Visiting LA

A Visitor’s Guide to the Staying Out of the Smog the Next Time You Find Yourself in LA

If you think Los Angles is just a place to come out of the closet or develop a smack habit, then your missing a whole vice that’s even better. LA is poker paradise, and if your girlfriend/ wife/kids are bugging you to go on vacation somewhere besides Las Vegas or Atlantic City, LA can save your relationship.

Out of principle, I don’t like LA. I’m a New Yorker, which means I hate LA naturally. So I realize I may not be an impartial judge, but this is LA how I see it. I didn’t go to LA to see Mickey Mouse, I don’t want to shop on Rodeo Drive, and I’m not here for the beach blondes — I probably couldn’t even pick up a girl in a Thai massage parlor – I went to LA to play poker and have fun.

Here’s how I spent my five days in LA…

DAY 1
The first thing to know about LA is that the poker is awesome. Everybody plays, whether they play the largest card room in the world or at one of the high-stakes home games; their play is solid and generally better than you get at a home game on Long Island.

The Commerce Casino is the daddy in LA. It’s the biggest card room in the world and it looks like a half-sized Las Vegas resort. It’s got a hotel, restaurants, bars, a spa, entertainment, etc. Think of Vegas before Steve Wynn and that’s the Commerce.

Now forget about all that; the poker is why you’re here. There are tournaments every
day of the year. If you’ve got the balls, they run a couple televised million dollar events you can
buy into, but for the average player, a $600 bankroll should cover the buy ins and rebuys for the daily tournaments. If you want cash games, there are 20 different types of poker games going on at any moment on the 200 plus poker tables. You can get No Limit action for bankrolls as puny as $100 on the $2/$3 games. If you want to play high stakes, don’t look at me, because the stakes go way higher than I am willing to play – the sky’s the limit. Limit Hold’em starts at $1/$2 and goes up to $500/$1,000.

After leaving the Commerce $40 in the red, thanks mostly to my fish hooks getting cracked by a set a fours, I went to Sunset Boulevard to see LA’s famous Viper Room. I had expectations. I expected a New York-style club with pain-in-the-ass bouncers and a hottie with a clipboard whose job is to not let me in.

Bam! When I got there, I told the guy at the door that I was doing a guide to LA for Bluff Magazine and, me more surprised than anybody, was inside in 11 seconds flat. Then the chick with the clipboard took me straight to a VIP table.

There was a live band in the far corner of the club – that’s something you don’t get in New York clubs – and hot girls at every table but mine – something I always get in New York. Every kind of trendy asshole was in this club, from guys who looked like they should be collecting quarters outside 7-11 to guys in designer suits who wore sunglasses in the dark – assholes. I was somewhere in the middle. I liked the club enough to stay for exactly two hours.

DAY 2
The next day I went down to the Bicycle Casino (the locals call it the Bike). The Bike is Yale if the Commerce is Harvard. Which one is better? Who cares? The only thing you need to know is that the Bike is more card room, less resort. The Bike has daily tournaments Monday through Friday and nightly tournaments each day of the week, except Saturday. The tournament that the Bike is most famous for is the Legends of Poker, where there are four events with a guaranteed prize pool of over $100,000.

After playing for about eight hours and earning over $600 at the Bike, I went down to the Whisky a Go Go. If you ever owned an electric guitar, you can’t go to LA without going into the Whisky. The Whisky is a dive bar. I like that about it. The band this night was heavy duty rock and roll and they gave it Hollywood like they were on an MTV video. I walked right in to the Whisky without having to use the “I’m doing a review for Bluff” trick because there wasn’t any lineup outside and it was still pretty early. You have to pay a ticket charge for the music, but it was only, like, $15. My only complaint about the Whisky is that everybody is really friendly – I hate that about LA.

DAY 3
There are some places that you feel like you should visit before you die. Most people will tell you they want to see the Pyramids, The Great Wall, Alaska – crap like that. The Hustler Casino was one of those places for me: beautiful centerfolds, the grotto, playing poker in silk pajamas – paradise. Let me first say how disappointed I was that there are no centerfolds anywhere in this place. The waitresses aren’t even extra hot. Guess what? No grotto neither. I’m not really that upset that people weren’t playing poker in their pajamas, but… strike three.

