It was Vegas in ’98 or ’99, January time. I’d flown out from London just before New Year’s Day for a series of tournaments at the Rio, with buy-ins ranging from $300 to $1000. Everything was going according to plan until about the second or third evening when I busted just before the bubble, queens versus ace king. I decided to quit the poker room and have a little spin on Pai Gow.
The First Mistake
I drifted from casino to casino on the strip, losing a little here and a little there. After a couple of hours, I hooked up at a table with a girl who was an off-shift dealer. We chatted and played together for a few hours until she went bust and left for home. At this point I was about $500 down. My little recreational adventure had become too expensive to just write off. I needed to get the money back.
I went back to my room at the Mirage, grabbed some traveler’s checks, and exchanged them for cash at the cage. I wasn’t going to spend hours hoping to go on a run at Pai Gow. My plan was to win a few spins at roulette and recover my loss that way. I had a dreadful start and could hardly hit a number. Within an hour, my $1000 was gone.
The Spiral Begins
I went back to the room, cashed up some more checks, and wandered down the strip to the adjacent hotel in search of better luck. Needless to say, I lost again. Back to the room to reload. Tried another casino. Lost again. I repeated this routine several times over about 8 hours.
By now I had been gambling for about 14 hours straight, was 5 or 6 grand down, and only had about 4K left in cash, checks, and credit card space. I’d tried and failed to get on a run at any of the casinos in the neighborhood of the Mirage. I was getting fed up with traipsing back to my room every couple of hours for a reload. I decided to cash up the lot and go further afield in search of a wheel where I could get on a run and recover my losses.
I was pretty nervous by now about the prospect of going busto, but surely my luck would turn. I’d have a good half hour, hit a few of my primary numbers in a row, and get it all back.
Twenty-Five Hours of Hell
The next few hours were a nightmare as my remaining stack drifted steadily downwards. There were small occasional upward spikes where I had two or three winning spins in a row, but nothing to suggest I was going to threaten to surface from the deep hole I’d gotten myself into. I’d been gambling for nearly a whole day and had hardly eaten a thing. I was in a cold sweat from the anxiety and completely on tilt.
I’d stopped communicating with people hours ago. I was just walking into casino after casino, chucking a few bills wordlessly on the table, refusing to acknowledge any of the Vegas niceties like “Hi sir, how are you today?” The only utterances I could manage were vile profanities under my breath every time the wheel failed to deliver one of my numbers. I swore to myself a million times that if I could only just get even, I’d not wager a single dime more on this trip and just stick to poker.
The False Hope
I was down to about my last $1000 when I stumbled into the Gold Coast about 2am. And I went on a roll at last. I won about $3000 in less than an hour. The comeback trail had begun. I quit the Gold Coast as soon as I lost a couple of spins in a row and tried to continue my recovery somewhere else.
In those days, especially in January at 3am, Vegas casinos could be pretty deserted places. I was getting a lot of spins per hour under my belt, and the money started to come back reasonably quickly. I added a thousand at the Orleans and another 2k at some other toilet. Despite a few dips here and there, the overall trend was upwards, and I saw the roll start to threaten to recover to its original starting level of exactly $10,000.
The Cruelest Moment
Eventually, after 25 hours on this horrible bender, with about $8,500 in my pocket, in touching distance of getting it all back, I found myself back at the Mirage at 4am. I went straight to the nearest roulette table where nobody else was playing. I started off with a few blank spins, but then I hit some form. A repeat number for a nice score, then a miss, then 3 good numbers in a row. It was looking like I was actually going to get out of this.
Then I hit 28, followed by 29, my best number. That’s a $525 return to me. I might even be there now.
I told the dealer to hold off spinning the wheel while I did a quick count up, but the fat dealer just ignored me and spun the wheel. Panic. I didn’t want to quit in the middle of a winning sequence, but if I was over the 10k mark, then I didn’t want to have even one dollar more than my profit on the table. I was so angry with the croupier. Why couldn’t he have waited for me? I was the only player at the table, just about the only player in the whole damn roulette section of the casino.
Even now I can see his sweaty, fat, smirking face whenever I remember this vile episode in my life. It’s the one detail out of my hazy recollection that remains razor sharp.
He spun a blank number for me. I did a rapid count up, and damn it, I was $11 short. If the dealer had just given me a minute to do an audit before he spun the wheel, I’d have put a little less on that last spin, walked off with my 10k restored, and this whole nightmare would’ve been over and the holiday saved.
Any normal human being would of course have settled for the 11-buck loss, thanked his lucky stars that he’d escaped, and walked away ecstatic. But I knew that the $11 would’ve bugged me all week.
The End
You know the rest, of course. I started betting $3 a spin. After losing like 20 in a row, I upped it to $10. Couldn’t hit a single number. Within 3 hours I’d lost everything. I then sat in the lobby for 3 hours until my friend Joe Beevers arrived from London later that morning so I could borrow a few thousand from him to play poker for the next week.
I’ve done some bad things since in the degen department, but nothing to ever compare to that night of total abject sickness. These days I don’t gamble; I just stick to poker. But whenever this episode pops into my head, it’s always dominated by the image of that fat, ugly dealer at the Mirage who spun that wheel one time more.
