Tiltboys in Vegas: Six Sigmas Out

Player Introductions

You've met them before if you've read any of the other reports in the Tiltboys series -- if you haven't, why the hell not? As for the new players, well, you'll certainly come to know and respect them for their obviously deviant personalities and penchant for gambling.

Phil "Scam King" Gordon

Poker player. Scam King. Tilt-monster. The man who would hit on your mother at your father's funeral (successfully), with a line like "No, but seriously, all flirting aside, you have really beautiful hair." (yes, he's actually said this). But 'scam' works both ways, because he's also the guy most likely to devise a massive con to part you from your money. Also, author of the last trip report. Of course, Rafe posted it to the net, and got all the credit (putting Phil on mega-tilt from hell).

Rafe "Tiltboy" Furst

Poker player. Deposed Angle-boy <:-( Lost the title to Dave Lambert when Dave successfully angled everybody on the last Vegas trip.) Tiltboy: the guy most likely to put you on tilt without even trying, then smile disarmingly as if nothing happened.

Perry "So many opportunities, so little chance" Friedman

"The Fried." Poker player wanna-be. Couldn't stop chasing if you stapled his feet to the floor. Roshambo king -- the odds-on favorite in any rock-scissors-paper tournament. You think you can randomize? Just try it against Perry. Green Apple boy: can consume Green Apples (see Beverages, below) at a rate equivalent to the shuttle consuming liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen on launch.

Dave "Dice Boy" Lambert

Six Sigma man himself (to be explained later.) He's the dice boy and knows it. Lives it is more like it -- his expectation is better at craps than at poker, and it is positive at both. Hell, dice boy probably has a positive keno expectation, but doesn't play because it isn't challenging enough and there's nobody he can put on tilt. The original smiley-boy; you'll rarely catch him sans the smug grin.

Tony "Absoloot Fooken Screama" Glenning

Aussie. Tiltable. Tight. King of Low-Limit. Math Brain? We think not, despite a Masters in Statistics from Stanford. Ultra-conservative play style (for us, this means he's not in every pot) tempered by the occasional well-placed bluff, as usually signaled by him catching a scare card and intoning in that Aussie accent, "It's an Absoloot Fooken' Screama!"

Johnny "Coffee" Lee

Vegas Pilgrimage Virgin. Coat-tailer: see him follow Phil's lead (to riches or ruin? We'll see...) Known for his mind-numbing pauses when making a heady $1 calling decision in the home game. When you've waited long enough, just ask "Coffee, Johnny?" Somebody wake him up, please!

Josh "Invisible Man" Paley

Roshambo king wanna-be. Newcomer to the Wednesday Night game. Where the hell is Josh? (Josh would anticipate this Vegas trip for weeks, generating a flurry of e-mail about the poop sheet and his card aspirations. Then, upon arriving at Vegas, he would disappear for the entire weekend.)

Bruce "Heads up" Hayek

Rock. Solid. Will play anybody heads-up. Eminently corruptible. Favorite choice for victim of scams, angles, and tilt maneuvers. Will always look in the circle. The only winner from "Vegas Pilgrimage" (last trip report), and don't you guys forget it. Deposed space-cadet-and-side-show boy: on sleep deprivation the extent of his muddle-headedness is amazing to behold -- as witnessed in the last trip report -- but nothing compared to Stern's antics on this trip.

(I'll be your host on this adventure, though I'll be inserting stories and details received from the other attendees.)

Michael "Locked for both, winning half" Stern

Superstitious. Pai-gow man. Misses the obvious, but able to quickly spot the unapparent (or non-existent.) New space-cadet-and-side-show boy: when he's on sleep deprivation/(drugs?) he'll make your head spin.

Russ "Gauss" Garber

Legendary. The original home-game man. Living the dream: no job other than an occasional trip to the card room. Craps consultant.

