Perspective at a charity game

[juanez]

I volunteered to deal at a charity poker event while traveling and visiting some folks. In general it was pretty fun, with few exceptions. This one little story was just an interesting insight into the perspective of SOME players (no, not all players. Gentlemen, relax your sphincters).

The game was 10/20 full kill. There is a $15/hour time charge. Excessive, yeah. But it's for charity, there are no legal card rooms around and there are plenty of underground card rooms around, so go there if you don't like the time charge.

When the lady comes around to collect the time charge, the players inevitably biitch. "You're 5 minutes early", "This is ridiculous", "I'm running bad - how about $10?" etc., etc. Some even try to scam, claiming that they just arrived at the table when they’ve been there for hours...I shut that crap down immediately.

So, a few hands after the time charge is collected and the biitch session ended, we have a $400 or so split pot. Since we were playing with cash (no chips) it's sort of a pain in the butt to chop and it takes longer than cutting chips, so one of the winning players says, "Let [that guy] split it and keep the game moving." Cool with me. They are paying by the hour after all.

So I'm pitching cards for the next hand and [that guy] pushes the winners their share of the pot. One of the players then tosses a $20 bill to the guy who just chopped it and says "Thanks for chopping it for us." The other player then does the same.

Amazed, I thought "WTF did I just see?" $40 for 30 seconds of "work"? But they wail and moan about a $15 per hour time charge for the CHARITY who set up the whole event in a HUGE tent with air conditioning (quite comfortable I should add), provided tables, chairs, cards, concessions, dealers, an ATM, a cash changing "cage", etc. Everyone working there was a volunteer, including the dealers.

For some reason I was a little annoyed after the chopping deal....like the charity was getting screwed or something. Of course they weren't - folks can piss their cash away to whoever the hell they want. Then I realized that, even thought they weren't forced to play there, these people were involuntarily donating $15 per hour to charity and I bet most of them would NEVER willingly donate one dollar to that charity. The charity ended up making about $35K that weekend. Time well spent. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[smoore]

haha, dicks.