So my supervisor (and attorney) Raul goes down to AC all the time. They know him by name at many places – he’s one of those guys. So when he asked me to come down, telling me we’d have a mini-suite at the Trump Plaza and a free comped dinner, I wasn’t about to turn that down. We were planning on playing the $100 hold’em tournament. I was stoked.

After my harrowing driving experience, I felt I had Lady Luck on my side for the weekend. So we get down and I hit some Let It Ride. I think I played 6 hands without even cashing once. I pick up and leave. I have $45 left of the $100 I was allocating for this, meaning I have 3 hands to play. I tell the lady “I only have three hands in me. Make them count.” I won my first 5 hands and put myself up $50 overall. Then they reshuffled the cards and my luck waned, but I managed to escape after 45 minutes with only losing $25. I’ll take it.

We go to dinner, drink a $92 bottle of Riesling, which I shall review later, and ate a $250 dinner for the price of tip. Not shabby. Then on to the Hold’em tournament. Only 25 people in it, and the price was more than we thought ($125), but first place took home $1500+. I could have done for that.

I also could have done for cards – seriously, I can’t even evaluate my play because aside from pocket queens (once), my best hand was K10 off suit. I mean, utter garbage. I bluffed a few hands, but nobody could win with the cards I was getting. I got knocked out unceremoniously and went back downstairs while Raul and Mike were betting ludicrous amounts of money at a cash game.

I took out $120 (something I was kinda against) and played the table game version of hold’em (just beat the dealer, essentially) Cards were terrible. I lost. It was my biggest loss ever at a casino, totally $270 (which puts me almost exactly even at AC in general)

What amazes me is that, bearing all this in mind, I had no real shenanigans. Just bad luck. I guess having my life saved the night before was enough luck for a while. And really I can’t complain about that.

Merry Christmas to those who wish to hear that. To everyone else, Happy Holidays.