Steve "Designated Pussy" Miranda

Conspicuously absent from this trip. Being the Designated Pussy(DP) this time around, he gets to appear in the report. Click here to see a picture of Steve and his wife, Laurel, at home. Can you tell which is Steve? We thought not. Feel free to write to Steve to tell him he's a pussy.

Explanation Of Concepts

The previous trip reports explained why trips to Vegas are, for us, a Pilgrimage to a land we consider sacred. They also explained that we don't simply play poker, we live and breath it; we don't simply enjoy an occasional fast one (angle) pulled on another Tiltboy, we strive with all our might and being to con each other at any opportunity; we don't simply make trivial fun wagers with one another, we plan for months in advance elaborate scams with which to part other Tiltboys from their money. That is to say, for us arbitrage is a way of life.

Our vocabulary and expressions reflect this. To make sense of some of the terms and stories in this report, here are a few preliminary explanations:

The Circle Game

I don't know where this game comes from, but apparently its pretty old. Most of us learned it in high-school. The object is to form a circle with your finger and thumb out of somebody's line of vision and below the waist, and then somehow get him to look at it. If he does,you get to hit him on the shoulder. Sound pretty trivial? Well, with this group, it is the ultimate accomplishment, and to successfully nail somebody makes you a hero. If you get nailed, on the other hand,everybody laughs at you, you feel like an absolute ass, and if that isn't enough, you get stung on the shoulder. No better way to put somebody in our group on tilt. Which brings me to the next point...

Angling

If one of us pulls a fast one on another, it's pretty much a guaranteed tilt. As a result, the angles that we have come up with,and will come up with on this trip, are so deviant, so complex, so inspired, that they are an art form of their own. Here is the angle-boy icon we use: <:-)

Tilting

For the poker-parlance purist, we tend to overuse/misuse this term, we like it so much. "Tilt" simply means to be in a state of mind (depressed, angered, vengeful -- even joyous or ecstatic) that obscures optimal rationality. As I've said before, each of us receives a deep, abiding satisfaction from successfully putting another of the group on tilt, especially if we are able to take monetary advantage (cha-ching!) of their tilted state. Every action we take seems to have this goal at it's core.

Because our relative tilt-level is such a critical factor, we have developed the following TiltMeter® to indicate the Tiltboy TiltLevel at various points in time.

Pussy

Okay, so its not quite politically correct. But around here its the law: If somebody in the group doesn't immediately go along with whatever gambling, angling, tilting activity anybody else proposes, they are labeled "pussy." Maybe it's a bit brutal, but this is how we maintain our status as the most easily corruptible bunch of gamblers ever to pilgrimage to Vegas.

Betting

We will find any, and I do mean any, excuse to bet with each other. Often these bets turn out to be great angles, conceived to put the bettee on some serious tilt. But regardless, the endless small bets we make help us keep our gambling bugs well fed. One favorite is Roshambo (rock, scissors, paper) -- a supposedly random game, but one in which several of these gamblers claim to have an edge due to their ability to read people and take the psychological upper hand. An example from a recent bet:

Rafe: I'm going rock.
Victim: Okay, then I'm going paper.
Rafe: But you know that I wouldn't tell you the truth.
Victim: You might if you think I won't believe you.
Rafe: But I know you will compensate for that.
Victim: Just go! (exasperated at Rafe's continued scrutiny for tells)
Rafe: 1-2-3-(went rock)
Victim: (went scissors)
Rafe: (pocketing bet) You over-compensated.

Roshambo

This trip was to prove even more than a gambling pilgrimage. As we came to realize the importance of Roshambo to our existence, we would found a religion to celebrate the life-affirming tripartite nature of Roshambo. For more info, consult the internet newsgroup: alt.religion.roshambo, or play roshambo against an Artificial Intelligence algorithm developed by one of the Tiltboys.

