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HERE BE DRAGON ROOMS Being a Voyage of Discovery into the by John 1. YEAR OF THE RAT There's this feral freelance journalist playing super pan 9 in the Asian games section of his local casino. You can tell he's new to the scene by the look of fool stupefaction on his face. He's on assignment for an upstart poker publication, the self-styled Esquire of the gaming industry. It happens that this urgent scribe is me. It further happens that I have no clue what I'm doing. It's Chinese New Year tonight, which you might could guess from the two enormous dragon heads parading through this Southern California card cavern to the staccato beat of cymbals and drums. Mad gamblers toss chips and bills, luck offerings, which the dragon heads scoop up with elaborate ceremony. This never happens over on the poker side of a casino. Can you imagine Baby New Year prancing around on December 31st, stuffing dollars in his diaper? But over here, here on the Asian games side, here where things are strange to the Occidental eye, over here the Year of the Rat has just begun, and strange is breaking out all over. A fancy Asian lady sits next to me, shining tonight in traditional dress: something in teal silk brocade with embroidered dragons and a stiff high collar. She's all poise and style… till she loses a big bet. Then she mutters something in Mandarin (so my untrained ear assumes, though it could as easily be Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese or Cambodian) and throws her cards at the dealer. Even over here, in the terra incognita of Asian games, they still throw their cards at the dealer. This is comfortingly familiar to me somehow. We're wall-to-wall in here tonight, a thrumming cultural polyglot, by which I mean (not to put too terribly fine a point on it) folks who didn't grow up on the Brady Bunch and little league like me. I ask the brocade lady if the joint is always this packed. No, she explains, on the first day of the Chinese New Year even people who don't gamble come out to try their luck. If they win tonight, they can expect good fortune in the coming year. And if they lose? "They go home and get more money." Oh. Of course. Welcome to the world of Asian games, or California games as they're staunchly called by at least one LA County casino desperate to step on no toes in these politically correct times. Hey look, I was PC before it was PC to be PC, but when virtually all the patrons are Asians, I don't think it's entirely out of line to call them Asian games. Plus which, it's New Year's, and look at the lovely laminated plastic Year of the Rat key chain the house gave me for just showing up tonight. The new year is not ten minutes old and I'm already ahead of the game. Year of the Rat. Year number 4694 since they started counting years in China some (I'm guessing here) 4694 years ago. There are twelve years in the Chinese cycle of years, each named after an animal, and each informed, like signs of the Zodiac, by the spirit that animal represents. Which makes the Year of the Rat a not so terrific year to be born in, as I learned during the ten minutes of speed-skimming that passes for research in my neck of the journalistic woods, to wit: "Rat people are small minded people and are easily aroused to anger. Although honest and ambitious, their continual gossip drives friends away. " They have pointy noses and they eat cheese. No they don't. I made that part up. Anyway, the first day of the Rat Year is probably the world's worst day to start an Asian games career, but I'm on assignment - paid assignment - and given how rarely the words "wealthy" and "journalist" appear in the same sentence, I find I have no choice. So here I am, armed with my minimal knowledge and the magazine's money, ready to flay myself with super pan 9, pai gow, Chinese poker and Asian stud. If ignorance is bliss, I'm stone euphoric in this scene. 2. EASY KUM-KUM, EASY GO-GO Super pan 9. It's dealt from a shoe containing twelve stripped decks (no sevens, eights, nines or tens.) Aces count one, faces count zero. You're dealt three cards to start, and you can draw one or none. Try to get as close to nine as possible. Super pan 9. It's a thinking man's game. A thinking man on quaaludes, that is. Truthfully, it's a no-brainer: Hit on five, stand on six, and if that's too complex, go "house way," and let the dealer make your choice for you. While helpfully pointing out, no doubt, which is your left foot and which is your right. An old man in a rumpled suit stands behind my chair, dead calm, following the action with his (dare I say inscrutable?) eyes. For the sake of my story, I'm hoping he's an Authentic Exotic Asian. Someone with a colorful tale to tell. A boat person, maybe, or a veteran of Mao's Long March. Alas, his name is Dan, and he's an accountant from Brentwood. Where OJ lives. Sigh. From Dan I learn that everyone plays this game against the bank (which players take turns taking) and that you have to beat the bank's hand to win. Dan says let's go kum-kum. I tell him I'm not that kind of guy-guy. Kum-kum, it turns out, means partners, or