Remember at the end of my last blog when I said something along the lines of “tomorrow’s another day” or some such nonsense, implying the possibility of good fortune on the horizon. Well, sometimes tomorrow is not really so much another day. Sometimes the next day is the same as the day before… but worse!

There was a nice little $300 tourney at The Orleans, an ancient and shambolic casino way off the strip. Far from The Wynn, both geographically and aesthetically, but who cares? With well over 300 entrants, not a bad prize pool. And given my losses over the three previous days, much more the speed I was looking for. Ah, regrets, I’ve had a few….

Every poker player complains about bad beats. My Friday in Vegas was not about bad beats. Bad beats are reality-based. This was “other”. This was the work of the devil himself. This was the cruelest of The Gambling Gods, the Cruella Deville of Deities wrapped around my neck like a lemming, as if I was some sort of pet project, a lab experiment, or a bet among Divinities to see how much one terrestrial being can take.

I hope you all had a good laugh!

I literally forget how to win. I forget how aces don’t get cracked by tens on a river straight, how AQ doesn’t get beat by A5, how KQ doesn’t lose to KJ on a board that runs KQJ3J. I forget how every single one of my bluffs doesn’t somehow run into premium pairs. I forget how the one time I get AA in the big blind, the entire table that has been preflop raising and 3-betting every single fucking hand doesn’t – for the first time all day – suddenly decide to give me a walk. Actually, the only walk I saw in four days.

The thing is, when I wasn’t getting the poker equivalent of forced anal penetration, I played well. Trapped a guy for his whole stack when my pocket deuces hit a flop of 2Jk. I let him fire three bullets at me on a stone-cold bluff to get his whole stack. Then later I took 25K from a guy with a starting stack of 40K with a stone-cold bluff of my own.

But those were anomalies.

The carnage was relentless. The inventiveness with which I was losing hand after hand was pure evil and ruthless and I have to admit that a few times I wondered to myself what heinous deeds I’d done to deserve these atrocities.

Maybe every poker player has these thoughts at some point in their lives. I dunno.

To cut to the chase, I was out of the tournament by 4 PM. I rebought for another $300 and was out of that one by 4:45. I was actually thinking about rebuying again, but I’d have been entering with a very short stack, and I knew there was a $200 tournament with a 25K guarantee starting at 6 PM. That seemed like a more compos mentis plan.

So, I had an hour to kill at The Orleans Casino.

I couldn’t stomach the idea of losing money at a Blackjack table. And then… like a beacon, I saw a massive neon sign that said FRIDAYS which was weird because… it was. Surely, they don’t create an enormous new sign for every day of the week? But no, it was for the restaurant TGIF, formally only known to me from TV commercials and as the punchline for late-night talk show monologues.

A sign outside said Steak and Lobster Special with mashed potatoes and a side of broccoli $19.99!

What sort of sorcery is this? At my hotel, The Wynn, you couldn’t get a sprig of broccoli for that price!

I moseyed in. I don’t even eat steak.

But a guy at the bar had ordered the special and was watching the Nuggets-Nets game on TV. The whole scene looked kind of … well… not insane. And I really needed to shake things up and do something completely uncharacteristic. So WTF, right? I spontaneously sat down and ordered the special with a Michelob Ultra on draught.

I texted Ruth and told her that at last I’d hit rock bottom. Steak and lobster at the bar on a Friday night at TGIF’s eating with strangers watching an NBA game I had no money on and no rooting interest in.

I suppose that if this is as bad as it gets, I should be thankful.

You know what?

The server was really nice, the game was good, the beer was cold, another guy joined us at the bar, and we talked about wives and kids and jobs and whatever strangers who will never see each other again talk about.

They mused about the fact that blackjack was all about “feel” and poker was all about “luck”. Know-nothings! But I decided not to school them. I decided not to espouse about the precise math of playing perfect blackjack. I decided not to point out that I’ve read literally scores of books on poker strategy and sat through endless hours of podcasts, videos and live and online play, and that “The Hendon Mob”, the seminal poker data base, ranks me as the 1,496^th highest money winner in Canada and 36,131^st worldwide (modest distinctions to be sure, but still).

Why try to educate them? It would never take, anyway. Shut the fuck up and enjoy your undersized lobster and overcooked steak with the friendly fat bald guy from North Dakota, and the guy from Bakersfield who looks like he might’ve just got out of the joint. They seem like nice fellas, and you’ve all got your reasons for being at this exact spot at this exact time.

So, that’s what we did, and a good meal was had by all.

I figured that would really shake up the rest of my night.

It didn’t.

It just got worse. As mentioned above.

So, I write this from the business-class cabin of Air Canada flight 1700 headed for my house, my wife, my kids, my dog. That’s right, business class. Upgraded. What’s another few hundred dollars when you’ve had the week I’ve had, right? Go big AND go home. That’s my motto.

Believe it or not, other than poker, I actually  had a nice time in Vegas. The weather was mostly pleasant, I got some sun by the Tower Suites pool, I worked out every day in the beautiful Wynn Spa, I ate healthily and sparingly. I managed 15,000 to 20,000 steps on my step count every day that I was there, I probably lost a few pounds that I didn’t need to lose, but my wife’s excellent cooking and some Blondie’s Pizzas will reverse that in short order.

I got out of the cold. That was the whole point.

Listen, I gotta share the good with the bad. If every trip was a winner, you’d question the validity of my reporting, right? So I’m compelled to share the good with the bad. This week was, start to finish, confoundingly freakish, poker-wise. But I’m sure I’ll play poker again. I don’t think this’ll be my last blog. Can’t stop at 99, can I? I don’t think so…