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It is 2:30 on a postcard-perfect Northwest afternoon in June. The sun grins overhead, drifting behind the evergreens, and a slight breeze scatters the clouds. But down in the basement of the Drift On Inn casino in Shoreline it’s as dark and enclosed as a cave.
“If you play too tight,” an Asian man is saying, admonishing the table as he takes its only vacant seat, “you can’t win any money.” From his pocket he removes a medium-sized wad of bills, unfurls two $100’s and tosses them onto the felt. The poker boss appears beside him and hefts him a rack of orange $2 dollar chips.
“You’re not giving lessons now, are you, Tim?” someone says.
The rest of the table—all men, nearly half of them bald, not one under the age of forty—hoots loudly before settling in for the next hand.
The Drift, as its regulars call it, has been located since 1930 on the same piece of real estate, just off 167th and Aurora Avenue North. Before re-opening as a casino in 1998, it was an old-school roadhouse café and entertainment venue that, according to legend, played host to high-caliber acts like Bob Hope and high-profile visitors like Harry Truman.
Those days are long gone. The Drift now hosts karaoke on Monday nights and wet t-shirt contests on Thursdays. But the ghosts of Aurora past haven’t been entirely exorcised.
Dave Benson, a sunken faced man in a black suit who works as one of The Drift’s poker bosses, has played poker here for more than 35 years. His tenure dates back to a time before the invention of the “hole cam,” which made poker accessible to the television viewer; before Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu became household names; before the Poker Boom.
“It used to be a different game,” he says. His meaning is literal in one sense-he cut teeth on Hi-Lo split and 7-card Stud; now the only game you can find is Hold ‘Em. But he also means that the players have changed. “You see more women now, more kids,” he says. “You’ve also got what I like to call ‘tournament chasers’,” he says with a scowl, “people who only play the tournaments.”
The Drift On Inn is one of six mini-casinos in the area that offers a daily poker tournament. The buy-ins range from $20 to $35 and the winner generally walks away with somewhere between $400 and $700. Because of their fast pace, low risk, and high potential gain, the tournaments attract amateur poker players by the dozens. While these newcomers bring with them the hopeful enthusiasm inherited from watching televised poker, they tend to be light on skill and heavy on luck.
“You see guys getting low on chips, they start looking at their watch to see if they can make the next tournament,” Benson says contemptuously. He gestures to the Drift’s poker table, where the men are engaged in a game of $1, $2, $40 spread-limit Hold ‘Em. Though different in structure and smaller in ante than the no-limit version featured so prominently on television, the game can escalate in a hurry. “That there’s what I like to call real poker,” says Benson.
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