Maybe not down, as in down, like the Stardust and all the other casinos that have literally went d-o-w-n, but it is closing.  No emotion on my part, although I do have history with the place, IMHO at this time it’s just another seamy dive.

My first experience with Las Vegas was sometime in the mid 80’s when I made a three-day trip down from Montana with my friends Gwen and Kim.  We stayed at the Castaways in a horrible hotel room that we got comped for playing poker at the Castaways.  The room was like a dark box with beds that appeared to be butted up against couches and no room to move around them once the beds were made out.

We didn’t spend much time in the room anyway.  We played some poker at the Castaways and I remember standing across the street from the Sahara when I got off of a bus that brought me back to the Strip after playing poker all night at the Golden Nugget downtown.  But I don’t remember going into the Sahara.  I know we went to the Riviera coffee shop for breakfast and Robert Goulet was at a table not far from us.  I didn’t recognize him but Gwen did.  Once pointed out, yes, I knew it was him.

In those days the whole picture of Las Vegas wasn’t – not even close to what it was when I moved down here in 1989 to open the Mirage.  The Silver Slipper was still standing, and it’s possible us three tourists did walk through the Sahara, but I just don’t think so.  I know I got broke!  I played the $10-20 LH game at the Nugget and was up $1,000 but just couldn’t leave with it.  Then the law of diminishing returns got me and I couldn’t win. And that game was the ‘big’ game then.  Let’s hear it for Full Tilt Poker’s Onyx Cup series…not! More on this later.

My stay at the Castaways was my first and only experience with an STD – specifically CRABS – although I didn’t get them at the Castaways, that’s when I found out I had them.  Whoop-T-fucking-dah!  The jerk I called a boyfriend had slept with someone that had them…he told me in a phone call that he’d been to the Dr. and he did, in fact, have them and knew I would have them also.  OMG!  I didn’t tell my two traveling companions.  I didn’t tell anyone.  I did have them!  What a great gift from someone that professes to love you.  Did I ever mention the fact that I can’t stand bugs?  Especially on me?  Especially ones that bite?  They were in the hair on my head, and on my body, and it was wash, clean, use this, use that, the bed, the body, the bed sheets, the blankets, the clothes…what a nightmare.  The jerks name is Rod Kaufman (not to be confused with another Rod Kaufman that plays/played the tournament circuit) and the wench he got them from was a dealer in Billings MT named Latone/Letone (who knows how it’s spelled).

Hey, that felt kind of good!  Ratting out the rats even though it was over 25 years ago!

When I started making the trips down to Las Vegas to deal poker tournaments, I played at the Sahara – pan and poker but I remember the Pan games and some tournaments more so than the live poker games.  After I opened the Mirage in 1989, I used to go play Pan at the Sahara – in those days Pan was big, lots of tables, lots of players, a variety of limits, and always fun for me because I didn’t bleed when I lost $20 or $30.  Some of the old women at the tables did though, you’d have thought someone had a bucket under the table and cut a bleeder in their arm when someone drew a valley card and used it…”You’re in my hair!” yeah, that’s a Pan expression but it would work with the frigging crabs too…LMAO now that it’s old history.

So back to the Sahara…

Some of us used to go to the Sahara buffet – because it was cheap – and as a group we could eat for very little and you could get comped pretty easy too.  But the buffet was bad, not as bad as Circus Circus but still low grade food piled in stacks of more low grade food.  The safe bet was a roll and salad.  The place never lacked for patrons though back then.

In the early 90’s we went to listen to and dance our butts off to Cook E. Jarr and the Crumbs, still an entertainer in Vegas, he was always fun to go  watch and dance to his music. We had a fun group that went out to hit some casino dance floors now and then and just before I left for Mississippi in ’93, Grace Dunmore (Mirage poker dealer then) had a going away party for me: a few pictures of some of my budds – the 1st picture, Donna – a poker dealer, Gina – poker office secretary; the 2nd picture, me – a poker dealer, and Donna; the 3rd picture – Paula, a poker dealer, Suzie – I think she was just gravitating into graveyard supervisor at the time:

I still find it difficult to believe that Paula is gone – *sigh* we had such great times together and she was always fun and easy to get along with!  I love her.

and after we had drank, danced, shoved food in our faces and each others, we headed to the Sahara for some Cook E. Jarr fun.

