Originally Posted by ChelseaAggro
I've been reading this thread on and off for weeks. It's been mandatory bedtime reading for some days now. Some of the stories on here are just scary, many of them are horribly familiar. I've had my own fair share of dreadful sessions culminating in that sick drive home after you've just slaughtered a fortune chasing a small loss.
Here's the worst and most painful of my portfolio of sick degen outings:-
It was Vegas in '98 or '99, January time, I'd gone out from London just before New Years Day for a series of tournies being held at the Rio in the $300 to $1000 range. On about the second or third evening of the trip, after busting just before the bubble QQ v AK, I decide to quit the poker room and have a little spin on Pai Gow. I drift from casino to casino on the strip losing a little here and a little there, and then after a couple of hours I hook up at the table with girl who is an off-shift dealer who also likes to play Pai Gow. We chat and play together for a few hours until she goes bust and leaves for home. At this point I am about $500 down, so my little recreational adventure has become a bit expensive. Too expensive to just be written off, I needed to get the money back.
So I went back to my room at the Mirage, grabbed some travellers cheques and exchanged them for $ at the cage. I wasn't going to spend hours and 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, could hardly hit a number, and within an hour my $1000 dollars had gone.
I went back to the room, cashed up some more cheques and wandered down the strip to the adjacent hotel in search of better luck. Needless to say I lost again, went back to the room to reload, tried another casino, lost again and repeated this routine several times over a period of 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, cheques and credit card space. As I'd tried and failed to get on a run at any of the casino in the neighbourhood of the Mirage and 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. For sure I was pretty nervous by now about the prospect of going busto, but surely my luck would turn and I'd have a good half hour or so , hit a few of my primary numbers in a row, that would enable me to get it all back.
The next few hours were a nightmare as my remaining stack drifted steadily downwards, although there were small occasional upward spikes where I had two or three winning spins in a row but nothing to suggest that I was going to threaten to surface from the deep hole I'd got myself into. I'd been gambling for nearly a whole day, hardly eaten a thing, was in a cold sweat from the anxiety and completely on tilt. I'd stoped 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're 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. And of course I swear to myself a million times over the next 12 hours if that I can only just get even I'll not wager a single dime more on this trip and just stick to poker.
So I'm down to about my last $1000 when I stumble into the Gold Coast about 2am. And I went on a roll at last. I won about $3000 in less than an hour. And 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 in the morning, Vegas casinos can be pretty deserted places. So 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, another 2k at some other toilet, and 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
Eventually, after 25 hours on this horrible bender, with about 8.5k in my pocket, in touching distance of getting it all back, I find myself back at the Mirage at 4am. So of course I pop up to my room, have a shower to freshen up, dump the bulk of my cash back in the room safe, grab something to eat and drink and the have another go at the tables once I'm refreshed a little, right? Do I heck!! I'm straight to the nearest roulette table where nobody else is playing and I'm off again. I start 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's looking like I'm actually going to get out of this, and then I hit 28 followed by 29 ( my best number). That's a $525 return to me, I might even be there now!!
I tell the dealer to hold off spinning the wheel while I do a quick count up, but the fat kunt just ignore me and spins the wheel. Panic!! I don't want to quit in the middle of a winning sequence, but if I am over the 10k mark then I don't want to have even one dollar more than my profit on the table. I'm 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 spins a blank number for me, I do a rapid count up, and godammit I'm $11 short!! If the croup had just given me a minute to do an audit before he span 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.
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, and 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 kunt at the Mirage who span that wheel one time more.....