The Lambert Clench

It all happened one night during the Wednesday home game. Lambert managed to catch his one card out to scoop a high-low pot. He was so excited, he stood up and took an arms-clenched-down-and-in muscle-man pose, stared at each of us in turn and gave us an aggressive "grrr!". Now, Dave is about 5'10", weighs about 150 pounds, likes to sport a straw hat when playing cards, smiles a hell of a lot, and is generally not the kind of guy you picture threatening you with a muscle pose. That night the group could barely breath for laughing, as Dave persistently looked for suck-out opportunities that would allow him to model his new signature pose. Of course, Dave gets more opportunities than anybody to use this pose, being the original one-out boy (Perry also often has one or less outs, but Perry doesn't get there.) Dave now uses this pose to induce massive tilt in the players he snaps, and believe me, it works. Occasionally a non-Lambert Tiltboy also strikes the pose, but somehow it just doesn't work as well for us.

CHA-CHING!! and AI-YAAA!!

These expressions represent, respectively, a cash-register going off(which we use to denote any positive occurrence, usually of a monetary nature) and the classic Bay-101 Asian gambler's expression of surprise, shock, etc. (which we use to denote surprise, shock, etc.)

Drinks

Drinking being an integral part of any Vegas expedition, you will see multiple references to these beverages:

• Rusty Nail: Scotch and Drambui. Dice Boy introduced it at the home game, and now he, Phil and Rafe drink them like there's no tomorrow.
• Green Apple: Midori, Stoli, Sweet and Sour. A vaguely neon-green, potent beverage favored by "The Fried", who drinks them like a chain-smoker smokes.
• Atlanta Tilt: Myer's Dark Rum and Peach Snapple (Peach schnapps will do in a pinch.) Invented at the home game one night while Phil was rummaging through his cupboards trying to concoct something to use up the remaining alcohol and drinks in his refrigerator. Delicious! -- Well worth teaching the bartender how to make.
• Meal-in-a-Glass: tomato juice with olives and celery. The only non-alcoholic beverage of choice. Invented by Rafe during the last trip -- a means of sustaining nourishment while playing for extended sessions, without having to ever leave the table.

Some Pre-History And More Self-Indulgent Buildup

To understand the magnitude of this (mis)adventure, we have to take you back about seven years to an adventurous time -- a time of poker, beer, girls, angles, tilts, and very little else. A perfect time for the beginning of the corruption process. Rafe explains...

To understand the psyche of the Tiltboys, a little bit of history is necessary. You see, it all started when I met Russ Garber, the undisputed king of degeneracy.

When I first started college I couldn't find a poker game. I tried several times unsuccessfully to start games in the dorms, but for some reason I couldn't get anything to last more than one or two sessions. That all changed sophomore year when I met Russ. Russ then looked then like he was 35, and acted like he was 55, even though he was only a year older than me. To say that he was (and is) a product of his New York heritage is an understatement. And while a character study of what makes Russ tick would take 20 pages in itself, and would be worth every page, suffice it to say that the most succinct explanation I can come up with is to say that Russ is a caricature of himself. Sort of a Jackie Gleason cum Archie Bunker cum Gabe Kaplan.

That Russ has been working as a special ed teacher at his old Brooklyn high school -- not because he particularly enjoys teaching but because it was the only job he could find that would let him live at his parents house, sleep late, play basketball every day at 3pm and have a ton of vacation -- is somewhat ironic given certain events of the weekend you will soon be hearing about.

But it is not half as ironic as the fact that Russ just recently retired from teaching his own version of the Sweathogs to goof off, and play a little poker. I hesitate to use the term "professional poker player" because Russ doesn't like to think of himself as a professional anything. He dislikes the concept of working so much that he spent more time and energy in school thinking of ways to get out of doing the assignments than he would have if he actually just did the work. But I digress.

