Never let them tell you a casino has no sense of humor.
Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the big Pokerfest,
the Poker Room manager calls and says they can't host the big
Pokerfest.
...and I'm all, ...like, ...WTF?
I went into full-blown, "Dude, we have
people flying in from all over the country.
You can't pull out on us 24 hours before
the big event - you're killing us!"
I figured it was better to go with, "Oh
my, what will we do?" mode.
There'd always be time to play rough after playing nice.
(You always start out nice.)
He said the Nevada Gaming Commission - whatever it's called -
issued new rules
that went into affect on January 22, and there'd be no time to
do "the paperwork."
And I'm like, "You have a Poker Room,
we just want to play poker," and he said
it was the privacy that was killing us, that the game had to
be open for everyone.
I knew that would be a disaster because a real card shark would
just chew us up.
I kept pleading, always keeping an eye out for the potential
use of the Big Hammer.
Since I'm a total unknown, they had no way to know I was court-ready.
He said he'd try to come up with something, possibly "an
11th-hour, special dispensation."
I had no idea he was Catholic. So he said he'd
call me back.
I figured that was just a dodge to keep me from exploding.
I called the people whose cell numbers I had, and told them the
worst that can happen is we
could buy a deck of cards at the gift show and play in somebody's
room, which wasn't very
practical due to the number of people involved, but it had to
be private - so we kept brainstorming.
A half hour later he called back and said, "What
the hell - let's do it."
Apparently he got a second opinion from Legal, and they cleared
us to play.
So Zendaba and I went there and signed the contract before they
changed their minds.
This was written the morning of the game, more on the results in the next issue.