The good ol’ days.  I learned to play 5-Card Stud with a joker in the deck first.  I won’t lie and say I lernt the game really well but I did start to put the pieces together after I bet myself broke when I made a straight and someone else had a 4-card flush showing.  Obviously I lost.  I thought my hand would beat a flush. 

In retrospect, I must have been flushed.  I was very excited as I kept shoving my $20 stack into the pot $2 at a time when I got raised.  OUCH!  My face felt hot and I not only blew off $20 I couldn’t afford to lose but I was also extremely embarrassed because I didn’t know the order of hands and really thought I won the pot.

From there I moved to Hold’em…yes…it took awhile. It was a $3/$6 Limit Hold’em game and I made mistakes there too. One time just after I started playing, I flopped a set of treys, the board paired with 10s.  I had the other player right where I wanted them but when the betting ended and he showed a 10, I thought he beat me because he had three 10s and I only had three 3s.  Dumb butt.  I threw my hand in the muck but not before the players on either side of me saw it.

They never said anything — as it should be — I grabbed what was left of my chips and stomped off because I thought I got beat. Later, they told me I had the winning hand.  Damn! On I went, wading through the games and learning as I went.  The next one was Omaha.

When Omaha hit the room, I’d been dealing and playing for about a year and knew how to read the cards without making any massive mistakes.  By this time I was dealing very little 5-Card Stud as we had a couple of female dealers that were afraid of the Hold’em tables and stayed at the Stud game.  We dealt 20, pushed to the next game, dealt 20, pushed, then took a 20 minute break through the shift if the games held up all night.  If we dropped to one game, we usually had two dealers on until 2-3 AM and we dealt 30 minute downs with a 30 minute break.  As the nights wore on, one dealer went home and the other was pretty much locked in the box with short breaks dealt by the cage person when they could get away.  Get out the leg irons, Kiddo!  You ain’t moving your butt off that chair until 9 or 10 AM or the game breaks down.

One of our 5-Card Stud girls, Tina, started to rotate slowly through the Hold’em game.  I was playing one night when she took the seat in the box.  She was unlucky enough to sit down in a rammer-jammer and not knowing the game, it was a bit of a struggle.  She knew I would help her though if she ran into a problem so…away we went.

One hand I’ve always remembered with her dealing, it came down where one player had a pair of kings (one hole card and one on the board) and a flush came on the board.  It was heads-up at the end and neither player had a flush card in their hand so they were going to split the pot.  Tina looked at me and asked, “They both have a flush, right?  But he wins because he has a pair of kings to go with his flush?”

Right, Tina.  She was really sincere and cute about it.

No, Tina, they split the pot because they only play the best five cards.

Those are the spots that you want to make sure you have your hands on your cards and are paying attention to the game because the dealer sure as hell doesn’t know what’s going on.  Tina improved.

Then we learned to play Omaha.  Someone that played at the OX went to Vegas or someplace and came back with Omaha stamped firmly in his head.  We were off and running.  When it was first introduced, you had to throw away two cards from your hand before the final betting round.

We had a player named Jerry, a businessman that usually came in in a suit and was quite a bit older than the normal crowd.  He used to love to run his fingers down my arm and talk about my beautiful skin and how soft it was.  Yah, kind of irritating, especially when you watched his eyes and the look on his face.  Mostly I laughed it off but I felt like I needed a shower after a run through sheep dip.

Jerry simply couldn’t pick the right two cards when he pitched and I won a number of his chips more than once because he threw the wrong cards away.  Nope, I wasn’t draping my arm over the table to distract him…or anything else for that matter.

The dealing side of the Omaha game was really crazy.  No one knew what they were supposed to do at first.  (Imagine that dealing crew learning Badugi or Deuce to 7 Triple Draw now…WHEE!)

Then we started playing it where you kept all of your cards and the dealers had a worse time reading the hands.  Not three or four of us that played all the time, we were on it!

We also had a player named Sid that came in every day — you could set your watch by him — and played for six or seven hours, sometimes late into the night if he got stuck.  He mostly came in in a sky blue sweater, as if it had grown to his skin, he wore it day after day but he was clean, just extremely pushy and noisy.

Sid learned to play Omaha too…sort of…kinda.

We had a new female dealer named Marla that was transitioning in from the games in Butte, Montana.  She didn’t stay with us long, I believe she went back to Butte, something to do with the boyfriend-blues.

One night we were in a jamming Omaha game (as jamming as you can be with $100 pot limit rule) and Sid and I ended up heads-up on the river, mucho raising going on.  Marla was dealing.

I had something like 2-2-3-4 (big Omaha high hand, right?) and flopped quad deuces. Sid made a full house.  When I turned my hand up he said he had the winner because he had a full house.  I had my fingers nailing down my cards to the felt as Marla reached to muck my hand.

I said that I had four-of-a-kind.  Sid kept trying to baffle Marla with bullshit and told her I had a worse full house than he did but I did not have four-of-a-kind because I had to use two cards from my hand.  No shit, Dick Tracy? Marla reached for my hand again.  I had a fit and told her not to touch my cards.

We didn’t have floor people in those days and no one came running if there was a problem in the game.

Sid kept pushing it and by this time she was ignoring my hand and listening to him as he prodded her to push him the pot.  She had her hands on the pot moving in his direction, when I barked, “Marla, if you push him the pot, I’ll knock you off of that chair!”

She stopped in mid-push, hesitated a moment while Sid kept arguing at her, and finally pushed the pot to me.

Sid did something like, “So that’s the way it’s going to be, huh?”  And the next hand started.  He knew what was going on.

After Marla was on a break, I found her to ask why she finally pushed me the pot.  “You’re a dealer.  I figured you knew what you were talking about.”

WHEE!

That’s it for the night, my head is tipping off of my shoulders I’m so tired.  The Rioteer finally went home to Momparental tonight after being here for the summer (three months) and I’m exhausted.