Everyone who has ever played the game of poker and has had any success thinks they are God's gift to the game. I was no exception. After all, I could beat a nickel-dime-quarter game in high school that included several adults, including my calculus and history teachers and my baseball coach. Talk about naive. Russ, on the other hand, WAS good. By the time he was in college he was beating games at the now defunct Brighton Beach Baths out of thousands of dollars. Not that the players he was beating were any good necessarily, but let's just say he was used to gambling with stakes hardly common among kids his age. So when we first started playing together he would naturally clean up each week. If it weren't for the generous donations from several members of the Stanford football team (some of whom now play professionally (football, that is, not poker), and none of whom still play poker, Russ would assuredly have busted the rest of us too, and quite possibly you would not be reading this article but instead might be reading the tenth article in a thread debating who would win a low-stakes slot machine freezeout tournament between Tom McEvoy and Mason Malmuth. I'm not so sure you didn't get just a little unlucky in that respect. But I digress again.

As you may have surmised, Russ's legacy of supreme degeneracy persists today with many of the original cast members from the Stanford game still playing in Palo Alto, forsaking loved ones and careers just to play in a $1-$2 game each week until the wee hours of the morning.

Now that we have real jobs, the money is inconsequential, but the allure is as strong as ever. Several new members have been added over the years and we have become a group which tilts its way into Vegas every few months (weeks?) with the zealous fervor only found in people who see gambling as good substitute for organized religion. To those in the group who had not actually met Russ but have had to endure his canonization by those of us who played with him, this trip would be an opportunity to meet a living legend. To those of us who know Russ, the trip could perhaps be equated to a pilgrimage to Tibet when the Dalai Lama just happened to be in town.

Wow. That write-up of Rafe's should give you some indication of how seriously we take this shit. As one of the Wednesday night player's who was not a member of the original group, I (Bruce) had only heard about Russ as spoken in reverent whisperings at the game (not to mention playing a hand with him over the phone long distance when he dialed in one Wednesday night -- he won). This trip I was to meet him in person. That's great, just so long as it didn't detract from my playing time.

August 4: The Party, the T-shirts and the Plan

It was about this time that the group received the distressing news that one of our bunch was leaving (Lenny "The Unluckiest Guy he Knows" Augustine -- so named because no matter how well or poorly he played, he always got his ass kicked when he showed up for the Wednesday Night game. Lenny could beat cardroom games consistently, but could never actually take money from another Tiltboy at poker.) Lenny was departing to play a higher stakes poker game: he was going off to law school.

Now the other Tiltboys are all in agreement that, what with Lenny's inability to ever successfully pull a bluff against a Tiltboy, we sure as hell wouldn't want him to be our lawyer if we had, say, killed our wife and her gay lover or some such. But on the off chance that one of us was ever innocent of a crime we were to be tried for, we'd sure as hell want Lenny's "can't tell a lie" face on the defense stand beside us. We would all miss the regular donations ^H^H^H^H^H attendance of Lenny at the Wednesday Night game, and Phil saw to it that Lenny was sent off in classic Tiltboy style, with a blowout dinner and beer fest. This also happened to coincide with Rafe's birthday, so a raging evening was called for.

The night of the party, Phil would reveal two absolutely brilliant products of his poker-corrupted imagination, in the form of a going-away present for Lenny and a birthday present for Rafe.

(By the way, at the very same party, he would belie the very genius attested to by these awesome gifts. Far be it from me, however, to mention in this trip report that the same genius who conceived of these two brilliant gifts (described below) would invite 5 ex-girlfriends all to this same party, AND his current girlfriend, and then get drunk and spend the entire party hitting on his exes while ignoring the current one. Needless to say, Phil now has 6 ex-girlfriends to invite to the next party. Again, though, far be it from me to bring up such unrelated topics. And if I do for some reason, sorry Phil -- but the reader needs to understand why we call you "Scam King" Gordon.)

The Gifts

Back to those cool gifts. The first -- for Rafe -- was a genuine California personalized license plate, reading (what else?) TILTBOY. The second -- for Lenny and the rest of us -- were custom made T-shirts with a computer scanned photo of the 10 Tiltboys sitting around Rafe's table during a Wednesday Night Game. Below the picture are 10 card-suit bullets with our names and nick-names. Above the picture is a list of our common poker expressions, such as "cha-ching!", "Ai-yaa!", and "Full House no good -- you go home now." On the back, in giant font letters, is printed MEGA-TILTED (at an angle, of course <:-) and a list of all the games we play. This incredible shirt would allow Lenny to remember the good old days while away at school, and provide the rest of us with a security blanket for when we found ourselves alone and apart from the Wednesday Night Game.

