A Little Break

I just wanted to let everyone know that I probably won't be on the blog until next Tuesday or so. After getting out of work around 5am tomorrow (Friday) morning, I'll be almost immediately heading to the airport to fly back home to Ohio for the weekend to attend the funeral and be with the family.

My first night went pretty well last night/this morning. I think I'm coming down with another cold, so the shift hit me way harder than it should have. I learned another carnival game last night, 3-5-7 poker, which is just another game to avoid if you ask me. Perhaps some of you readers out there have big success stories from playing some of those oddball games, but it seemed that for every player out of the six spots on the table who won money, the other five would lose their asses. You just have to get damn lucky to win at those weird games and I truly don't know why they have such an appeal!

The other two games on my string last night were single-deck and double-deck blackjack. I've had PLENTY of experience with double-deck from my time off-strip, but I had never dealt single-deck before in my life. It IS a little easier since I have much less cards in my left hand, but it only has one cut card, which is placed on the bottom, so there is NO cut card in the middle to tell the dealer when to shuffle. Since I dealt double-deck at my old place for hours upon hours, I just got used to coming to a cut card while dealing and got into that "mode" a couple times last night. It almost cost me two times as I probably had ten cards in the deck after finishing a hand, which is WAY to close to running out.

As much as I needed a break from craps after my gig on Boulder Highway, I'm looking forward to dealing some dice at this place. It seems like I'll be getting an average of 4 days per week, with 2 of them being dice. That sounds like an almost perfect mix.....just as long as the other 2 don't consistently include dealing the 3-card poker/let it ride/texas hold'em string!!

One thing that caught me off-guard are the hours of the shifts on swing shift. Since I'm used to dealing off-strip where the table games area becomes pretty dead around 3am, I just got used to swing shift always being 7pm-3am most of the time. However, since this place is on the Strip, it was actually pretty busy this morning at 4am when I punched out (even on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning), which means the normal swing shift is 8-4. On top of that, there is one dice crew that is scheduled for the not-so-coveted 9pm-5am shift each night! Since I'm the new guy around, guess who gets that shift whenever he's on dice! Oh well, I'd rather deal the 9pm shift on the Strip as opposed to the 7pm off-strip shift anytime!

I really underestimated the bosses at this place. As soon as I mentioned that I had a death in the family, he immediately whipped out the schedule and made sure I'd be able to fly home this weekend! He couldn't have been cooler about it, even though I hadn't even started my very first shift at that point yet!

Have a great weekend...see ya sometime next week.