as Dan so poetically puts it, "Our fates rest in the same place." He matches the money in my stack with money of his own, and now we're a corporation, linked in a solid bond of brotherhood. Have I ever felt so close to another human being? We're foxhole buddies, welded together by risk. Lives are on the line! Well, dollars, anyway. Our Gibralteresque partnership is shaken on the very first hand when we draw six to a four, for ten, which (since you drop the front digit in super pan 9) equals zero, the worst possible hand. Dan blames me. He says I held our cards the wrong way. Two hands later, we go broke, and go our separate ways. Our fates, it would seem, rest in the same grave. Though you can play super pan 9 for as little as five bucks a hand, most Asian gamers scorn the minimum bet like Dean Martin disdained light beer. Apparently it's just not done. Meanwhile, I'm having trouble gambling with the magazine's money. I just can't seem to get emotionally invested. Might be different if I had something real on the line. This month's rent, say, or money for Mother's iron lung. But oh well. You're born broke, you die broke. Everything else is just … fluctuation. I try to get into the inner game of super pan 9, and then realize that there is no inner game to super pan 9. 3. THE DICEMAN COMETH So I slide over to pai gow, a game more complex than super pan 9 in the exact sense that a chimpanzee is more articulate than a head of lettuce. In pai gow, you get seven cards, and make of them your best two-card hand and five-card hand, according to conventional poker values. The five-card hand, or "back" hand must outrank the two-card hand or "front" hand. So if you're dealt A-A-K-Q-7-4-3 of mixed suits, you'd put the king and queen in your front hand and the aces in back with the trash. This I learned when I tried to do it the other way around. Informed that I had fouled my hand (sounds like I lost bladder control), I forfeited my bet, and suffered the scathing ridicule of all the pai gow pros sitting around the table. To win in pai gow, both your front and back hand have to beat the bank's front and back hand. If you split it's a push, and you lose nothing (except your $1 collection per hand - you didn't think the house was spreading the game for charity, did you?) If the bank's hands beat both of yours, the bank wins, and you wonder what you did to offend the pai gow gods. The real trick to this game, though, is mastering… the dice cup. If you've ever set foot inside a California casino (or even ever been within about three zip codes of one) you've heard the rattle and clang of the dice cup, about the size of a grapefruit (well, maybe a large navel orange) and louder than the front row at a Def Leppard concert when they shake that hollow cup and slam it down on the felt. You may have wondered what the dice cup was for. (You may have simultaneously wondered if your health insurance covered ear drum damage.) At last the secret is revealed. In pai gow (or super pan 9) when it's your turn to bank, you decide how much you want to wager, anything from ten bucks up to roughly the size of the national debt. Since you might not risk enough to cover all bets at the table, the dice cup is used to determine where the action starts and who gets paid off first. As such, it's treated with the reverence of a Michael Jackson glove or a piece of the True Cross. So now it's my turn to bank. The dealer slides me the dice cup. I take it and cradle it, feeling the smooth, cool brass of it. I hold it unto my breast like an infant child and whisper ritual words of luck. I shake it 23 times, then slam it down on the table hard enough to shatter my wrist. I feel an inexplicable thrill as the numbers come up. The action starts at seat seven! Wow! Incredible! Seven! My head is throbbing with the excitement of this, and yet I realize in a moment of rare clarity that I have no idea what it means. Luck dominates this game, and don't let the wise guys tell you otherwise. Everything impacts outcome in pai gow: how you look at your cards; whether you have your hat on backward; signs and portents in the sky; oh, and did you remember to rub your lucky Year of the Rat laminated plastic key chain? These things matter. You think I'm making this stuff up, but I'm not. People will put up dollar collections on empty spots around the table - so-called "no action" plays - just to ensure that the cards fall in the order predestined by fate for a full table. Squeezing out cards is the most important skill of all. Squeeze your cards right and you can win with nothing. Squeeze wrong - rush the squeeze, or look at all the cards at once, you greedy thing - and of course you can expect disaster. When you're the bank you can't squeeze the cards; you can't even touch them. The dealer reveals your hand, according to your preference: one card at a time, two and five, three and four, all at once, slow, fast, whatever. Nuance is everything. I find myself convinced that good fortune lies in holding my water bottle in my right hand while I squeeze out the cards with my left, one leg carefully tucked under the other, my lucky laminated