This week is the anniversary of an unfortuante event from years ago - enjoy.
I'm hosting a three table small stakes tournament, borrowing two tables plus mine. The tables are spread in several rooms of the house. The nicest table (not mine) is going to be the final table and is in the poker room. It was a nice home built table, not quite so good as a professionally made table but far beter than the ones you could buy at the local sporting goods store.
I'm seated at table three in the dining room with the rebuy chips and cash. It is a really busy night for rebuys and it is taking all my concentration to play, cashier and deal with occational problems. On a better night I might have seen trouble coming, but somehow I just didn't understand what was about to happen.
One of the regulars dashes in and out all the time to get a smoke in while missing as few hands as possible. Let's say he isn't drunk but perhaps a tad impaired. On one trip he returns with a sawzall from his car - something I barely notice.
A few minutes later I hear a short, loud burst of noise from the poker room. I yell a question about "what's going on?" The final table folks shout back "nothing, just fixing a little problem." Still immersed in the game, I don't ask what the problem might be.
The second time the noise happens, my regular sticks his head in the room and says "the table wasn't level, I'm fixing the legs." Yet again, my brain doesn't wrap around just what was said. I keep playing.
Now that I know what the noise is, I stop paying attention. Then I have a player drop out and need to take a player from the poker room to my table and find that the table is now lop sided, wobbly and one end is resting on the players' legs. It seems that the guy with the sawzall has been trimming the metal legs of the table trying to get it level. He has cut 3 inches +/-off of each leg. I mention that the floor of the poker room is stone and isn't regular - the table in this room is always is a tad unlevel. "Oh
"
The guy who owns the table finally sticks his head in and just stares in stunned silence. A couple of inches might not sound like so much, but it makes a HUGE difference in how the table looks and plays - I wish I had taken a picture because words can't fully explain how bad things were.
Several of the other regular players sitting in the poker room promise the table's owner that we'll pay to get it fixed. I wouldn't call him happy, but what else could he hope for?
The guy with the sawzall was a general contractor and volunteers to fix the table in his shop. He would just let us know our share of the costs. Like the dumbasses we are, we agreed.
It takes about a month, but the "table" shows up at the game "as good as new". Thing is, it isn't the same table, not really. The only thing that came back from the old table was the playwood decking. We had new legs (as expected) a new custom made rail and high end speed cloth plus foam backing. Total bill for parts was $900. It seems that his first try at a fancy rail and the first batch of speed cloth got ruined, so he hired an upholstery shop to remake the rail and put on the second round speed cloth. It did turn out nice.
We end up paying the original owner $300 for his table, figuring that we might as well keep the table now that we have put $900 into it. $1,200 in total costs were a lot more than most of the regulars expected to pay so we agreed that the contractor and I would front the costs and we would hold a special raked game ($1 from any pot that hits $40) once a month to recoup costs. It took almost two years to pay off the debts.
That's how we ended up with our current table. It is nice enough but when I see pictures of custom tables, I figure we didn't get anything like the kind of table we could have for $1,200. I don't allow sawzalls in the house anymore. . . . .
Good times! -=- DrStrange
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