The Idea

It was the very next week, during the Wednesday Night Game, that I mentioned how useful the shirts would be during a Vegas Trip. I mean, imagine 10 young, arrogant punks like ourselves invading the Mirage cardroom, acting like we are the king of any game we play (well, we are) and sitting down among the locals and tourists. We'd all be wearing our T-shirts of course, which proclaim that we think we are special by virtue of having our face on a T-shirt that says "Palo Alto Wednesday Night Poker -- The Best Night of the Week". In my story, the other players all go on Tiltboy-induced-Tilt, and we walk away from the tables after a few days with everybody's money in our racks, flashing the MEGA-TILTED signs on the back of the T-shirts as we depart.

No sooner do I mention this scenario when the next trip is planned, plane tickets booked and rooms reserved for August 18.

Aug. 16: Wednesday night, The Best Night of the Week, 2 days 'til Vegas

With a Vegas approaching very fast, not many people would even consider blowing off their other responsibilities early in the week for some home-game poker action. Well, for this group, Wednesday night poker is a ceremony we take seriously. If you're Catholic and it's the week before Easter, does that mean you can blow off Wednesday night service? Of course not! Likewise, the Wednesday game had full attendance.Rafe's house, Palo Alto. The chatter was immense, everyone was clearly stoked for the adventure. The angling started early, and the poop sheet was fully populated with proposition after proposition. Devised by Josh:

     Official Betting Lines From The Home Office In Urbana, Illinois

     To Win Most Money
     ------------------
     Bruce                1-1
     Josh                 3-1
     Phil                 3-1
     Rafe                 4-1
     Tony                 5-1
     Gauss                5-1
     Dice Boy             5-1
     Stern                6-1
     Perry                6-1
     Johnny              12-1

     Win Most Money Over/Under
     --------------------------
     Bruce               +450 
     Josh                +250 
     Phil                +400 
     Rafe                +200 
     Tony                 +50  
     Gauss                 NL   
     Dice Boy            -150 
     Stern                -50 
     Perry               -200 
     Johnny              -150 
     Everyone            -200 

     Lose Most Money
     ----------------
     Perry                2-1
     Dice Boy             4-1
     Phil                 4-1
     Tony                10-1
     Field                5-1 

     Roshambo differential
     ---------------------
     Dice Boy             8-1
     Bruce                9-1
     Phil                 9-1
     Rafe                 9-1
     Tony                 9-1
     Gauss                9-1
     Jeff                 9-1
     Perry                9-1
     Johnny               9-1
     Josh                10-1

     Golf Over/Under
     ---------------
     Rafe                  95   
     Phil                  95   
     Dave                 105 
     Tony                  93   
     Group                388
     Lost Balls             7    
     Penalty Strokes       13   
     Birdies                2    

     Circle Game Over/Under
     ----------------------
     Times we get Bruce on the trip               20
     Times we get Phil on the trip                 6   
     Times we get Dave on the trip                 4   
     Times we get Rafe on the trip                 1   

     On Women
     --------
     Number of people attending a strip club       2   
     Number of women Phil hits on                  8   
     Number of women Phil scores                 0.5 
     Number of women slapping Phil                 1   

     Bay 101
     -------
     Rafe Leaves a winner                       EVEN
     Phil Leaves a winner                       EVEN
     Tony Leaves a winner                       EVEN
     Dave Leaves a winner                       EVEN

