MORALITY LESSON

    The other evening at The Mirage a lady of considerable heft was talking to a  bald-headed gentleman about proper manners at a poker table.  A self-appointed expert on etiquette, Madame Gros (that's French for fat) felt no constraint over expressing her disdain for anyone (me) who happened to disagree with her.  Chopping and tipping were issues on which she held a particularly strong point of view.  On both subjects Baldy was in full accord.

 

 Chopping occurs when as a result of no other player following the action the small  and big blinds agree to avoid a face-to-face confrontation by taking back their money.  Seated immediately at Baldy’s right, he was not content when, dealt a pair of queens, I raised his big blind after every other player had folded.

 

 “Don’t you chop?” he asked in a disagreeable tone, tossing his cards on the table.

 

 “Sometimes,” I said.  “In this case I think I should respect the cards.”

 

 “Nothing doing,” said the overweight lady.  “Either you chop or you don’t.”

 

 “That’s right,” said the dealer.

 

 “Really?” I said.  “Is that a rule carved in stone?”

 

 “No, it's just good manners,” said the lady.

 

 “Something not everyone has,” said Baldy. 

 

 “Well, you know what that old philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said,” I rebutted, thinking back on the many times I had come across the great man dining at The Montparnasse Coupole with his companion, Simone de Beauvoir.   “A man must create his own system of thought so as not to be enslaved by that of others.”

 

 “Wonderful,” said Madame Manners dryly.  “As if anyone has the slightest idea who you are talking about.”

 

 I let it go.  Not because I was adverse to a verbal confrontation but because the hand in progress had captured my attention.  A player’s fifty-dollar raise was followed twice before the bet came to me.  I dropped out holding a suited king-queen.  Surprisingly, my hairless neighbor followed.  Well, to make a long story short, a player holding two sevens flopped a set and wiped out his opponents, two who were dealt a higher pair, and Baldy who held Big Slick.  After raking in five or six hundred dollars, the gentleman tipped the dealer five bucks and quit the table.

 

 “That’s about the most disgraceful a tip I have ever seen,” said the fat lady.

 

 “I’ll say it is,” said Baldy.  “A person who wins a hand like that should tip at least five percent.”

 

 “Absolutely!”  Madame nodded vigorously.

 

 “I agree,” said the dealer. “A few dollars more would have been nice.”

 

 Pretty much aware of what I was getting into, I said maybe if the casinos augmented their employee’s salaries we could do away with tipping altogether. 

 

        “After all,” I concluded, “has anyone ever seen a dealer return a dime to a player who has dropped a bundle on a losing hand, even a person who has been tipping generously all evening?”

 

         Nobody gave me the finger or booed out loud, but the dagger-throwing glances cast my way by Fatty, Baldy and the dealer let me know that my idea did not concur to their way of thinking.  Since it was late in the evening and I was about even, I stood up and said goodbye to a perfectly silent table.  Other than a bad beat, I can think of little I appreciate less than a morality lesson from poker opponents.

 

         The following morning I drove my Honda to a garage I had picked out of the yellow pages.  A computer-generated light on the dashboard continued to indicate something was wrong.  Damn, why had I spent $170 at another garage less than a month previously just to discover the problem still existed?  Tom, the owner of the appropriately named High Road Automotive told me that this particular light received information from 32 different sensors.  After hooking the car up to a fancy machine, he informed me that the problem was with something he called a catalytic converter.  That, he said, was a job that would probably cost in the neighborhood of $500. 

 

         “That’s pretty steep,” I said.  “Can’t you do it for less?”

 

         “I can’t, but Honda can and will.  You’ve only gone 61,000 miles.  For this kind of problem your warranty is good up to 80,000 miles.”

 

         Tom directed me to a nearby Honda agency.  Sure enough, even with a seven-year old car, I was 100% covered for the job at hand.  Instead of raking me over the coals, a perfect stranger had saved me five hundred dollars while earning nothing for himself.  Returning to his garage, I let Tom know how much I appreciated what he had done.  

 

        “I only did what is right," he said.  "How can I charge you when I know you can get the job done for nothing?”

 

        “Most people don’t think that way,” I said.

 

        Tom shrugged.  “That’s their problem.”

 

        After discovering that Tom and his wife were into organic food, I went to a special market where I bought a mixture of fruit and vegetables for $25.  If proper poker etiquette says one should tip a dealer 5% for randomly distributing cards, I guess the same percentage would be correct when a garage mechanic saves you five bills.  I'm really not sure, but I hope to find out from Madame Fatty or the Bald Eagle when I return to play Texas Hold 'Em on The Strip tonight.