The Texas Night Rolls On

[ I pick up continuing story of my Dallas poker week on the second club of Tuesday night. Previous installments: Earlier Tuesday night, and Monday night. ]

Steve eventually made the money in the tournament and cut a deal, and we were off for the next club of the night. Actually, I had already heard a few things about the next place. A few hours before, everyone in the tournament simultaneous got an SMS message ad from this other club. The SMS said, apparently: Tatas, Tacos, and poker at The Loft.

Dallas, during my visit, was at that moment in its local poker scene where NYC was right around late 2005. Here in NYC, just after the 72nd street and PlayStation busts in the summer, it became clear that the police weren't going to do any additional busts for a while. They surely knew about the additional clubs, but had decided to focus on the large ones, presumably hoping it would scare the smaller ones. The opposite happened: in late 2005, it was tough to throw a now-worthless 72nd street dollar chip on the island of Manhattan and fail to hit a poker club.

At the time of my visit, Dallas had been through some busts of larger clubs a while back, and like in the late-2005 NYC, the small 2-3 table clubs were competing heavily for business. (Although, there have been a number of small club busts now in Dallas, similar to what happened in NYC). The small clubs always look for gimmicks to market their places.

Dallas' The Loft (amusingly sharing a name with one of the better small clubs that ran on Manhattan's Lower East Side for much of 2005) had picked a rather odd gimmick — topless dealers. This wasn't the first I'd heard of this gimmick. Many strip clubs, particularly in Las Vegas, since the poker boom, have taken to having stripper-dealt poker tourneys, where an article of clothing is removed by the dealer at each blind level. However, this was a bit different because it was a cash game and an otherwise regular club, and the dealer started and stayed topless basically indefinitely.

It was certainly a bizarre site to see. We entered the club, with one $1/$2 table going, and, as advertised, a bare-chested woman was sitting dealing the game. I set aside the obvious incredibly sexist side of this, and began to view it as an interesting social anthropology experiment. What happens to a poker game, I asked myself, when there is a topless dealer?

Well, with this one data point, I discovered that it's not good for the game. I don't know if it was the particular mix of players, but this was the most tight-weak live $1/$2 game I'd ever played in. Were they all busy gawking and therefore folding everything but top ten starting hands? I couldn't really tell for sure, but at least a few of them were clearly disinterested in both the game and the topless dealer and downright bored (it was, after all, a boring game, with plenty of blind steals and few flops). Certainly not a profitable game, given the heavy rake.

Ultimately, I found it distracting to play in a game with a topless dealer, but not for the prurient reasons you might think. The problem is much more mundane than that. To use a horrendous pun, since they are almost impossible to avoid here anyway, there is simply too much flopping in this game. Obviously, naked female breasts tend to move around a lot anyway, and dealers do quite a bit of reaching and moving as it is. Now, I've never been distracted at all by a dressed female dealer, but I assume I've never been dealt for by a woman not wearing a bra. As it turns out, in this topless situation, as you try to focus on the actions and movements of your opponents to build reads, you see constant movement out of the corner of your eye. It's simply movement you don't expect to see, having spent hundreds of hours being used to how people move at the poker table. You see movement that is so out of place that it distracts you. Then, you quickly remember that this a club with topless dealers, and that you are actually much more interested in playing poker than watching this woman try to reach for the muck without a shirt on.

So, This gimmick is just a stupid idea. I think that even men who actually like going to strip clubs and somehow enjoy the experience of group-staring at naked breasts will find this sort of thing pointless. And, the discomfort of the dealer is not to be ignored. I twice saw her actually get her nipple slightly injured by getting it caught in the chip rack. (Ok, yet another awful pun there that I again can't find a way to avoid.) I mean, how far is this club willing to go for this stupid gimmick?

I might have been inclined to stay if I felt my opponents were actually being distracted or otherwise inspired to make mistakes because of this pathetic display. But, the game was not all that great; the players were the type you find online in tight-weak games where seeing lots of hands and making lots of raises help you win. But, doing that live at a ten-handed game with a heavy rake is somewhat hard to do. Steve and I left after only an hour or so. I was down about $80, mostly because I got pot-stuck with a flush draw against a short stack (and embarrassed myself by offering to do business at stakes where it is (apparently in Dallas) socially unacceptable to do so — poor Steve was mortified), and for misreading someone in a “has the nuts or nothing” situation, calling off about $40 over two streets.

We headed out to another $2/$5 game — F.J.'s second club. This was probably the best game we visited in Dallas, and I look forward to telling the story.