THACKERVILLE, Okla.–Made my first journey to the much ballyhooed WinStar poker room yesterday. Some of you may or may not know this (Great Uncle Frank’s long-kept family secret) but I am pretty sure I have some WinStar blood in me. It’s time for us to be proud of our Native American roots! The WinStar tribe gave so much to this country before they had their land commandeered by Christopher Columbus and Microtel.

Anyhow, so WinStar Casino … Dallas’ nearest legal poker room, some 80 miles from downtown up a presumably booming corridor of Far North I-35 … in a monstrous industrial-strength circus fort with 15 tables set amid faux Roman architectural elements. Sat down for some 11 a.m. $1/$2 NL hold’em at a fresh table that I found very playable for about three hours.

Buy-in: $100
Cash out: $1,083
Net: +$983

Good cards, good flops, easy folds … Decent coffee and $2 Red Bulls.

Only two unusual things … one was how the dealer pulls in the small blind before the pre-flop action is complete (an extra rake for Oklahoma schoolchildren?) — a guaranteed certainty every hand, so no chopping … the other might have been just a statistical anomaly: so many high hands for a single room. The WinStar gives away a $100 high-hand bonus every hour. As they were calling out the first winner (a full house), I hit quad 5s. Woo-hoo, that should hold up! But nope, 15 seconds later someone else gets quad aces (king kicker). During the next hour, I play smart/dodge a bullet by not doubling up a guy with quad 10s … and 10 minutes later someone on another table hits a royal flush. Holy big cards. Maybe because bonus-eligible high hands in the Chickisaw Nation don’t have to show down or even see a turn?

Also, props to a high-quality (trained, licensed) dealer who politely insisted I bet $80 when I crossed the line with a stack of chips that I meant to bet $75 with. He wouldn’t explain why … “after the hand. Just put in five more dollars, please … ” OK, whatever. I had AK and the flop had come K-K-A … “If you had aces and he had kings, we’d have a bad beat,” he later explained. “Pulling back that extra $5 would’ve been enough for them [nods at security camera] to negate the jackpot, and I wouldn’t want to see that happen.” Indeed. Thank you, sir. The next dealer couldn’t land two cards on top of each other to save his life.

Oh well.