Profiles

There’s rich, and then there’s filthy rich. Lori Steele has seen them both, as well as the passing stages in between.

“I personally handled Michael Jordan, Bruce Willis, Charles Barkley, Demi Moore, Wayne Gretzky, Ben Affleck, people like that,” said Steele, recounting her days at MGM Grand in Las Vegas — and just to clarify, “handled” is a gaming term for a personal dealer, not a masseuse. Steele, now Fortune Valley’s table games manager in Central City, also certainly remembers the time Barkley, or “Sir Charles” as she called him, flipped her a $25,000 chip as his thanks for dealing him back up from $750,000 down.

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I don’t know about you, but when my friends and I get together for poker, not a lot of ideas are generated.

Come to think of it, not a lot of multi-syllabic words are generated. The mood is more likely to foster an array of guttural sounds, interspersed with the occasional come-hither hand gesture toward a bag of Cheetos, or the raising of an empty can overhead, the universal symbol for, “Need Beer/Cannot Move.”

Fortunately for Todd Anderson, his poker outings with friend Greg Lang were more productive.

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Opinions differ about who was the scariest Dracula. You have to consider Bela Lugosi’s dark and mysterious presence; the icy glare of Christopher Lee; and, who can forget the terror-inducing tan lines of George Hamilton in “Love at First Bite”? But for Transylvania native Victoria Popa, none of those guys stack up to the real thing.

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Gamblers aren’t the only risk-takers in Central City. John Baril, music director and conductor at Central City Opera, takes chances every time he produces an opera. The wild cards involved in training an international cast of performers, seamlessly blending instrumentalists and singers, managing divas, jumbling schedules and even persevering through power surges can be taxing. We talked with Baril recently to get the details.

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Black Hawk Mayor David Spellman and Central City Mayor Ron Slinger recently took time from their busy schedules to talk about raised gaming limits, favorite hangouts, and tricks and treats. Here are the five questions we asked them, followed by their answers.

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