Joe Speaker

The Gold Coast is less a casino than a corner pub. Vegas locals leap from table to table, greeting the dealers by name.

The usual, please.

The evening’s entertainment, a diminutive Asian crooner, plays Pai-Gow to kill the hours before crossing the floor to take the stage. Sarcastic croupiers head to the bar at quittin’ time. Pit bosses ask players what the “talent level” is across the street at The Palms.

It’s the kind of place where someone walks in and a bunch of people scream out, “NORM!”

Or, in our case, “Here come the loud guys.”

I think it’s safe to pin the bloggers’ love of Pai-Gow on Otis. He is at least responsible for spreading the word, like a degenerate Messiah currently wandering for his 30+ days in the neon wilderness. Let us not forget the past miracles he has performed at this very site.

Like devoted disciples, drizz, Spaceman and I followed his lead, across the shimmering asphalt–our own trial by fire–from Rio to The Promised Land, where we tried to multiply our loaves and fishes chips.

 Hey…fishes and chips. Is there a rule against biblical metaphors also being sort of pun-ish? Dunno. Was that lightning?

Above all else, Pai-Gow is a drinking game. You can get a lot of free booze while pushing hands for hours. But it’s still gambling and since I usually only play it in the wee hours, the alcohol is just piling on. In the case of this particular evening, I had not gambled nearly enough during the day, so I upped the stakes pretty much right from the start.

Ken from China seemed like a nice enough guy. Goofy grin, typically fractured english. For no reason that I could ascertain, he had it in for Otis. Chided him relentlessly and laughed  in the face of Otis’s protests. He was dealing us good cards, though, even if he kept setting drizz’s to induce a push. Squeezing out a profit was as easy as giving birth, but we are all within shouting distance of our starting stacks.

Didn’t dampen the mood, quiet the shouts–”PAI-GOW!”–when the dealers turned over garbage.  Otis was going for his supernatural vibe, betting the bonus/not betting the bonus, holding off on Old Man drinks, pulling the levers to construct the perfect situation for profit convergence. 

I was just kinda drunk.

Which is how I managed to get quad aces and still push my main bet. I was so excited, you see, that I didn’t split them. I did have $5 on the bonus, though. That pays 50-1. No tax. Right about then, it became a party.

I pushed my bonus bet to $10  and $20 and landed a couple flushes (which I set correctly, thankyouverymuch). drizz went on a rush and as we counted up at the end of nearly four hours, had a little profit. I won $400. Otis was even. Dead even.

“PUSH GOW!”

By then, we were regulars. The Loud Guys. We’d be back.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.