Two mixer hands

Mrs. Lederer suggested that I should join her for the Imperial Palace Sunday night mixed game last night. I hadn't seen her yet on this trip to Vegas, so I agreed.

One remarkable hand was making the nuts in badugi. The goal is to get one card of each suit, and have them be as low as possible. I started with A-3-4 in three different suits, plus one useless card. I needed a low spade to make a strong hand. I invoked my new-found powers of card-calling, focusing specifically on the deuce of spades. I slid my dud card to the dealer, and he gave me in return...the deuce of spades! It's the first time I've ever made the best possible hand in this game.

The other remarkable hand was in ace-to-five triple draw. I started with four clubs, traded in my mismatch, did my mental voodoo to get myself the ace of clubs, and bingo!

That all by itself wouldn't be so remarkable, but Mrs. L. ended up drawing the king-high club flush. Between us, our ten cards consisted of ten of the 13 clubs in the deck:

I don't even know how to go about calculating the odds of that happening, but they must be pretty long. I'm amazed that she somehow knew not to raise on the last street (when she finally made her hand), and lost only one more bet there.

The only other even remotely interesting thing that happened was that when she went up to her room to get a sweatshirt (it was cold in the poker room), I swiped three stacks of $1 chips from her and hid them in my lap. I wanted to see how long it would take her to notice. The problem was that she took her sweet time about getting back, making some other stops along the way, so I ended up with about 15 minutes of paranoia that the surveillance people had seen me do that and security would be showing up any second to confront me about my theft. Fortunately, that didn't happen. And it only took her about five seconds to notice that she had been looted, so I didn't even get much fun out of my juvenile little prank.