Table Tango, my couch, awaits my thoughts and self-expression for the day. This self-indulgent space is my therapy. Let me tell you how it all started. I dealt poker in Montana for some years before traveling to Vegas to deal my first big tournament in 1987. That tournament was the last tournament the Golden Nugget hosted – the Grand Prix. Shell shock!!!! Looking back on it now, I wonder how I ever had the will to return. It was brutal. I was almost sick to my stomach due to the attitude of the players and the house’s willingness to let it slide.

After the Grand Prix, I continued to work major tournaments in Nevada for two years – from 1987 to 1989. Poker was really slow in Montana and I knew if I was going to be in the poker business, I would have to make a move. I applied at The Mirage and opened the casino (along with over 5,000 other employees) in November of 1989. The Mirage took all the poker business in town. Caesar’s Palace closed their poker room six months after The Mirage opened. Every room in town downsized or closed.

Fright night had turned into 24/7 as far as I was concerned. I dealt to everyone that was ‘name brand’ during that time period. I used to leave the poker room at night swearing that I would have to quit my job. I dreamed of ways to make myself immune to the ugly glares, the card throwers, and the swearing freaks that were always the same troublemakers in the games and always managed to just get a gentle rebuff when they got horribly out of line. Even a lot of low limit players had the attitude that they were spending their money, they should be allowed to behave any way they wanted. I hated every second of it. I used to sit with other dealers and moan and groan and share horror stories about players and their attitudes towards dealers.

Then in 1996 I got my first computer. Back in the days when 32 mgs of ram and a 1.6 gig hard drive was the top of the line. I knew absolutely nothing about computers but I was determined to learn to build web sites. I locked up a domain name for my son’s tattoo shop and started messing around with a site. One of the dealers I worked with had just started a poker website. We spent a lot of time visiting and he asked me if I would write something for his site. I did. (In the meantime…along about 1999, I locked up the domain name ‘PokerWorks.Com’) Although he liked the articles and put them up on his site, he eventually felt they were too much trouble to update and told me I should just put them up on my site. I did.

Those articles were my first rebellious statements about what happens at the poker table on a daily basis – the truth about what people are really like when they are running bad and watching their money being pushed across the table to someone else. Eventually I kicked off ‘dear diary’ and then changed the name of my couch to Table Tango when I had someone else write for a short time.

These pages are here for me. I write for therapy. I write for my own enjoyment. I write so that I can go back and see where I was at another time in my life. I really never thought anyone would ever read of any of it or that I would meet so many great people because of all of it. But the bottom line is that this is here for me.

I really used to become quite angry when someone would say, “Stu Ungar was the greatest card player that ever lived.”

And I would want to snort, “Bull fucking shit! He was great when he won. But when he lost, it was the dealer’s fault.”

Guess I should say that I didn’t just want to snort…I did snort. And truthfully, I never had a good session with Stu Ungar. So if he was so damn great, why couldn’t he take a beat? I don’t think the world should view poker players as if they aren’t human and they all sit around like Ladies and Gentlemen and pass the time of day politely moving on to the next hand. It just ain’t so. And if poker players don’t want the world to know just how ugly they can get when they’re on a losing streak, they need to apply more make-up to their poker face, bite their tongue, control their hand motions, and just get on with the game because some of us are going to tell it like it is.

So it all started out as rebellion and turned into therapy. Now it’s a way of life. I can’t imagine not writing about my life and how poker interacts with it. My beautiful couch…Table Tango.