A record I'd rather never beat

I have the worst luck at the Excalibur. I blamed it on a ghost in the machine when they had the electronic tables. Now I think the place just has it in for me. I must have offended the departed spirit of King Arthur or something.

Last night I played there--for the first time in six months--for 5 1/2 hours. The best hand I made was two pair. No trips, no straights, no flushes, no full houses. I had two pair twice, never even top two, winning with it once, losing to a straight the other time. As for starting hands, the only big pair I ever had was K-K, and of course that lost to A-Q when an ace flopped.

I don't even know how one might begin to calculate the odds of that sort of run of near-nothingness, but it seems astronomically improbable. Though I don't keep records that could confirm this, it was, I think, the worst stretch of cards I have ever come across. The fact that I lost only $106 was due to top pair being good in a couple of key spots, plus my necessarily stingy play earning my occasional steals a lot of respect.

To add insult to injury, the night also featured me losing $60 with top pair/top kicker (A-10) on a 2-2-4-10-8 board to, yes, the mighty Deuce-Four, which had flopped a full house. After all I've done for it, it turns on me. That hurt. It really, really hurt.

It was a thoroughly miserable experience. It appears that after a hiatus of exactly one day, the run-bad is back on.

However, I'll have to admit that an endless string of worthless hands, grating as it is, is preferable to the endless string of good-but-not-quite-good-enough hands that had characterized the previous few weeks. At least it was easy to fold all night long.


Oh, and as I was leaving the Excalibur at about 2:00 a.m., I had the pleasure of seeing a random dude urinating between cars in the parking lot. It's the third time I've seen this in a casino parking lot, the first being at South Point and the second at the Tuscany. That's keepin' it classy, Las Vegas.