Other than that, the place is cool, really cool. Atmosphere = Cozy, (only about 90 tables) and they have a sports bar. I know that, because I had to wait 30 minutes in the sports bar for a seat at a table.

When I finally got a seat, it was for the $2/$5 No Limit game. I bought in for $300, and it was give and take for the first few hours. After that, things got California (that means they got weird). I wound up losing about half my stack to some ginger douche-bag, and as soon as I made the cowboy douche-bag to my right my mark, the cards started running cold. I must have been dealt 2-7 offsuit at least four times. I called it quits before I lost the rest of my stack to the blinds. My play was like…fold, fold, fold, fold, bluff called and lost, fold, fold, fold, fold, etc. It was ridiculous. Don’t get the wrong idea, I recommend this place highly, and I wish I didn’t get a run of cold cards, because I would have screwed my ass into the seat for the whole night. I’ll be back Larry Flint – oh yeah baby, with both guns blazin’.

After I left the Hustler, I met up with a few of my boys from back East. Since I was still up $500 from the night before, I asked the concierge at my hotel what the best club in town was. He said the White Lotus.

Unbelievably, my “I’m reviewing for Bluff” line didn’t help us get into White Lotus; so we stood around outside for a while, watching girls and cooler people walk in ahead of us. No problem, I know the score. Once we got inside, I decided I liked that people in LA were friendly. I decided that when some friendly girls started talking to us.

The $500 I was up from poker didn’t last long. Besides buying my cheap-ass friends drinks, I was buying drinks for the girls. It was like, $70 a round. I had to get away from the bar, so I grabbed my drink and my boys and we headed for the patio. As usual, after we cut bait with those first girls, we couldn’t talk to another girl for the rest of the night – so we kept drinking.

The next morning, I was surprised that I was in my own bed. Can’t really remember how I got there. I checked my wallet and, as usual, it had nothing in it. I’m always amazed that, when I’m drunk, I can perfectly budget the exact amount I to need drink as much as possible and still have enough cash to get back home; when I’m sober I cant even budget a quarter for a parking meter.

DAY 4
Out of all the card rooms in LA, Hollywood Park Casino is my favorite. I haven’t been there for a few years, but it was renovated last year and now it’s just as nice as the Commerce inside. They have a $1/$2 No Limit game, which I sat at until my hangover went away (usually 4pm, after two beers). I stayed out of the daily tournaments this trip because I was still a little hungover, but there is action all over this place, even though its only got about 70 tables.

My cold streak was over and I was getting pretty average cards that produced big for me. I was getting everybody to lay their cards down with my $10 bluffs and getting everyone to call with my $4 raises. I can’t call it a run because I wasn’t getting cards; I call it fishing. After an hour and a half of fishing, I’d picked up 50% more chips, and it was time to go fishing at the $5/$10 game. Apparently my fishing permit wasn’t any good there, and I wound up almost even for the most of the night and only got involved in one big pot, which we split. When I finished I was only up $30.

I went over to the sports bar for dinner, I couldn’t believe how much Hollywood Park had changed in the last three years: they made it really comfortable – you know what I mean? It feels good to be there, and not many places feel good when you’re nursing a hangover. Another thing I like about Hollywood Park Casino is that it’s part of Hollywood Park Racetrack. You can bet on horses while you play poker; awesome! They also have the best nightlife of any card room. You don’t want to go there for a night out if you’re not already in the casino, but if you’re there already…

So that’s what I did; I went to Hollywood Park’s Club Kamaleon for one las drink before I left LA.

DAY 5
The alarm was set to ring at 9:00 so I could catch my flight. That means I woke up at 7:30 worrying that the alarm wouldn’t go off. Off to LAX and onto the plane. I’m in my coach-class seat writing this review, and I’m thinking about my trip. Okay, so I didn’t see Venice beach, I missed Disney Land, the Universal Studio tour and I only saw the Hollywood sign from my taxi window. You know what? I don’t care. I didn’t come to LA for all that crap; I came to play, and in five days I played at four of the best card rooms in California and won a wad of cash. If you think that going and eating hotdogs on Venice beach is better than that you should get your head examined.

