Poker Room Hires Full-Time Listener For Bad Beat Stories
The casino says disputes at the tables have halved. The listener, who spent twenty years handling airline complaints, says this is harder.
RENO. The poker room at the Marigold Resort and Casino has hired a full-time employee whose only job is to listen to players describe hands they lost, the casino said on Thursday, after dealers complained that they were spending more time hearing about the river than dealing it.
Leonard Ashby, 58, who handled complaints for a regional airline for twenty years, started this month at a small desk beside the cashier’s cage, under a sign that reads BAD BEATS. He is paid $41 an hour and takes notes on a yellow legal pad.
Every one of them was a 91 percent favourite. I have now heard about more 91 percent favourites than there have been hands of poker.
Ashby said the average story lasts six minutes and forty seconds. Management has given him a short list of approved responses, including “wow” and “he had no business being in that hand,” and has told him never to ask what the other player had, because players will tell him.
Players have welcomed the service. “Finally, someone who gets it,” said Teresa Vang, 49, who has visited the desk twice a day since it opened, each time about the same flush.
The poker room says disputes at the tables have fallen by half since Ashby started. On Wednesday it received its first formal complaint about him, from a player who said that halfway through his account of the turn card, Ashby had glanced at the clock. The player has asked to speak to someone about it.
