So I get a call that The Showboat is opening a poker room in the New House of Blues section of the casino, but they’d like to give the dealers some experience before the official launch. Would I like to come down and play for a couple of days and give them some feedback? “Well, are you going to stake me?”, I asked. “No. But we’ll give you some rooms.” “Alright then.”
We headed down on Friday night and stayed at Harrah’s on the Marina. The hotel rooms there are quite nice and very modern with dark wood floors. The new room is nice and the dealers are capable. Now onto the Showboat. First off, the tables: They’re red felt. $5 chips are red. The backs of one of the decks is red. Red is not a good color for the table. There’s also some logos for the WSOP on there with four aces on it (Including a BLACK Ace of Diamonds) which I would keep including in the board cards (“Oh! I flopped a ace! oh wait, that’s the logo”). They also have those deck shufflers which I was told cost $11,000 each. I was there within five hours of the room opening and they would break down once an hour or so. The dealers are very very green. Very nervous and some of them don’t even know how to make proper change let along control the table. I actually had to take in a couple of sessions at the Trop to make sure I didn’t end up killing one of the dealers.
The play was very soft though. Normally there was one fixed game (3/6, 4/8, 5/10) going on and one NL game (1/2). I stuck to the limit game. I’m assuming that these people also got called in, but some of them could’ve just wandered off the street, either way, I want to thank the Showboat for putting them on my table and letting me take their money.
And then onto the rest of the trip. Sunghee ended up with a nasty sunburn on her back on Sunday while I was splashing around in the ocean. We actually went to the hospital for some burn cream on Monday before we headed home.
On Sunday night we also ate at Carmine’s at the Trop. So so good. The Chicken Parm was amazing.