Cardroom Integrity and National Public Radio

I have been in a real groove at Bellagio lately, and my confidence is back. In a recent game, I was feeling pretty good about everything when I realized it was 5:30 p.m. on Friday and I had an important meeting to attend. OK, I didn't have a meeting. It is an ongoing joke in our Omaha game that someone says he has a meeting to attend after a big score if he doesn't want to give any money back. I cashed out, went to my safe-deposit box, counted my win, and was quite confused, because I thought I had won more. Oh well, I thought. I am the same guy who misreads the board in Omaha half the time. Maybe I didn't buy in for what I thought I had.

The following day, I received a call from Howard Lederer, telling me that Susie, his wife, who is a shift manager at Bellagio, told him a mistake of some sort had been made at the cage and Bellagio owed me $400. I was thrilled, because my calculations from the day before now made sense. So, while my problem was solved, I was upset with myself for not paying attention when the cage employee miscounted a stack of my chips. I thanked the people at Bellagio for catching the mistake, and then gave myself a two-day penalty for being an idiot.

When Monday came around, I was at the office and called Jerry Stensrud at Commerce Casino. Initially, I had called him to discuss the Coriolis effect in the Southern Hemisphere and toilets flushing backward, when it dawned on me to tell him my Bellagio story. He explained to me that that type of thing happens all the time in public cardrooms, and I asked him for examples. He E-mailed me a list of employees at Commerce Casino with examples of their integrity. Here are a few:

• Luis Hernandez, a floorperson, found a jacket with $8,000 in chips in it but no identification, and turned it in.

• Baham Behoudi, a floorperson, found a $1,000 chip on the floor and turned it in.

• Miguel Bautista, a porter, found $700 in cash on the floor and turned it in.

In all of these instances, the money was returned to the rightful owner. So, if you realize later on that you dropped money or chips on the floor, check with the casino, because someone may have found it and turned it in.

Recently I was on my way to lunch in Seattle with my longtime friend Dominik. FYI, Dom came to Las Vegas last year and had the opportunity to meet Paul Phillips. Anyhoo, I was driving and he was in charge of the music. As he was scrolling through the channels, he stopped on NPR (National Public Radio). He and I looked at each other when we realized Paul was talking on NPR about losing with pocket aces in back-to-back hands in the World Series of Poker championship. I called Paul immediately, and he told me the show was a rerun from months earlier, and that Linda Johnson, Jennifer Harman, Jim McManus, and a few others also had been on NPR. What the heck? Poker is in mainstream America and I didn't even know it.

Welcome aboard to new columnist Alan Schoonmaker and his column "The Psychology of Poker."