but I did get tired. I actually didn’t post yesterday because Clearspine did and whoever posts last, their post hits PokerWorks’ main page. I wanted readers to read him and hopefully leave a comment on his query on how to blow off use his FPPs. So do give him a holler – all of you online poker players out there.
And if you didn’t know, PokerStars has upped the ante and changed the name of the Sunday 1/4 Million $11 buy-in tourney. It’s now the Sunday Storm and this coming Sunday, the 27th, is a must play – even if there are 9million runners. The tourney prize pool is guaranteed at $1million…yowzer!
To the business of Montana Poker. I’ve scanned in more pictures, and in a way I’m kicking myself for missing out on a lot of years of pictures of those players. But on the other hand, when you stop and think about developing rolls of 35MM film, it could get quite expensive, and did!
When I first landed the bartending job at the Oxford, my ex and my three sons were sleeping in the basement of my sis’s place, Vickie, (the truck driver that now lives next to me in Pahrump). She was then married to an alcoholic piece of shit that she had two kids with, Gay and Chad, right around the ages of my two youngest boys. As soon as I managed to put together some money, we moved into a two story house about a block away from where she lived. It was brutal. We had no furniture – literally. Damn, I hate sleeping on the floor, even as a kid, even as I got older, and to this day I know my body wasn’t meant to lay down on a hard surface and try to survive the night pretending I can sleep. And then the worst part is getting up the next day when you slept like shit and your whole body aches.
My ex, Bob Geenen, picked up a part-time job at the OX as a handyman, helper, repair person or ‘jack of all trades’ as the saying goes. I really don’t remember the time frame that he got the job though, it seems to me that it was a bit later. We lived in the two story house for awhile and then moved into a duplex later, that’s when I specifically remember him working at the OX.
I tended bar, I became ‘a runner’ on Cathy’s nights off, and then a dealer – all of that is listed under the category ‘Montana Days and Nights’ so catch up any time you want. As stated before, I got hooked on poker when my boss, Bill Ogg, brow beat me into a 5 card stud game on his stack of chips.
Until I started ‘running’ drinks and food to the back room, I really didn’t think about the poker table back there. There were two pan tables but if one ran late, it was unusual. So when/how/long was that particular ‘open’ game running in the back? Poker had been played at the OX for a very long, long time. Hidden in the basement underneath the kitchen long before poker was legalized in the state, that’s for sure. Poker was legalized in 1972 in Montana. Nope, not on Indian Reservations, just legalized throughout the state. So the game in the back room had probably been there at least since then.
The 5 card stud table had my attention when I stood behind the bar and when I got off work since it was in the front where the restaurant and bar were. I can’t remember the succession of players as they came and went, even the regulars. I do remember Chubby too well. It’s always the case, you remember the ones that give you grief or give you extreme happy thoughts.
I was dealing the back room game in 1985, but it was some time before I got to that point.
While I was ‘running’ and bartending, I talked with some of the old timers about dealing. I sat in the booth by the cage with them whenever I had the time to capture them and spend a few minutes. Of course they loved to sit and bullshit so it worked out well. A young kid named Monte knew them all and played poker but here’s the crazy part, I don’t remember him playing until a few years later when I worked at the Palace, but Monte dealt private games in Alaska I think. He was friends with Bob Anderson and if memory serves, Bob worked the fishing boats in Alaska and came home in his off time – and like to play poker and drink, the perfect combo for him and I to meet. Bob was about my dad’s age but we hit it off and he was always friendly and took care of me when I served him a drink or pushed him a pot in later years.
Monte’s advice to me to learn to deal was to watch the games and the dealers and see what they did. I tried to, but if you aren’t a poker player and you haven’t handled cards before, it takes a brighter bulb than me to figure it all out. The old timer’s told me how easy it was, they used to deal the ‘snatch games’ in the basement and they showed me how the flipped chips out of the pots with their fingers and slipped them off their elbows into the rack, and all kinds of things to steal from the players. Those days were long gone by the time I got started in the business so mostly it went over the top of my head. I was never a cheater and didn’t really comprehend that I was hanging with a group of blatant poker thieves…they were proud of it.
Now I’d like to know if the house got everything they stole, if they stole some of it from the house, if they ran the games themselves so it was their take and they were the house, if they trusted each other to deal a game because obviously a thief will steal from a thief but I will never know, I think the ones I talked to back then are all gone now. One of them may still be around, he came to the Mirage and I dealt to him once after I came back from the Gulf Coast but that would’ve been around ’96 or so.
Somewhere around this time period was when we moved into the duplex. I started practicing my shuffle and my pitch. I set a bowl on the floor in front of me – hell yeah, I was sitting on the floor – and pitched cards at the bowl. Hour after hour. Take a break, pitch, do some housework, pitch, sleep, pitch, go to work, pitch, fix dinner, pitch. My shuffle sucked, I had my fingers on top of the deck pushing down while my thumbs were trying to pry up, the deck was glue, but I was determined.