Observations of a Poker Room Manager
Tales of my Mississippi poker days
By Daniel Higginbotham

First off, I’d like to congratulate Paul Hammond, Brad Owen, and Gary Reilly who are on their way to play in the Main Event at the WSOP after winning the WSOP Mega-Satellite at the River Rock Casino. Great job guys and good luck!

In my last article I promised some interesting stories from my time spent running a poker room in Mississippi. When I left Las Vegas I thought I had left behind all the colorful characters that hang around the poker rooms. Wow, was I ever mistaken! In Mississippi I met some of the most wonderful people in the world. To this day, I remain in touch with not only people I worked with, but players as well. I made a lot of really good friends there that will always have a special place in my heart. I also met some true “southern gamblers” that were every bit as colorful as the poker players I had known in Las Vegas.

In Mississippi they weren’t just poker players, they were true gamblers. If you didn’t have money on it, it wasn’t worth seeing or doing. Whether it was a sporting event on TV, golf, pool, dominoes, etc., folks were gambling on it! Sometimes the prop bets and side bets were bigger action than the poker games they were playing in when they made them. We had a pot-limit Omaha game every weekend that had some of the wildest gamblers you could ever hope to meet. The game was $10/25 blinds with a live $50 “Mississippi Straddle” on the button, more action than most people would ever want (our $10/20/30 Omaha and $5/25 7-Card Stud were pretty lively as well).

It was not uncommon in the PLO game to see $10,000 bets on whether the flop would be red or black, but we also had some of the more interesting prop bets come from that game. For instance, we had two regular players, RW and LB, get into a discussion about being out of shape. LB said something about running the 100 yard dash and no sooner than the words came out of his mouth, the younger and slimmer RW thought he had a sure thing and he said, “You can’t beat me in a 100 yard dash.” LB responded with, “I’ll go ahead and bet you $20,000 that I can run a 100 yard dash.” RW jumped on it and asked if I could get someone to pace off 100 yards in the parking lot. Now if you look at what they said carefully, you may be able to predict what happened.

RW accepted LB’s wager and off to the parking lot they went. RW was stretching and getting ready to run, while LB was finishing off a sandwich. RW said to him, “I don’t know how you think you’re gonna beat me, you’ll be lucky not to have a heart attack before you get to the finish line!” “Beat you? I don’t have to beat you. The bet was that I could run a 100 yard dash, we didn’t bet on a race and we never put a time limit on how long I could take.” RW thought about it and realized that he had gotten hasty in jumping on this bet and knew he was bound to lose so he looked at LB and said, “Will you let me out of the bet for $10,000?” LB agreed saying that it was worth $10,000 not to have to run 100 yards. RW later remarked that he didn’t mind paying the $10,000 since he probably saved LB’s life by not making him run.

On another occasion RW got into a discussion with one of the other regulars that we’ll call TBC (The Boat Captain) about TBC being a black belt in Aikido. RW kept needling him saying that kind of stuff was useless and how he didn’t think TBC could put him down (this was all very friendly). TBC just smiled and laughed at RW with the confidence of a man that knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could easily accomplish the proposed task. Finally RW says, “I’ll betcha you can’t put me on my ass.” TBC, still smiling looked RW dead in the eye and asked, “How much?” “How much you got in front of you” asked RW? “About $12,000” was TBC’s answer. So they agreed on the amount of $12,000, and then started negotiating the finer details (such as how long, that they would both start standing up and that RW would announce when to start).

The agreed upon time limit was 10 seconds, they stood up in the poker room and faced off. As soon as RW yelled, “go” he immediately turned to run away. Unfortunately for him, TBC got a hold of his arm as he turned to run and promptly slammed RW down to the ground. While I intercepted security and explained that they were just friends goofing off and it wasn’t a “fight,” all I could hear was RW laughing hysterically. When everything calmed down and they both rejoined the poker game, RW counted out the money to pay up, looked at TBC and said, “I thought I could run away for 10 seconds” and continued to laugh about it for hours afterwards.

I enjoy writing about the interesting things that I have experienced as a poker room manager, and will do so from time to time. My future articles will deal more with the actual nuts and bolts of running a poker room, so if you have any questions that you’ve wondered about, please feel free to e-mail me and I will try to address them. If you just like the poker stories, feel free to drop by the River Rock and join us in the poker room. I love to spend time with players sharing stories and talking poker, golf, hunting, fishing, etc.