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It’s been an intolerable poker week for yours truly.

For some inexplicable reason, the ladies of the city have been making my life miserable.

A couple of days ago, the bane of my existence was “boob girl”, and today it was “spectator girl”.

Those of you who play poker in Vegas on a semi-regular basis have almost certainly encountered this creature.  This is the woman who  stands behind her boyfriend or husband, or pulls up a chair to sit and watch from behind.

The spectating girlfriend takes on many forms.  Sometimes she stands quietly behind her meal ticket and doesn’t say a word.  Sometimes she nags him that she’s hungry.  Sometimes she is friendly with the other players.  Sometimes she’s loud and obnoxious.

When a guy’s female companion walks up behind him and begins to camp out, you just never know what you are going to get.

Frankly, I’m not always a huge fan of spectator girl.

If her husband is sitting across from me, I don’t really care.  If he is sitting three seats to my left, I don’t really care.

If he is sitting beside me … I care.

I feel like my space is being violated.

It’s not so much that I think she’s going to peek at my cards, although that is a possibility.  It’s that I can’t really relax and focus when I am sitting down and someone is looking over my shoulder.  Since the presence of a female behind me when I am playing cards almost always indicates the presence of a cocktail waitress, I have a innate instinct to keep turning my head around and looking back.  I think most people have this instinct when someone is peering over their shoulder at a gaming table, and it’s distracting.

It’s also inexplicably tolerated.

I can honestly say that in the many years that I have been playing poker in this town, I have never brought someone along to watch me play.  I’m just not that good.  I am not proud of the way I play poker and I certainly wouldn’t want an audience.

Even if I was good, however, I still wouldn’t have a girl stand behind me in front of the other players.  It looks so cliche’ and silly.  It’s the gambling equivalent of dropping to the ground and doing one-armed pushups to impress your woman.  Sometimes, it’s almost like you are showing your bitch off to the rest of the table.  Almost as if we wouldn’t believe that you got attention from the opposite sex unless we saw it with our own eyes.

Of course, with the bad, sometimes comes the good.

When the spectator girl doesn’t stand over my shoulder and annoy me, I have sometimes used her to my own advantage.  Dudes play far more loose when their women are observing them, and I’ve won a sizable number of pots because Melvin Monsterdick didn’t want to strike out looking.  He shoved all in, because win or lose, it’s just a braver, riskier, more ballsy thing to do.

Let’s face it, you’re never going to make a girl’s panties wet by properly calculating pot odds and mucking your cards because your opponent has too many outs.  Shoving a stack of chips in the middle like you know what you’re doing, however, is the unathletic way of launching a 3 pointer at the buzzer.  Sometimes Kobe makes it, sometimes not, but he always gets his wiener polished after the game.  Especially in Colorado.  Let’s face it, there is not a suburban white guy on the planet who doesn’t want to be Kobe.

If you truly have a big hand, it’s sometimes easy to coax Melvin into calling by saying things like “why don’t you just fold and use the money you save to buy the lady a nice dinner”.  I once used this line myself.  It does two important things:

1. It implies that you care more about his woman’s welfare than he does
2. It implies that he is so poor that he cannot afford to call the bet

These two things are great insults to the male ego, and you up your chances of being called even if Melvin has Jack high.  If you know how to work the psychological angle of the game, sometimes it tilts the odds in your favor ever so slightly.

Today, however, I was not able to employ this method.

I took a seat at a table late this afternoon, and it was just my luck that I was seated immediately between not one, but count’em two dudes with spectator girls.  I was literally the meat in a douchebag sandwich.

Have you ever tried to read with another person reading over your shoulder?  Well, try two people.  It was just freaking unpleasant.  Every time I heard someone speak behind me, I turned, and when both women started yapping to each other, it was just unbearable.

Also, I like to think that I protect my cards well, but shorter (read: feminine) people sitting/standing behind you have a much better chance of catching a peek at your cards than do players seated immediately to your left or right.  There’s no privacy, and without sounding paranoid, it wouldn’t surprise me if these husband/wife combos didn’t have some signal should I get embroiled in a big pot with my neighbor.  It’s just human nature to try to help, and that is why in poker, there is one freaking player to a hand.

Alas, once again, this cardroom rule exists for men, and men only.  You don’t usually see dudes sitting directly behind other dudes for an hour.

I was so uncomfortable in this situation, that I packed it in after only about ten minutes without getting involved in any hands.  Since this spectating is generally accepted, I didn’t say anything or complain … I just picked up and headed off.

I do wish some kind of consistent rule would be established.  Maybe I am just getting more cranky and intolerant, but at this point, the distraction of having someone sitting/standing behind me for half an hour outweighs the statistical probability that I will be able to shame some guy into giving up his stack.

Until such a rule is established and actually consistently enforced, allow me to take this moment to appeal to the sensibilities of all douchemonkeys out there:

Please, don’t bring your woman to the poker room.  Instead of having her stand behind you, give her a few bucks to play the slots, or give her the Gold Card and turn her loose in the Forum Shops.

You don’t have to prove to the rest of us that you get laid.  We believe you.  Rather, we really don’t care, we just want your money.

I swear to God, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to find a poker table this weekend that I can actually tolerate for more than five minutes.  I’m not trying to be mean, but the ladies have been outright ruining the game for me lately.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m off to find the gayest, most flaming poker room I can possibly find.

Not only will I finally have a chance to win some money without being distracted by females, but I’ll also get to play at the same table with Steve Wynn.

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