Los Angeles teaches you the nature of tradeoffs. Yes, you can roll down the Imperial Highway with, as Randy Newman so poetically put it, “a big nasty redhead by your side.” But this assumes that cars are moving on Imperial Highway and not stopped dead by the trademark “LA Traffic Jam for No Apparent Reason.” True, you can be grabbing a tan by a swimming pool on Christmas Day while the rest of the northern hemisphere hunkers down in a deep freeze. Then again, you can be bounced into said pool without a moment’s warning any time Ma Nature decides to get frisky with the San Andreas Fault. And granted, Los Angeles features some of the swankiest hillside neighborhoods known to man. Of course, no one but the obscenely rich can afford to live there, and those who do find their dwellings at risk through all four of LA’s so-called “seasons,” fire, flood, mudslide, and drought.

Still, it’s a pretty enough place, and having lived here for 20 years, I have achieved a rough accommodation with the city, largely through discovering its many hidden treasures. It's these treasures that I'd like to share with you now, for I'm assuming you're savvy enough to find your own way to Disneyland, Venice Beach, Hollywood Boulevard, Universal Studios, and other known destinations favored by the Wichita and Wabash crowd. If your taste runs to tourist traps, star maps and endless iterations of the Gap, I can’t help you out. But if you’d like to pick up the rock that is LA and poke at crawling around underneath, then grab a stick, ‘cause here come some of LA’s best kept secrets. LA Confidential, if you will, confidential no more...

TRAGICAL HISTORY TOUR: For a truly macabre look at “Hell A,” roll with Dearly Departed, a guided tour of all things dead and depraved. Hop aboard the (air conditioned, natch) Dearly Departed Tomb Buggy for a three hour dive deep into LA’s entrails: the site of the Manson murders; the place where River Phoenix cacked; and a certain street corner where Hugh Grant learned that what you see is not always exactly what you get. Plus much more that is lurid, lewd or otherwise totally LA. According to the website, “Not recommended for children who haven’t learned of outdoor sex.”

SMELLS LIKE GARDENA SPIRIT: If you come to LA to play poker, you’ll naturally find your way to the Bicycle Club or the Commerce Casino, but for a taste of old growth California cardroom poker, head on down the highway to the Normandie Casino in Gardena, California. Once upon a time, Gardena was the place for poker in the southland, with card clubs like the Horseshoe, Rainbow and Monterey all littering the cityscape. They’re all gone now except the Normandie, and who knows how much longer it’ll last (because, frankly, it’s kind of a hole). So for a bit of living poker history — including some players who seem not to have left their chairs since the Kennedy administration — check it out while you still can.

CUBA LIBRE: You’ll want to eat while you’re here of course, and though your guidebook or cab driver might point you to the likes of Kate Mantilini or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous Schatzi on Main, do yourself a favor and take a drive to a dive, Versailles Restaurant in beautiful and scenic Culver City. Taking the best of Cuban cooking and plunking it down in the heart of LA, Versailles features such Cuban specialties as oxtails, fried plantains, and a roasted garlic chicken in lemon marinade that will make you think you’ve died and gone to Havana. Plus it’s cheap: You’ll pay less for a full meal here than you’ll pay for valet parking at Spago. Come early, though, for the locals all know about Versailles, and the line can get insane during peak dining hours.

SHOUTIN’ THE BLUES: If you want real blues music, not the prefab version they serve up in such overpriced artificialities as the House of Blues, point your wagon west, all the way to Santa Monica, and plant your ass for the evening at Harvelle’s Blues Club. A west side institution since 1931, Harvelle’s features the best in name and no-name blues bands, plus an eclectic crowd of blues freaks, college kids and retro swingers. It’s a dark, sexy, smoky (okay not smoky — no place in California is smoky) terrific place to lose all sense of time.

CINEMA RETROVISO: If you want a multiplex showing the latest Hollywood blockbusters on twenty screens at once, sadly, you won’t have any trouble finding such monstrosities around here. But if you’re interested in old school cinema, there’s only one revival house for you: The New Beverly Cinema on Beverly Boulevard in LA. Screening such classic double features as Dr. Strangelove and Lolita (the original; the good one), the New Beverly also serves up generous helpings of the Marx Brothers, James Dean, and Humphrey Bogart. Trust me, you may own Casablanca on DVD, but you haven’t really seen the picture till you’ve gawked up in the dark with your shoes sticky from jujubes and your nostrils filled with the redolence of real buttered popcorn. When you’ve had all the California sunshine you can stand, go beat the heat for an hour or six at the New Beverly Cinema.