a lot of new faces.  Sometimes you deal to the same people a lot because they play the shift you work and you always end up in a line-up they are in, but mostly, the faces change as people from from all over the world come in looking for a friendly game of poker.

After The Winery conversation, it was a day or so later that Paul popped into my thoughts.  He played at the Mirage (and the Mirage is where I dealt to him on a steady basis) and Bellagio for awhile and let’s assume he still has the money to play but he stopped frequenting the tables the last five or six years…or he plays somewhere else.  He apparently had sold a business and had a ton of bucks when he first came in swinging every day.  I remember him playing $50-100 Holdem, although I believe he played $40-80 too, and sometimes $75-150 and he was definitely the live one.  They built games around him.  He loved to try and draw out on someone with 7-5 off or 3-4 or whatever he held…and he came to play every hand.

The conversation with Amy prompted the Paul ripple in my head.  The first year or so of dealing to him wasn’t too bad.  Then he went into the losing grind and became cynically jaded.  But don’t think he tried to improve his play…that would mean he knew he was doing something wrong, so let’s not give him credit for thinking he had a huge flaw in his game play.  Instead, let’s blame the dealer.

As soon as he missed a shitty draw that might not even win the pot for him, I knew what he was going to growl at me, and without fail, it was the same.  “She’s up to her old tricks again!” as the cards came snipping in.

Yes, Paul, she’s a well trained dog that knows how to handle the deck well enough that you cannot win with 9-4 off suit.

I never hated dealing to him but I remember it not being pleasant at all the last few years.  He always tried to make it a personal point with the dealer, not just me, but all the dealers.  The worst of it is that he was lost in poker insanity and he couldn’t walk away from the game or put it in a place that he could learn how to better his game and seriously try to be a winning player.  He wanted to gamble.  He wanted the rush of creating agony for someone else when he beat their Aces with his 8-4.  He was looking for a high and probably, in a sick way, got the same type of high, in a reverse manner, with his anger when he lost.  He needed a fix and poker gave it to him.

That, my friends, is why I stayed in the dealer’s box for 30 years…intrigued by the silent screaming that’s really going on at the table.

Am I twisted?  I’d like to think so.