To Dick Bartley..my pleasure. Just had a great time all around and wanted to re-live it here on the board.

To Steve...You notice I didn't say much about my luck other than at Sams Town. Won about $600 at Sams. That was the good news. The bad news was our luck just about everywhere else.

Craps was surreal. We were losing at every table
we hit on the strip. It was so bad that $300 was lasting about 5 minutes at the tables. Point 7 is the vanity plate on my car. It was also the tale of my craps journey. Barbary Coast -$300....
Harrah's -$200.....Time to go downtown to change our luck. So we go to Mainstreet Station. Lower stakes, can't get hurt there right? Mainstreet Station -$275. So we thought a nice buffet at Mainstreet would stop the bleeding. WRONG!!!

Bad craps...worse buffet. Time to head back to civilization. Next stop the Orleans. Craps table again, this time -$48. Okay let's try roulette ( another positive expectation game ).

Roulette session goes this way ( at The Orleans ). Mark and I lose $200 each in under 20 minutes as niether of us hits even a single number in nine spins of the wheel. Not used to that, as roulette has always been pretty good to me.

Mark is in shock at our horrible run of bad luck, and goes off to sob in front of a quarter video poker machine. Not me, as I am convinced that the roulette disaster could not happen again.

As I returned to the table and plopped down another $200 the croupier smiled and commented,
" ahh they always return to the scene of the crime."

But this time I managed to nail a couple numbers in a row, and walked away after turning my $200 into $450. Now I felt a little better. Perhaps the tide was turning.

That tide by the way turned into a tidal wave.
I copped out of one of our meetings the next day and found a craps table at the Venetian with only three players. This was about 1:00 PM Saturday. I decided I would not take it anymore.
Time to try the "don'ts" you know, the wrong better thing. I started out well and think I could have done better than the $160 I quickly won, but those three players I mentioned.... turns out they were part of a covert, black ops military unit that our government denies is out there. They don't like terrorists, and they really don't like wrong betters. I tried to explain that I just couldn't take getting pounded by the craps tables anymore. I even joked that I had several purple hearts from the serious wounding I had sustained at the tables from earlier in the week.

Yes I went wrong, but only after right was being so cruel to me for so long. They had, as you might have guessed, no sense of humor. I took my $160 and ran to my partners to tell them that I had unlocked th secrets of winning at the craps table.

That evening I took them back to that same table to show them my new found lucky streak bought about by my "can't miss" style of wrong way betting.

I then proceeded to take a major beating, losing $400 in 20 minutes to a one legged woman with a bad throwing arm. She almost put an eye out on one throw, and several times knocked over stack after stack of freshly arranged boxmans chips.

She couldn't throw a seven to save her life
(actually my life ). At one point I had the 4-5-6-9-10 all covered with full odds in back and then watched as she hit the 10 twice then the four, then the 10 again followed prompty by the five then nine then for the grand finale the six which was the point. Everyone was doing the high five thing. I was doing the sobbing thing.

I would tell you what happend later that evening at the roulette wheel, but hey this is not the place for R - Rated stories. Let's just say it was R rated not for sexual content, but for the violent beating I took. It was Ugly!

This was the worst luck I have ever had in my years in the casino's. But bad as it seemed at the time, when I added up my wins and losses late Sunday evening, I was down probably $1400, but got a ton of playing time in, learned some great lessons ( like find another hobby ) met some good folks, but most of all I had fun. Entertainment is what it is really all about. I have never lost more than this amount before during a trip like this. I have never won more than $1300 on any given trip. Most of my trips I end up plus or minus $500. This was the very rare exception.

On a more pleasant note, I discoverd the joy's of poker room play. Don't really like playing cards to be honest, but ther is something about holdem poker that is just hard to explain.

First of all, if you play 3/6 or 2/4 limit holdem, you really wont get hurt to bad, or win too much. Or if you do it is certainly going to take up some time. You sit at a table with 9 other holem players, men women, and occasionally a strange creature or two, and you interact. You meet some great folks at a poker table as you sit back, relax and just breathe in that great atmoshere.

I plan to spend more time in the poker rooms and much less time at those tables of destruction. POKER! IT'S WHATS FOR DINNER!

Jim Litnar's Breaking-The-Bank System??? I think not.

The only sad note is that I lost the money that I was planning to use for my sex change operation.
Now how bad is that?

See you all in June.