Despite his getting of to a shaky start with this city, when President Obama upset feisty former mayor Oscar Goodman and casino mogul Steve Wynn with his controversial but prophetic remarks criticising corporations for using federal bailout money to visit Las Vegas (remember the General Services Administration scandal, when $820,000 was spent on a 300-attendee conference at M Resort?), there's no indication that the Head of the Free World disapproves of the city's primary business per se; on the contrary, President Obama and his wife seem to be having a love affair with Las Vegas -- and its pizza. The President's current three-day sojourn in Henderson, during which he has helped put Settebello gourmet pizzeria on the map, just as he did for the westside's Dom DeMarco's on a previous visit, constitutes his ninth visit to Las Vegas this year alone.
Still, much as he'd probably love to escape from the political campaigning for a night to hit the Strip's gambling dens, Barack Obama has the good sense not to spend any time -- nor a dime -- at Sin City's gaming table and machines, especially while Las Vegas remains locked in a deeper economic malaise than much of the rest of the nation.
This is in marked contrast to his former rival Presidential candidate John McCain, who's a well-known face at Sin City's crap tables: Back in December, 2010, Randall Lane, reporting for the Daily Beast, described how he had "the odd experience of playing craps for several hours with John McCain, during the run-up to his 2008 presidential campaign. The qualities I saw—thousands of dollars in chips manically thrown onto the felt in hope that lady luck would bless them—did not portend presidential greatness."
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a predilection for the far more cerebral game of poker and describes his skills as "pretty good." His game of choice, admired for its strategic virtues, puts the poker-playing President in the same company as prior presidents Jackson, Truman, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson, Grant, Bush Jr., and Nixon, who according to respected British journalist and poker writer David Spanier excelled at poker, and "took the game very seriously." Spanier described Nixon's style as Tight/Aggressive by today's standards.
As far as the current President's style is concerned, Illinois state Senator Terry Link describes him as "a very cautious player." Between between 1997 and 2004, Link hosted a weekly game, at which Obama and other lawmakers were regulars, at his house on Seventh Street in Springfield. "Very cautious in the sense that he didn’t just throw his money away. He played the odds. He didn’t play for the inside straight," he recalls.
Fellow player and Illinois General Assemblyman Larry Walsh concurs. "Barack was a very good, very conservative poker player. He held his cards close to his vest. Very rarely did you find Barack Obama being caught by surprise."
In the same Daily Beast article, Walsh describes how their Wednesday game had a code name, "the committee meeting" ("people would come up and say, 'Is there a committee meeting tonight?' he remembers), and it became so popular among Democrats, Republicans, and lobbyists alike that sometimes two tables were required to accommodate everyone.
What developed into an institution, ending only when core-member Obama's election to the U.S. Senate removed him from Springfield, originally started at a local country club, then moved to Link’s living room, and from there, finally, to his basement, which he transformed into a full-blown poker den, complete with vents to accommodate all the cigarette and cigar smoking.
Whether the younger Obama partook of that vice or not, Walsh refused to disclose ("I know Michelle too well"), but apparently he generally put down a few beers and munched on pizza (evidently a lifelong favorite dish). The stakes weren't high, but significant enough to matter -- it was hard to win or lose more than $150 in a night, according to the participants.
Commenting further on the President's style, Walsh described how, "He wasn’t a bluffer. When Barack was betting, you could pretty much know that he had a hand." A right-leaning Democrat, Walsh recalls commenting to his fellow "commitee member" one day, "If you were more liberal in your poker-playing, and more conservative in your politics, we’d get along a lot better."
