Canada, Poker, and the Drug Smugglers

Recently my sweetie and I were invited to be guests of the River Rock Hotel and Casino in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the launching of the first major poker tournament in Canada. She would be doing one radio and two television interviews, and I would carry the luggage. I then phoned Big Denny to ask if he would like to accompany us, because I knew that his antics would provide plenty of material for a column.



"Canada?" he said doubtfully. "Ain't dat in da Nort' Pole? How ya gonna get dere, by dogsled?"



I explained patiently that Vancouver was a lovely city only a couple of hundred miles north of Seattle, and that the weather was relatively mild there. "There aren't any polar bears, and you won't need a fur coat."



"Don't matter none 'cause I can't go even if I wanted," the big guy said. "Some bum who cleaned out our backroom craps game is missin' now, an' da cops told me I hadda stick around town, on account of I was 'a person of interest.' It's da first time anyone ever told me I was interestin'."



I explained that "a person of interest" was a police term for a suspect.



"Suspect?" Big Denny cried out indignantly. "I swears ta ya, Maxey, I don't know nuttin' about what happened. Anyways, da cops won't never pin anyt'in' on me, because da bum's body was hid so good dey'll never find it."



"Too bad, Denny," I said with a shudder as I hung up the phone. Just what I needed – to try to cross the border with Big Denny and then have Barbara and me arrested and charged as accomplices in a homicide. I could just see the headlines:



Acclaimed Poker Humorist and Friend Detained as Suspects at Canadian Border

Little did I know that something similar would happen to us at the border.



Anyway, off we went, flying to Seattle and then driving a rental car to Vancouver for the tournament. Until recently, I was almost completely ignorant about poker in Canada. In fact, if it weren't for Daniel Negreanu and his Canadian hockey jersey, I wouldn't have even known that anybody played the game there.



In fact, until fairly recently, poker never had been that big at our northern neighbor. There were only a handful of casinos spreading the game, and just a few tournaments, along with some small daily and weekly events. This all changed when Canadian poker history was made with the launching of the biggest tournament to date in that country. The BC Poker Championships, staged by the British Columbian Lottery Corporation, consisted of only three hold'em events (limit, pot-limit, and no-limit), with buy-ins ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 (Canadian), but the final event drew more than 500 players.



Sure enough, the weather, while expectedly chilly, was quite tolerable. The River Rock Casino, it turned out, is a first-class resort with a spacious 25-table poker room, by far the largest in Canada. And it was a breath of fresh air to discover that not only the poker room but the entire casino was smoke-free. Judging from the number of patrons, the lack of carcinogens didn't seem to be affecting business, either. I wish Vegas casinos would get the word, but I won't hold my breath. (On second thought, I do hold my breath when I walk through them.)



Poker in Canada, we discovered, is pretty much the same as in the States. The tournaments were well-run, with gradually increasing blinds, giving participants lots of play. Tournament and satellite sign-ups, however, were rather detailed and time-consuming, with ID, for some reason or other, required at the table. Also, the chip racks had a quaint moniker: "toboggans." Interestingly, the prize payouts increased at each step, rather than in groups (ninth-12th, 13th-15th, and so on), as in American tournaments. And there were lots of young faces, because 19 is the legal age for playing poker in that country.



Dave Scharf, a major figure in Canadian poker who acted as master of ceremonies at a kickoff reception, told me that things are a little different at casinos farther north in the wintertime. Players, clocking the time by movement of the button, will regularly get up, walk to a window facing the parking lot, and use a remote device to start their car engines to prevent them from freezing up.



(And, no, I'm not going to make any stupid jokes about the favorite game in Canada being freezeout.)



We got to do some sightseeing, of course. Friends took us on a ferryboat ride to Vancouver Island and its magnificent Stanley Park, where the highlight was watching a fat little raccoon waddling around, happily accepting handouts from a mob of Japanese tourists who, fortunately for him, apparently couldn't read the signs forbidding the feeding of wild animals. Wild? That little 'coon was tamer than any lap dog.



I was struck by the friendliness of Canadians, both away from and at the table. No anger, no throwing cards. American players could learn a lesson from them. On the other hand, maybe Canadians will get more into that mode once they get more used to the game and have absorbed enough bad beats.



The border incident came on the way home. A friend of my sweetie had asked her to pick up a couple of bottles of a pain pill called "2 2 2," which is sold over the counter in Canada but by prescription only in the States. No problem, her friend assured her, because other people had brought many bottles in before with no problem.



Yeah, right. At the U.S. border, when asked if she had any drugs, my sweetie innocently reported the two bottles of 100 pills each. Immediately, a sticker was slapped on the car's windshield, and we were told to pull over and step inside the customs office. The officer there informed us that only 50 pills per passenger were allowed into the United States. OK, we said, couldn't we just dump the other bottle? No, we were sternly told. We would have to go back over the border to Canada, discard the excess there, then get back in the long line of cars coming over the border to the United States, thus making it quite possible that we would miss our flight from Seattle. If we dumped the extra bottle in the States, we would be charged with drug trafficking!



Oh, well, we didn't get fingerprinted and we just managed to make the plane, and while the incident was upsetting, to say the least, at least it gave me enough material for this column … even without Big Denny. The funny part came when I told the customs officer we were in Canada for a poker tournament, and he began talking about hold'em. Then, when he searched our luggage, he came across a Card Player magazine with Cyndy Violette on the cover, and began asking questions about her. (No, we explained, she didn't make the final table at the World Series championship event. Barbara remains the only woman ever to do so.)



That shows how poker has spread everywhere. You can't even get arrested now without someone talking about the game!