Friday, February 06, 2009

A spoonful of magic





I had a good time and a profitable session at the Riviera last night, so tonight I headed there again. Two seats to my left was a guy using a small souvenir collector-type spoon as a card protector. (I snuck a picture of it.) OK, that's a little peculiar, but hardly worthy of mention all by itself.

The really weird thing was what he did with it. Before every hand, he would rub the back of the spoon several times in a small circle approximately where he expected the cards to be pitched to him, then turned it on its side and made three or four consecutive scraping or scooping motions toward him, as if trying to spoon the good luck his way.

Before.

Every.

Hand.

It seemed to work. That is, once in a while he won a pot. But a lot of the time it didn't work, and he had to fold without putting any money in, or he put some (or a lot of) money in and lost it. Overall, I'd say it worked about as well as if he had, say, smeared chicken blood on the table and his chair (though many casinos, oddly enough, frown on this practice).

People are so strange.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonder if he trying to get his cards lucky with with circle motiion. He might of just been outlining the pot.

The scooping towards him motion is defintately scooping the pot motion ihmo.

Oddest thing I notice about that is the dude is covered with excessive Tats! Was this one rough looking guy?

Nate said...

I'm no expert on the occult, but this smells of Wiccan magic to me. The circle is for protection of his cards (against evil, presumably). The scooping action could be part of a spell, which invokes the action of scooping the pot.

But, it didn't seem to be helping him too much. He probably isn't a "true believer" :-)

Sorry for commenting on so many old posts. Love your writing, trying to catch up!