plastic Year of the Rat key chain at the ready, and my tongue pressed against my soft palate just so. And it works! My luck is unassailable! For two hands. Then I start losing again, just as if the squeezing and the key chain and the dice cup had nothing to do with it. Imagine! So the diceman cometh and the diceman goeth. It's time to try another game. 4. HOT COKES AND COOL SMOKES I wander into the Dragon Room. All these casinos have a Dragon Room or a Phoenix or a Gold or a Jasmine Room. This is where the high rollers hang out, which you can tell because they're placing bets the size of the price of a new car (okay, or a Hyundai.) This is a small room (though it may be called, among other things, The Big Room) and in these close quarters the sound of smashing dice cups is enough to trigger epileptic fits. I flee to the relative tranquility of the main gaming floor. Chinese poker is called Chinese poker everywhere except the Philippines where, for reasons unknown, it's known as Russian poker. This advanced madness pits four players against each other with 13 cards apiece, dealt from a standard deck. As in pai gow, you arrange your cards in separate hands of ascending value, only now it's three hands, of three, five and five cards each. You win when the majority of your hands beat the majority of your opponent's. Ah-ha, but it's not that simple. Chinese poker includes all sorts of bizarre bonus conditions, like a shot, where you sweep your opponent's hands, or a home run, where you sweep all hands of all players. Then there are other special hands with arcane names like Black Dragon and Red Dragon, Minor, Senior and Six Wheels. I wish I could explain all these hands, and the payouts that accompany them, but I'd need an advanced degree in calculus and a Cray supercomputer, and you'd need a good, stiff drink. I do know this about Chinese poker: There's not nothing to the game. Your decisions matter. It's easy to set your hand wrong and when you do, you go down in flames. If you're an inexperienced player, the veterans go through you like a cop through a stoplight. I'm an inexperienced player. I take a couple of brutal hits ("Let's see… you've got a Purple Dragon, a Sergeant-Major and a Ground Rule Double, so I guess I owe you… well, almost everything I've got! Isn't this fun?") I decide to get out with my dignity, if not my stack, intact. Thus I find myself playing Asian stud, the fourth and final stop on my Asian games itinerary. It's just like cowboy movie stud, except it's played with a stripped deck, no sixes, fives, fours, threes or twos. Oh, and it's played no limit, so if you haven't lost all your money yet, here's a darn good chance to try. An Oriental gentleman sits beside me. He's expansive, friendly, not at all inscrutable (shall we call him scrutable?) From a passing waitress he orders the oddest drink: hot Coca-cola with lemon. I'm elated! Such a bizarre drink! At last, my Authentic Ethnic Experience! Where did he discover this drink? Macao? Shanghai? Singapore? Nope. Encino. His mom used to give it to him for an upset tummy. Grr… frustration! I want to stand on the table like a stand-up comic and shout, "Is anyone here from out of town!?" For reasons of personal safety, I curb the urge. He orders me a hot coke and suggests I smoke a cigarette with it. "Without a cigarette is good," he explains. "With a cigarette is better." I decide to throw myself completely into the experience. When in Rome, I reason, roast your lungs. The waitress brings our hot cokes, and my new best friend lights me up a menthol Kool. Transfixed by nicotine, I immediately go all-in with a pair of sevens (the worst possible pair) and lose the last sad remnant of my once proud and powerful bankroll. Smoking they say, and it's true, can be hazardous to your health. 5. HERE BE DRAGON ROOMS We pro journalists have a rule: Get the story. (Actually, we have two rules, but "never say no to free food" doesn't really pertain here.) In the name of getting the story, I crossed the deceptively wide gulf between the American style poker games on this side of the casino floor and the exotic, quixotic Asian games all going on over there. I did it for you, gentle reader. I was your Vasco da Gama, your Ferdinand Magellan, explorer into uncharted waters. Of course never forget that Magellan was killed and eaten by cannibals. Exploring in uncharted waters is not without its price. The caffeine in the hot coke kept me up all night. The cigarette gave me heartburn that still hasn't gone away. My search for an Authentic Ethnic Encounter led to an incident in the parking lot that I'd rather not talk about now. I separated my shoulder slamming down the dice cup. And I lost… well pretty much every cent I had. But it was worth it. Truly it was. How else would I have gotten a lucky Year of the Rat laminated plastic key chain? They may have taken all my money, but they can't take that away. Author's note: I'd like to thank the Bicycle Club for their help in preparing this article, but given the slanders herein contained, perhaps it would be best if I don't.
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