Poker gems, #28

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 73-74:

Like at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when Floyd has been playing seventeen or eighteen hours in a row without stopping to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom because he’s so fuckin’ stuck he don’t want to move. And finally he can’t take it any longer so after he folds his hand he says, “Deal me in,” and starts sprinting for the bathroom, which in the Taj isn’t so close—no, you have to go out of the whole poker room and down the hall—and so the hand ends and the dealer shuffles and says, “Should I deal him in?” and Virginia says, “Yeah, give him a hand…he’ll make it.” And sure enough it hasn’t even been thirty or forty seconds and you can see Floyd through the plate-glass windows separating the poker room from the hall coming at a dead run, full sprint, waving frantically so we can see that he wants to be dealt in and there’s no way that the guy had time to finish let alone wash his hands, but when you’re stuck you don’t want to miss even one hand, not even after eighteen hours and five or six hundred of them. And it’s not just Floyd—I mean we all been there. And I heard that’s why Tom H got booted from the Stardust casino because the game was so rocking and wild and he didn’t want to miss a hand and walk all the way to the bathroom so he went in a corner and pissed in a garbage can.