PlatKat.com: Craps Lift Us Up Where We Belong

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Craps Lift Us Up Where We Belong

This weekend I returned to Atlantic City for another bout with the gaming gods. My experience was markedly different from my first visit for two reasons: no Gus and no drinking. I usually don't drink when I play hold 'em because I love the the game a lot and want to be able to concentrate. However, I've recently become quite taken with the game of craps, and you almost need to be drinking to be good at that.

Gus took a long weekend to attend SXSW, so in addition to returning to AC, I decided that it would be a good time to do the Master Cleanse again. To recap, the diet consists solely of a tea made of lemons, real maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. No drinking, no smoking, no eating, no social life (pretty much). This time, I'm doing it for 14 days. Today is Day 10.

Traveling while on the diet is not the most convenient thing in the world, but I managed, as people in general should do when they have special dietary needs. I really, really don't want to be one of those girls (I should say "people," but it's usually girls) who make a big production of announcing what they can and can't eat and making the entire group bend to their whim and eat somewhere lame because they just cannot eat seafood/steak/Chinese/whatever. So I brought the stuff I needed with me and tried not to make a big deal of it. At that point, I wasn't missing food terribly, and I actually didn't mind foregoing alcohol, but it made trips to the bar to meet and greet some of the other poker bloggers less exciting.

So, I spent a lot of time at the craps table, and a little (far less lucrative) time at the poker table. Craps is a pretty simple game (you put chips in certain places on the table and depending on the roll of the dice, nothing happens, you get more chips, or your chips get taken away), so instead of sucking down cape cods, I looked at people. I will tell you about some of them now. (A lot of these snippets are from different tables, sometimes on different nights. If you want linearity, read a novel.)

Crazy Old Guy with a Gray Ponytail
This guy brought excellent energy to a table that needed it. He had a good roll and every time he rolled something particularly excellent, he made a really loud rooster noise. Not "cockadoodledoo," which is not what roosters say at all, but the actual phonetic sound a rooster makes. More like "er-ER er-ER er-OOOOO." I like making that sound too, so I joined him. Soon our table was packed and there was much rejoicing.

After his stellar roll, Crazy Ponytail Guy pointed out his wife sitting about 15 feet away. He told us that she's not allowed to talk to him until he's done shooting because whenever she does, his roll ends. He motioned to her that it was okay to come over. She reiterated his story and said that one time she came over while he was in the middle of a roll and he said, "Hey CRAPFACE!" And when you're 70, that's a joke. I laughed.

Amazing-Shooting Biker Dude
I'm told this guy started with maybe $100 in front of him and by the end of his roll (see below), he had over $1000, mostly as a result of his own shooting. Pretty sweet. He had a pleasant demeanor and helped me make lots of money. But then came...

Fucking Yuppie Scum Suburbanites
Let me just start by saying, "Fucking fuck you cocksucking fucking shit-fucking ass motherfuckers." Figured I'd just get that out of the way.

So the table is enjoying a decent roll and I have some bets down and these two white-bread, relaxed-fit jeans and sweater-clad, faggoty-ass married couples saunter up to the craps table sucking on nine-dollar Bud Lights and start talking. One of the females, a short, high-strung twit with unremarkable features squeals, "I totally don't get this game! Oh my God! What are they doing! What's happening! Why did the dealer do that! I'm a fucking spaz who should be shot!"

Okay, she didn't say the last line, but I would have been happy to help out if she had. I may be from Murray Hill, but I'll still whack a bitch.

Her equally obnoxious, dutiful husband begins explaining what little he knows about the game. As they engage in their little discussion, rife with inaccuracies, the shooter rolls a seven and everyone's fucked.

I asked the man if he was planning to play, as he and his field mouse were taking up plenty of real estate at the table. The man was flabbergasted that one of "those people" was talking to him and asked me to repeat myself. It's like I had alerted him to the fact that he and his yup-schlup were actually at the table and not watching us through a glass cage at the zoo.

He said, "Um no, no, not right now" (and probably not ever because he's a coward) and I should have replied, "Fuck you, asshole. You're killing a perfectly good table." But instead, I said, "That doesn't work for me. I'm leaving." And he stammered some retarded apology that made me wish even more that I'd told him to fuck off.

The Happy Couple
This young couple was so adorably excited about being there that I was thrilled to play next to them. They had that breathtaking force occurring between them that seems reserved only for new couples, maybe only those truly in love for the first time. I could tell he was already giddy about what he'd be fucking later, and she was giddy about having a good time with a nice boy and feeling all around gorgeous. Their shooting fell a little short, but I'm sure their energy did something to help out the rest of us. I made money regardless. They were quite young, so they obviously hadn't played the game much and needed to ask questions. Just to clarify, this is fine with me. They were playing the game and learning as they went along. I've never seen that alone kill a table.

