Badugi is up and running at Bellagio…only hitch is that it can only be played in Black Chip games so if you hoped to play it at a lower limit swallow your dismay and disappointment or take out a loan on your house. What exactly is it? It’s a four card low game – not of the same suit – best possible A-2-3-4 – played like Deuce to 7 Triple Draw. With a few complications – A-2-3-3 is a three-card hand as the pair takes one of the cards out of play. The same thing happens if you have two of a suit in the hand, it then becomes a three-card hand. That should give you an idea.

From the dealer’s side of the table, I had the displeasure of dealing to Marty – 4s, in the $20-40 stud game. But it’s always that way with him in the game. He looks like he’s older than dirt but I figure that out of sheer orneriness, he will outlive me by a million or so years. The game was four handed. The 1 and 8s were strangers; the 2s is a regular – name unknown. I started right out with ‘attitude’.

Marty and the 8s went to war. The 8s bet on Sixth Street, Marty raised, the 8s called and threw his bet at the rail in the 6s zone. That’s exactly where his bet stayed, nestled neatly up against the rail, completely out of my reach. On the River, Marty bet, the 8s folded and sat there, making no move to reach for his chips on the rail or help me out with pushing them to Marty. There’s no way in hell I could reach those chips from the Dealer’s chair. In retrospect, if I were in the 8s’s shoes, I wouldn’t assist anyone in sending my money off to Marty.

I thought about just leaving the chips up against the rail and seeing if Marty would reach for them but ATTITUDE took over. I pushed my chair back, stood up, reached across the table, grabbed at the chips and swiped them towards Marty, sat back down, pulled my chair in, and slightly slammed the deck together to put it into the Shuffle Master. By the end of the next hand, I was over ‘attitude’ and just settled down to deal a long, tough half hour.

Of course Marty proceeded to go from somewhere around $200 in front of him, when I sat down, to over $1,000 in the half hour. Ugh!!! I don’t believe I had anything to do with his rush, I blame it all on the Shuffle Master. He rarely tips and he didn’t change his MO during this down. Straight to the point, I would rather not ever receive a tip from him because I never want to have to tell him thank you. At least that part of the down went well for me. But I had to listen to him…double ugh!

I’ve opted to E/O-Play every night, except Monday night. The room is quiet. I could deal, take a lot of breaks, and sit a lot of ‘dead spreads’ but I’m not in the frame of mind to do that. I’m hoping the next few weeks will find me becoming more settled and ready to sit in ‘the box’. I still have a lot of things left undone with the move out of the house and into the coach. Time solves all.

Tomorrow’s post will be about some of the games I played in and people I enjoyed the hell out of.

And a plain black and white view of the universe – thanks to Hubble – that lends imagination to a colorful day. Maybe time is in black and white…