I had a major run in with a player on my third down. The game was $30-$60 Holdem. M.D. was in the 10s and he’s a steamer, I’ve dealt to him before. Tom, the $75-$150 Stud player from the last post was in the 7s. (I did find out the deal Eric D., Tom, and the 3s had going…if Eric or Tom were rolled up, the 3s was going to give them $2,000. Those guys just have to have more than one gamble going on all the time.)

M.D. set out his $20 small blind and walked away. I dealt him in and he didn’t return in time. He came back and asked me what happened. I told him.

A few hands later, M.D. raised pre-flop. Tom folded and was talking with a guy that had walked up behind him. The hand went to show down and M.D. lost the hand. He threw his cards across the table into Tom’s hands. Tom turned back to the game, grabbed the cards, looked at them and asked, “Am I in this hand?”

M.D. steamed and everyone laughed. Tom carried it a little further, “This is a pretty good hand. Did I lose the pot?”

The 5s was teasing me about Montana and what I was drinking the night before and a few other million things were going on in the game. Sergeant Rock was in the 3s…Mark to me…and Lance came in as a new player in the 4s.

M.D. raised again. Tom had a hand this time and he jumped right into the action. The pot was big…Tom and M.D. both lost on the river. Tom said, “I give up on you, Linda!” and slid his cards in a little too hard. One of them skipped off the table under my elbow. He immediately apologized and jumped up to retrieve it. He had pocket Queens.

No one knows what M.D. had except M.D. He acted like he’d taken the bad beat of the century and snorted, “Change the deck!”

I said, “I can’t.”

Tom had his fallen card on the table by now and I was pulling the deck together to count it down.

M.D. barked at me again, “Change the deck, a card went on the floor!”

I had already started to count the deck when he demanded, “Then count the deck.”

“I know how to do my job but thank you for helping me with it.”

Mark and the 5s asked if they could help me with it too. They were enjoying the show. I knew it was only going to get worse because I’ve dealt with M.D. before.

I told them my theory on having a clip board on the dealer’s chair and the game rules for the particular game being updated on the clip board. They thought it was a great idea but they would have to have a table captain to interpret the rules and the game would never get past the first hand because the rules would change all the time. Everyone appeared to be having a great time except M.D.

M.D. had another ‘burst’ with me. I said, “Settle down and play poker. If you keep messing with me, I’ll call the floor man.”

His reply, “Do you think I’m messing with you because you are fucking beautiful? Just deal.”

I screamed, “Decision, Table 24!”

Boba came over and I told him what M.D. had said to me and that I didn’t want to hear it. Boba told him to stop…NOW! M.D. argued briefly but he knew he’d lost the case. Boba came back a few minutes later and asked me if I was ok and did I need anything else. He’s great!

In the meantime, the 1s opened and Lance moved into it. As he was going, he loudly stated, “L.A. is where you throw cards and insults at the dealers. Not here!”

Lance jumped into the chair beside me, rubbed my arm, and asked, “How can you not love this girl?”

M.D. turned to stone, watching TV and leaving his hand lay unattended each time until it was his blind. I gave him a missed blind button and he sat there until the next dealer tapped me out. When I left the game, so did he. The little gutter snipe went to Boba and told him that I took $20 from him and dealt him in the small blind when he walked away from the table. Boba told him that that was not even a possibility. No dealer would take a player’s money and deal them in unless they were told to do so.

My last down of the night was $80-$160 Holdem. A player/tourist picked up about $1,000 in bills from under his tray and stuffed them in his pocket. His hands were folded in front of the rack in front of him and I knew he had about $800 in chips but couldn’t see anything else. When I told him the bills had to stay on the table until he left, the 10s informed me that the players in the game knew what was going on and ‘you dealers don’t have to say anything…and shouldn’t say anything.’ He implied that we created a problem if we tried to run the game because the players always know what’s going on.

At that point, I wondered if I jumped up, onto the table, leaped over and grabbed the drape that hangs at the side of the window openings in the poker room, and used it to swing out into the Sports Book to escape the plight of being too intelligent to deal poker to blithering dumb butts, if I would get fired.