The Lucky Zone

Tomorrow I leave to go to Southern California for a week to play poker and hopefully make some money.
As I'm packing for the trip, I was reminded of a similar poker trip that didn't go so well.
This was back when we lived in Lawton. A couple of guys I played with had received a free room at the Palazzo on the Vegas strip, and there was a special airfare deal for $125 round-trip from OKC to Vegas. (Non-stop flights too. Good luck finding that these days).
These guys were both middle-aged family men, and they planned to play a lot of tournaments while I prefer the cash games. So I figured we'd sleep in the same room but otherwise wouldn't see each other a lot.
The trip started with them picking me up at home around 6 a.m. to drive to OKC for the flight. We stopped at a gas station in town, and it was there that I discovered that one of my weekend companions, who I'll call "James", was an abject racist. He made several inappropriate comments about the clientele of the convenience store and how he generally refuses to go there for that reason.
Okie dokie, then.
I didn't say a word to him all the way to Vegas. When we got there, I decided to play the first tournament that these guys were entering. It had already been running about half an hour but you were allowed to register late and they immediately gave me a seat.
I folded about 5 hands before picking up pocket aces. Before it was my turn, two people had gone all-in ahead of me! I was excited to call and see that I was up against K-J and A-Q. I have an 81 percent chance to win this hand and build a huge stack immediately. Instead, the A-Q finds a way to win and knock me out of the tournament. So I've been in the Venetian less than 15 minutes and am already down $350.
I walked over to Caesar's Palace (no short stroll) and got in a cash game there. I'll spare the details, but needless to say it was not a pleasant experience. Keep in mind, this is back when I still worked full-time at the paper. I was doing well at poker but I had a much smaller budget for it than I do now. I wasn't losing money I couldn't afford but I still felt like crap for being 2,000 miles away from Missy and dropping a fairly significant amount of money.
So I moped all the way back to the Palazzo and decided to call it a day and go to bed early. When I got back to the room, I walked in to find that my new racist friend "James" liked to sleep in the nude. Awesome.
I grabbed a pillow and slept on the sectional sofa in the other part of the room, but the sections kept slowly drifting apart like glaciers, and I would slump in the middle. Still, I never even considered going back to the naked racist. No need to discover three new things about him in one day.
The second day of our three-day trip went about like the first. Poker took a dump on me, and life wasn't much better. I remember getting ripped off at Chipotle for about $2 and being too depressed to even say anything to the cashier.
I decided I had lost enough for one weekend, which meant I was stuck in Vegas for another 36 hours with money to eat on but nothing else.
The other guy who went with us played craps and blackjack a decent amount, and he was pretty cool to me when he found out I was busto. I went to a craps table with him and he told me to roll for him. I threw the dice way up in the air because, as everyone knows, the "lucky zone" in craps is 8 to 9 feet above the table. There's no telling where the dice will end up when you throw them that high, but you're guaranteed to win.
I won several throws in a row, and soon the whole table was excited. Some had been skeptics of the "lucky zone," but now they saw it with their own eyes.
Unfortunately, casino management was not a huge fan of the "lucky zone," especially since the dice bounce all the way off the table about one in three times. They don't really like that. I won about six games in a row, but when I finally lost I was politely asked to leave the table.
That was a fun way to pass the time, but I couldn't get back to Oklahoma fast enough.
Now, I can only hope that the week I spend in California goes a little better than that.