What if you’re a first time visitor to Earth? Your name is Zeeduk and you landed in Las Vegas and you’re in the back of a taxi . . . which is screaming through the streets, racing through red lights and switching lanes so fast that your little, alien neck is almost snapped off. You, of course, have incredible vision and memory retention and are well versed on our language and definitions.

The first sign you see is WINNERS EAT FREE! Whoopee!! Oh yeah, first you have to win. If you’re losing, just head on back home with an empty stomach.

The next sign you’re confronted with is PAIN CLINIC. You ask the taxi driver to pull in and ask for 3 pains to go and load them up with a couple of jagged, sharp burns just for after effect. He explains that it isn’t a pick up service.

Dead trees are being handed out in the form of magazines by flesh peddlers on every street corner. The magazines are advertising all of the places to go to see a naked girl. Geez, after you see one, you’ve seen most of everything that’s available so . . . what’s it all about?

You’re just in time to see a perfectly good casino become a mountain of dead, twisted steel and concrete to make way for a new mountain of rooms, fountains, eateries, lounges and, of course, machines and table games. There are a few short popping sounds intermingled with bursts of light and then as the whole structure collapses, the air fills with dust and the crowd begins to dissipate, heading for the noisy, bustling casinos that still have life.

Everything is under construction or destruction – no history or historic landmarks here. The streets are blocked off and narrow down to one way traffic; the freeway is a jumble of merging and converging lanes filled with Detour and Road Closed signs; hotels and apartment houses, malls and shopping complexes sprout up everywhere; cranes dot the horizon, loading layer upon layer of new floors to new buildings. Nothing like your home planet where everything has order and peace and no one even flinches or feels any emotion or pain.

Signs are flashing everywhere, so hot and bright that your little, green eyes are ready to burn out of your head. The radio’s blasting, “Megabucks is out there . . . waiting to be won but you have to play it to win it.”

You know why you came to Earth . . . you came because one of the travelers stopping off on your planet told you about poker. Poker, a game of cards that’s played against another person with a center dealer and the score is kept with chips. You listened and learned from this traveler, Gelbud, knowing that you were born to play poker . . . had to play poker.

“The Mirage.” You tell the taxi driver. He drops you off and you ask valet for directions to the poker room. Millions of dollars float back and forth across the tables and pour down the throats of slot machines but you aren’t interested in them.

As unusual as you appear, no one even looks at you or notices that your eyes are distended and appear to float outside of their sockets. Your hair is a thatch of burgundy and it keeps moving – undulating waves that push in and out from underneath the brim of the hat your wearing – your skin is dark gray and your face is flat, without a bridge where your nose should be, and your mouth never moves when you speak.

Then you see it . . . the poker room in all of its glorious expanse, table upon table of green felt, empty chairs lined up around each one, a few that are filled with players but the whole atmosphere appears subdued and grim. This isn’t anything like Gelbud’s description of poker at the Mirage.

You’ve come a long, long way and you want to play so you sit down in a game of $3-6 Holdem and purchase your chips, (of course you made a currency exchange when you hit the Dhranbix Galaxy), ready to post and take your first hand. There are chips at 2 vacant seats at the table so the game is a full 10 handed game for all intents and purposes.

You’re dealt in and look down to J-3 spades. The player under the gun raises and 5 players in front of you call. You can feel your sense start to swim. The excitement and tension in all of the players builds. You aren’t sure what to do so you call. The bet gets raised behind you and by the time it gets back to you, it’s re-raised. You call and by the time the flop rolls off, all of the raises are in.

The board comes down K-Q-10. The action takes off again with all of the raises in before it gets to you. You call every raise, watching each player and exhiliration runs through you because you are part of it . . . part of the action.

Your eyes are really starting to float away from your head now. Your hair is moving so fast that you have to keep grabbing your hat and placing it back down on your head. Your nostrils would really be flared if you had them.

You can sense the smell of the player next to you – a very large framed male. He’s oozing a heavy, oily aroma – not unpleasant but certainly overwhelming to your senses. The woman on your right lights a cigarette and you almost lose everything. The acrid sting of the smoke makes you want to bolt and run . . . but you are in the middle of a hand.

The turn card is an ace and the betting takes off again in the same mad, whirlwind of raising and calling. The last card comes a 10 and you have absolutely no idea what you have or what you’re supposed to be doing with this hand.

Once the smoke clears and all of the betting is finished, the first player turns over K-K, the second player turns over A-A and the third player turns over 10-10. The look on the third player’s face is what holds you spellbound. That totally triumphant, “I beat your asses!” look. He’s holding onto those tens with both fingers and looking as if he’d already stacked the pot.

The dealer says, “Alright turn ’em over!”

You don’t have any idea what you may or may not have so you turn up that J-3 spades. The dealer declares, “Royal flush!”

Suddenly the other hands go zinging into the muck and as everyone starts groaning and moaning about ‘how could he have stayed in for all of those raises?’ – ‘what an idiot to take all of that heat’ – and so on and so on, the dealer is pushing you the pot.

You’re so excited you can’t stand it. “What the hell happened here?” You’re thinking, (and you don’t even know how to swear), your gray skin has changed to white, your eyes are starting to really dance off of the front of your face but no one even notices. You’ve never felt like this before!

The other players just keep jibbering and carrying on about the play of the hand and what a monster pot that was. Their aggitation only adds to your enjoyment.

You start stacking chips and suddenly notice that one of the vacant seats now has a player in it. The player’s wearing a leisure suit, sunglasses, and a baseball cap but something about him looks very familiar. He tips his head towards you and suddenly you realize that it’s Gelbud, even though he resembles the rest of the players in the room due to the way he’s dressed.

“What took you so long kid?” You get a mental voice message from him.

“Got held up leaving Phreng. The planet’s under restriction now.”

Gelbud continued, “You think this game’s great? Wait ’til you hit Bellagio!”

“It’s better than this?”

“New casino, new poker room, lots of new tourists in town.”

Your slamming chips into a rack as you give Gelbud a message. “Remember what you told me on Phreng a million or so years ago?

Gelbud sends you an inquisitive thought as your leaving the game.

You flash him back with a solid, “See you there!”