To Manage a Cardroom...

Tales From the Floor
By Johnny Coldeck

A lot of players seem to envy me for the job I have. I mean, on the surface, helping other people play games every night, joking with the players and making the occasional game decision seems like a pretty good gig, but it’s really not all strawberries and orgasms. There are a few situations which require tough judgment calls, and this job is not for the faint of heart.

We hired a new poker dealer this month, and we have discovered just how insufficient the interview/audition process is for our little club. It took all of a week for our players to dub him “Jimmy the Geek”, partly because he is handy with a keyboard, but mostly because “Sammy the Spaz” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily. With a big, toothy grin and a, “What are you guys talking about?” look on his face all the time, he is impossible not to like. He turns beet red when a woman speaks about him, near him or (if it ever happens) to him, and Jimmy the Geek is easily the least coordinated young man any of us have ever met. He has fallen down at least three times since he started working here, each time in spectacularly slow motion, and not, as far as any of us can tell, for any reason whatsoever (although there was a female nearby during two if the incidents). It’s a real head-scratcher to all of us, and while the Daffy Duck/Charlie Chaplin/Quaalude-overdose routine is a source of intense belly laughs for all of us, I have become a little concerned and told him to get his inner ear checked out by a certified physician, because it’s just not right! The area where Jimmy the Geek seems to excel is in growing a beard. His five-o’clock-shadow seems to cross the International Dateline before work every single day. Now, it is my job to talk to the dealers about grooming issues, but the mental picture I have of Jimmy the Geek alone in his bathroom with a razor in his hand is far too disturbing and if anyone is going to be responsible for a horrific scene like that, it sure won’t be me. Anyway, he is a great kid and a lot of fun to have in the cardroom, so he’s probably going to work out as long as our insurance company doesn’t find out he is here.

Car Dealer Mike, whom you may recall from one of our first stories, has been hanging around the place, not playing poker. Since his huge losses at local casinos, his stints in rehab and his attendance at Gamblers Anonymous meetings, the man has been spending more time at our cardroom. As a floorman, it is difficult to know where to draw the line with washed-out ex-gamblers who hang around for no apparent reason. This is particularly difficult in the case of Car Dealer Mike, who is not a quiet man in the same way in which an apple is not a jellyfish. On one occasion, he actually pulled a $100 bill out to buy into a short game (the game was three-handed with an average stack of $800 and an average pot size of $100 – he is also not a smart man), and told us all that it was okay because it wasn’t his money! We are all aware of his problem, but, hey, I have a job to do, right? Being a bad influence is in my job description (being sympathetic is notably absent from the document), but I had him dealt out a complete round to give him the opportunity to reconsider his decision. Since one of the players threatened to leave and break the game if he bought in, he stuffed somebody’s money back in his slacks. One item of note: in just one month of retirement, Car Dealer Mike has become a true expert at the game of No-Limit Texas Hold-Em in the same way balding businessmen in BMWs become experts at quarterbacking NFL teams! Anyway, I had to draw the line somewhere, so when he sat in one of the empty chairs in a live cash game and studied his GA literature, I did finally pull him outside for a little chat.

The other complex issue at our little cardroom involves the consumption of alcoholic beverages at the poker table. Generally speaking, the kindhearted and loving poker players always offer to buy an intoxicated player a sympathy drink after he closes one eye, looks at his cards and shoves $200 worth of chips into one of their pots with J-3 off. When our bartender politely states that he is on water for the rest of the night, it always causes hard feelings. The player doesn’t want to stop drinking. The other players sure don’t want him to stop drinking, so what is a floor supervisor to do? While I will not interfere with the bar business, for our purpose here in the cardroom, we have adopted the “ATM” cutoff method; if the player can remember his pin number and operate the buttons with no direct assistance, the bar is open and the cards are in the air. As a humanitarian effort, one of our players will always drive the gentleman home after he is no longer able to operate the teller machine. If the ATM cuts him off, so do we.
At first blush, the job of a small cardroom manager looks easy. If you have no marketable skills, it may be the job for you! The training program for this position, which comes highly recommended, is as follows:

1. Spend one year as a kindergarten teacher, preferably in Brooklyn. This will help you work with the poker players.
2. Spend one year as an animal trainer for a circus. This will help you work with the dealers.
3. Spend one year as a Buddhist monk. You’ll need it.
4. Spend one year selling timeshares in Florida. This will be your ethics training.

One word of caution: If you are currently a lawyer attempting to re-train for this position, forget about it. There are some things this job requires which a lawyer just won’t do.

Tales From the Floor is written anonymously by the manager of a small Northern California Cardroom. While the stories told often have a grain of truth, please take them with a grain of salt. Johnny Coldeck has been undergoing psychiatric evaluation for years now with no noticeable results. With no chance of surviving on his own, he was rescued by a band of gypsies and trained to be a poker dealer. Although he was found to have no skills which would qualify him to deal, his years as a fluffer for the pornographic film industry and his ability to juggle made him well suited for the position of floor supervisor. This training program is not recommended.