I’ll tell ya, Lady Luck is one harsh mistress. One minute you’re up, the next you’re down, the next you’re down even more—there’s absolutely no logic to it. You can be riding high, getting comped left and right, and lose it all in an instant, then face rapidly mounting losses for days on end. That’s why, after blowing thousands upon thousands of dollars at blackjack every single night for the past month, all I can do is shrug my shoulders, chuckle to myself, and say, “Well, ain’t that just my luck.”
If you’re anything like me, you sometimes feel like you were born under a bad sign. But you can’t let that get you down. Hey, sometimes it rains, sometimes your car breaks down on your way to work, sometimes you max out all your credit cards trying to win back everything you’ve lost over the past nine hours. That’s just the way life goes—we all go through unlucky patches in life and in all-night, stimulant-fueled gambling sessions.
Listen, no one can explain luck; in fact, it’s best not to try. Take a look at my recent history, for example: I could be in the VIP room killing it at the high-limit tables and then, before I know it, find myself sleeping at a truck stop after being forcibly ejected from the Palms. Then the next night, I’m back at some dingy second-tier casino miles off the strip playing $2 blackjack till dawn. Those kinds of ups and downs are just unexplainable.
Good or bad, it’s all a big toss-up, and there’s not much you can do about it one way or the other, whether you’re on a roll or questioning whether your fillings are made of a valuable metal that can be removed and sold.
Because whether you like it or not, life will throw you a curveball every now and then—there’s just no getting around that. Today, you might double down and magically hit 21, and tomorrow, you might have to dip into your infant son Owen’s college fund for the dozenth time this month. It’s the luck of the draw, after all, so why question it? I say just sit back, let fate take its course, and call the dealer a cheating son of a bitch as you’re escorted out by security. That’s always been my motto.
You win some, you lose everything in your checking account on some—it happens to us all. But remember that when everything looks down, that’s when, out of nowhere, you’ll hit a hot streak, win a few hands, press your luck, and wind up pawning your wedding ring, your suit, or whatever you can sneak out of your hotel room for bus fare home.
The wheel of fortune is unpredictable, my friends. Maybe the dealer will bust. Maybe the idiot kid on your right decides to hit on a goddamn hard 17 and draws the four that you needed and that would have been yours if he had played the fucking game right. You simply don’t know when destiny will lead you to riches or place some clueless dipshit tourist in your path. You have to take things as they come, even when fate leaves you borrowing $25,000 from your aunt under the pretense that you need chemotherapy for an invented cancer, hitching a ride to Reno, and losing it all on a 48-hour bender.
Let’s face it: Every now and then, you catch a bad break for the entire month of August and most of September.
When that happens, just tell yourself that, no matter how bad it seems in the moment, you’re not cursed. You just have to resign yourself—like I did yesterday—to the fact that, yes, there will be times when you’re attending a business conference out of town, realize there’s a riverboat casino 145 miles away, drive all night to get there, and then, before the boat has even left the dock, lose an entire month’s salary on the turn of a single card. Honestly, who ever sees a thing like that coming?
Tough luck will find you wherever you go, as I can attest from experience. On occasion, life will deal you a bad hand, or, in my case, several hundred bad hands spread out over the past 30 straight nights, some with tens of thousands of dollars I don’t even have riding on them. But the way I see it, until you get blacklisted by the Nevada Gaming Commission, there’s always hope.
What can I say? When you’re hot, you’re hot—and when you’re not, you’ve refinanced your condo to pay for more chips. But I say let ’em fall where they may. Things will turn around for me soon enough. I’m counting on it.
