There But For The Grace of Homer Go I . . .

I played a small poker tournament yesterday but this is not a poker story. This is a pondering morality tale with a poker backdrop.

It was a small tournament only two tables, Bill and I played. The young lady on my right was an OK player, her husband at the other end of the table was not. She wore too much perfume and over the course of the hour or two it took for her to bust out, I liked her less and less as her mood darkened and she complained about things irrelevant to the poker game. Some might call it: "just bitching". She went out 11th, so she bubbled the final table. Only the top two places were scheduled to be paid but when we got to four players (both Bill and I still in) the short stack player began to ask about a chop. The chipleader was not interested, so for about thirty minutes the stacks went up and down as the blinds went higher and higher. It became a shove-fest. I bubbled in 4th and the remaining three players chopped the cash.

But this is not a poker story. Last evening, I was down in the casino at Monte Carlo as I exited onto the Strip I saw several LVPD officers talking with the young lady and her husband who had played in the tournament. Out of curiosity I listened in.

It appears that after she busted out, she took her dark mood to another casino and playing what I believe was carribbean stud and won herself $40,000. She then decided to continue drinking heavily and to switch to playing craps, which apparently she did not understand well. While she was drinking, throwing dice, showing her tits and generally having a great time (did I mention she had ditched her husband?). Anyways at some point she had $5K of her $40K windfall on the craps table and the other $35,000 stuck in her purse in cash from where it was lifted by a crafty pick pocket. Hence, the police.

It took about five minutes of eavesdropping to get the gory details of her sad story, I believe I overheard rendition six or seven. All the while the husband kept chiming in with: "I don't know, she dumped me after she drank dinner. She still had all the money then."

So yesterday I bubbled a little poker tournament, all in all not a bad day . . . considering.

[my apologies for the poker jargon to my newer non-poker playing readership]