The Pissing Contest
But on the topic of killing tables, what's worse than yellow-bellied cockroaches discussing the game without playing is people fighting while playing. As we learned last weekend, negative energy can kill a table fast. I was at a somewhat cold table when a black guy a little older than me stood next to me and bought some chips. He was in a really bad mood from the beginning, so a few minutes later when an older Indian man (dot, not teepee) interrupted a roll to buy some chips, the black guy lost it.

"What the fuck, man. You're messing up the game!" he said.

The Indian guy said that he was just buying chips and told the man to settle down (agreed). The black guy retorted that he plays the game more than the Indian guy so he should shut up. The Indian guy responded by pulling out his VIP Super-Awesome Premium Gold Free-Blowjob Card and in so many words said, "Respect it."

And of course the black guy scoffed at it and proceeded to bitch and curse all the way into my roll, which was the shittiest roll ever. (Point established, seven out.) Then the black guy swore again, kind of at me, so I thought, "Fuck this" and left.

If you're that miserable, go play blackjack. Or in moving traffic. Or something.

Belligerent Drunk Douchebag at the Poker Table
During the five minutes that I played poker, I had the pleasure of sitting next to this stupid asshole. He was a preppy guy in his mid-twenties, the kind of douchebag who would hit on me in clubs, back when I went to clubs...

A few minutes after he sat down, the dealer asked him not to hold all of his chips and told him that he needed to set some of them down on the table. This makes sense because it shows the dealer and other players that those chips are in play. He made a huge fuss and swore at the dealer.

Lesson for newcomers: Don't fucking swear at the dealer!

Dealers will put up with lots of crap, and as I learned in Aruba, some will even let you sexually assault them, but don't swear at them. They didn't do anything.

The dealer threatened to have the young man removed and he retorted, "Fucking do it then. I've been kicked out of better places than this." I'm sure that sounds really cool in your head when you're drunk, but to the rest of us, it sounds like you don't know how to conduct yourself in any environment and are too stuck up to realize it.

The dealer called the floor manager, who should have kicked him out then, but didn't. So the floor manager pretty much gave the drunk asshole carte blanche to repeat his behavior later. He did, and was then asked to leave. He left without arguing.

Before he left though, he began to engage in unwanted conversation with me. He noticed me making my tea and started asking a bunch of questions about it. I explained that I was on a cleansing diet. In a predictable fashion, he said that I was skinny and I don't have to do it, etc.

"My diet is probably worse than yours. Just eat better, that's all," he said.

How nice! A cross-eyed donkey lush giving a distance runner nutrition advice. I'm continually amused by the fact that some people think that just because they can't imagine doing something, other people must not be able to do it either. Guess what buddy, we're not talking about you. This type of guy is the reason I dated men so much older than me before I met Gus. Boys in their twenties really are at the center of their own universe.

At the same table were two more people at the centers of their own respective universes (universi?).

Obnoxious Old Man
This septegenarian was sitting way on the other side of the dealer, but for some reason, despite all the other people at the table, he felt the need to talk to me... repeatedly. He told me to smile, which I'm beginning to learn is how men must have conversed with women back in the olden days. Although my first reaction is to say, "Fuck off" or "Blow me," I think the best response is to completely ignore them... for good.

The way I see it, these asshats are the douchebags from the days of yore, all grown up. They simply want to make contact with an attractive woman to help validate their existence. But since they're douchebags, they have nothing interesting or intelligent to say, so they bark an order. The best thing for a girl like me to do is deny that they exist at all and send them further down their pit of idiocy and despair.

Not that I like to see random strangers suffering, but come on... "Smile"? That's the best you can do?

The Family Reunion
Next to Belligerent Drunk Douchebag sat an older black man with like 50 people standing around him. Okay, there were only four, but that was a large enough group to substantially remove attention from the game. I'm not saying you shouldn't talk, drink, and be merry while playing poker (especially at a low-limit table), but if it gets to a point where you're more concerned about Aunt Bea's foot operation than the cards you're holding, maybe you should just lay them down for a few hours until you're ready to play. He had to be reminded that it was his turn every round and then he had to look at his cards again each time. I actually found this more annoying than the drunk and the old man put together, so I left to play craps again.

In conclusion, those are the people of AC. Vile, rude, and contemptable for the most part, and usually not so fun to look at either. I often carry around a weighty sachel of self-loathing, but after spending some time in AC, I feel like I'm a really good person. A really, really good person with an extra 500 bucks.

posted by platkat @ 9:54 AM