I did have a great time that night.  Security came over and asked me to stop dancing on top of the table and I had money stuffed in my boot tops and pants pockets by appreciate guys when I danced on their table – all $1 bills in case you’re wondering.

On the funny side, about 12 years later, I ran into Cook E. Jarr standing in line at the grocery store of a Vons about 5 p.m.  – no shit – he looked almost like he did in the picture with me.  He’s a ripper!

Sahara, Sahara…it waited for me to go to Mississippi and open the Gulfport Grand Casino, I stayed for a year, and when I came back Treasure Island had just closed their poker room and the Mirage wasn’t hiring until they took back all of the dealers from TI that opted to stay in poker.  I went job hunting.  I landed a day job at the Sahara and had to take my first drug pee test – it was the norm, and became the thing everywhere.  I had to deal Pan, Pai Gow Poker, Let it Ride, and some really shitty 7 card stud poker games with an occasional holdem table thrown in – that was the rotation.

When I first hit Vegas before the Mirage opened, I did some small poker room tournament stints in Vegas and one of them was the Plaza where they had pan and it was in the rotation, but I managed to slide by dealing it and dealt only poker.  That wasn’t going to happen at the Sahara.  I really hate to deal games where people are playing against the house – I don’t play them and sure as hell don’t want to deal them, those were Pai Gow Poker and Let it Ride. The pan games were scary.  Mainly old Jewish players – ahhhh…don’t get in a twit and think I’m being hard on Jews, it has nothing to with it, but that’s mainly who sat every day at the Pan tables and they can be extremely unkind in many ways, to each other and to the dealer.  There are no happy, smiling faces.

The Sahara had idiot rules for their dealers – not unlike other casinos that want you to sacrifice your soul and your pocket book to work there if you’re a playing dealer – and they allowed their dealers to sign up to play pan – the EO/Play thing.  If you played $5 Kondition, you wouldn’t get picked up to deal so the other dealers were married to the dealer’s box in rotation.  But along with that, if you declared you were playing the hand, the last person with a hand would always declare they were playing, unless it was a person who didn’t split and then they definitely had a hand.  But if they split, you had to split tops with them.  You could be buried in the game and pick up a hand with a lot of pay value, then be forced to split and go to the next hand because of the ‘playing dealer’ rule.  It’s like houses that won’t let you check-raise when you play on the clock because you’re a dealer.  Gee, get the handcuffs, put the leg irons on me, oh…don’t forget the blindfold because I’m just here to throw off my money and you, Sir, you can use every tool the game offers, but I can’t!

Oh well!

The Employee’s Dining Room.  That’s one of the scariest places I’ve ever seen food served.  First you have to go down into a long, dark hallway, with some strange darker hallways opening off of them with sounds like gurgling water, then up a few steps, then down again, and finally you enter this section under the hotel that should be restricted to hazmat suits only. Dark, dingy carpet, a rail with food trays behind it and some type of gruesome looking server slinging the food into the troughs, dirty dishes in bins, tables and chairs that looked like something was going to crawl up the leg of the chair you were sitting on, and literally, cockroaches on the floor now and then as they scored a morsel and disappeared under the counter or the next table.  Way awful.

The tips sucked, the job was hard with limited breaks, and I hired on to deal the Gold Coast Open night shift while I worked days at the Sahara.  I figured I could survive two weeks of the Gold Coast Open.  I almost didn’t…it was rough.  To this day I would never go back and try to work two dealing jobs at the same time, I just don’t have it in me.

Then I got lucky that several positions opened up at The Mirage and I was back in – back where I could deal poker and knew WTF I was doing and the food was good with a clean kitchen.

I did go back from time to time to the Sahara and played Pan.  I went back a few times and played a tournament, but mostly I’ve stayed away. The Pan games have died out everywhere in town, possibly there’s an occasional Pan tournament somewhere but none that I know of. As to what will happen when it closes, I have my doubts that it will ever resurface again in Las Vegas, but I’m only guessing.