Gold Strike - Tunica, Mississippi

Just flew into Memphis and took the shuttle down to Robinsonville, MS and checked into the Gold Strike Casino Resort. I will be dealing here for the next few weeks leading up to the World Poker Open, which has a World Poker Tour $10K main event starting on 1/20.

I am not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but I am going to make a fresh start in 2008 and resume my intentions to blog on about my dealing experiences. I apologize to those that checked out my blog last summer and were disappointed when my entries suddenly stopped. Internet access in Vegas was pretty inconvenient and expensive, but that's just an excuse. But, at least for now, I am blessed with free Internet access here at the Gold Strike. I have a Boingo account for future travels and I will probably end up getting a Sprint card or something for this summer in Vegas. In order to capture some of my "lost episodes", I have my notebooks from last summer's WSOP and the WPT event at the Beau Rivage with me, and intend to capture some of my most favorable recollections with added posts the next few weeks.

How did I get here? Well, dealing poker in Houston became a little bit dangerous this last fall. While I was on a Caribbean cruise, one of the bigger rooms got raided by law enforcement (there had actually been another bust a few weeks earlier at a smaller room north of Houston), players were detained, dealers taken to jail, and the legal environment seems to have changed. Many of the clubs have closed or just can't sustain games because players have naturally found other venues. The bigger games have went deeper underground, it seems, but many of them have been robbed over the past few months. I made an immediate decision to stay away from any trouble, and have only worked a few private home games and holiday casino parties - not nearly enough to make a living. I have decided to spend a year or two on the tournament circuit and travel to and work as many events as possible. It is great experience, there is abundant work given you make the right contacts, and of course modest, but sustainable income.

Last fall I worked the Gulf Coast Poker Championship at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was also a WPT event (their first) and much of the staff and leadership team there came together over the past few years putting on the WPO in Tunica. I was immediately impressed with the quality and consistency of the floor staff, and over the course of that event, I knew that I would enjoy working for them again. I consulted with Ken Lambert, who overseas poker operations for both the Beau Rivage and Gold Strike, and was assured that I would be invited to work in Tunica as well. They came through and here I am, excited as ever to work another great event.

The World Poker Open has some roots back into the late 1990's as Jack Binion endeavored to establish a top notch poker event on the banks of the Mississippi River, where poker's American history really is rooted. It was immediately successful, one of the first major tournaments to receive ESPN coverage, the very first to employ the hidden hole card cameras, a revolution that resulted in a tremendous popularity boom. Binion developed a great reputation for treating players well, providing the most professional service, and employing a dedicated staff, and by 2000, this event had outgrown the confines of the Horseshoe property and reached out to utilize the convention space at nearby Mandalay Bay (later renamed Gold Strike). In 2003, the WPO helped launch the World Poker Tour, and the event seems to have grown better every year since. This year it seems challenged by several nearly concurrent events (the Aussie Millions of the APT, the Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure of the EPT, and a WSOP Circuit event right here in this very market), but they still have over 600 rooms booked for players here at the Gold Strike throughout the event and have had to attain overflow bookings at nearby properties for peak periods.

At the dealer meeting yesterday, I saw many familiar faces and enjoyed reconnecting with many of my dealer buddy acquaintances. The check in, badging, payroll and uniform processes were very smooth and headache free, an indication of the first class way management here seems to take care of everything. I proudly wore my Beau Rivage t-shirt to the dealer meeting, and when signing in, the ever-charismatic Johnny Grooms made a comment about how nice it looked. I found out later that he had been promoted to poker room manager at the Beau. He has a wonderful southern charm and ability to cut through problems on the tournament floor and his staff is quite loyal, which seems to contrast my other experiences. I hope to learn more from them and emulate the fantastic customer service they exemplify.

I really wanted to work this event because it has a great reputation for the way dealers are treated. Like the Beau, our rooms are comped, we are allowed to eat in the employee dining room, and transportation is pretty much handled for us (less airfare, of course). The property is quite nice, not as upscale as the fabulously restored Beau, but comfortably elegant anyway. The poker room is well run, the dealers are really, really strong, and it seems to be run very efficiently. This clearly carries over to the tournament staff, and throughout the next few weeks, I will likely be asked to work cash games in the full-time poker room as well, so that invigorates my passion to improve as a dealer.