     Miscellaneous Over/Unders
     ---------------------------
     Number of total roshambos                                            300
     Number of roshambos played by Dice Boy in car en route to Bay 101      3
     Number of games Bruce plays heads up on plane into Vegas               3
     Number of games Bruce wins heads up on plane into Vegas                2  
     Number of times Perry pukes on someone's chips, trip                 0.5 
     Number of beef slabs (prime rib/roast beef) Josh eats on trip       10.5
     Number of double Martell Cordon-blues Michael consumes while
           playing Pai-Gow in each sitting                                  4
     Michael's Pai-Gow expectation                                       -200
     Diceboy's Pai-Gow expectation                                       +200

Poor Josh. He volunteered to be the bookie, and being a relative newcomer to the group, was unaware of several of the group's "quirks". Of course, the Tiltboys showed no mercy and immediately piled into all the bad lines -- can you say: "free money"? Everybody took Perry at 8-1 to win the roshambo differential (Perry is the creator of the roshambot, see player intro's above). Everybody (except me) took the under on Bruce as big winner -- after all, I'm such a rock, and with the low variance brought on by playing tight, surely somebody like Dave with variance through the roof would outdo me ;-). Everybody took the over on me for the circle game, and everybody took the under on Rafe, who never, ever, ever gets circled. Josh would end have to indulge in a little maneuvering of his own (as you will see later) to avoid losing his shirt as bookie.

The Angle

Perhaps the best line of the night (not my own opinion, but apparently in the rest of the group's) was conceived by Phil: how to put me on tilt even before we leave. Phil later would state that his goal was to instigate such a massive tilt from me that I could not repeat as this trip's big winner, and hence not gloat and badger the hell out of everybody like I did last trip. And thus the first angle of the trip was sprung:

Phil: "Bruce, did you see the scratch marks that girl from last night put on my leg?"

Bruce: "Your kidding!" (I look gullibly at Phil's leg, dutifully staring full into the circle Phil has waiting for me.) "Aii-Yaaa!"

Phil: (punches me HARD on the shoulder) "Bruce, you're so bad at the circle game, it's absolutely unbelievable. In fact, I'm willing to wager $10 that we can get you over 20 times as a group on the Vegas trip." (20 times seemed about right -- I am legitimately the worst circle game player in history, and 20 would seem like too many for me to turn down, lest I be called a pussy for the whole trip...)

Bruce: "Yeah, well, you're on." (squeamish, I know I've been successfully angled into a questionable bet.)

For the rest of the game we made grandiose plans for the trip, which we knew were certain to be forgotten as soon as we sat down at that eternal mind vacuum that is the poker table. Among these plans:

1. Have Perry (who I might add will do anything on a dare or for a dollar) grab the front desk microphone and introduce our arrival to the poker room: "And now, just in from Palo Alto, California, it's the Tiltboys: Rafe "Tiltboy" Furst, Bruce "Heads Up" Hayek, etc."
2. Have Perry vomit on an opponents winning cards
3. Have Perry eat an opponents winning cards
4. Have Perry.... well, I think you've heard enough.

Anyway, the home game that night was loose as hell (not that this is anything new) because all of us were anticipating playing our (6-12 up to 20-40) big games in Vegas. Everybody went home early at around 4 AM, to dream blissful dreams about 45 minute runs at the craps table and putting bad beats on Roy Cooke. I, however, would dream horrifying nightmares involving many circles and bruised shoulders.

Thursday seemed to drag; a problem which some of us solve by falling asleep at our desk for most of the day. (Somehow, the Best Night of the week was always followed by Thursday, the Longest Workday of the Week.) Such are the rigors that one bears as a devout Tiltboy.

Friday, August 18,... And Saturday,...And Sunday

(Days all seem to run together when there's little sleep...)

Friday. We were all eager to get in a good, productive day's work to compensate for Thursday and have things in order before flying out. As Rafe demonstrates here.

The email traffic before a Vegas trip, with everyone goading each other into blowing off work early to go to Bay101 and such, is enough to bring any hard-working soul to his knees, let alone slackers like us. Phil, Tony and I decide not to burden our respective employers with such lack of productivity, and agree to blow off the entire afternoon and hit the Stanford golf course.

I woke up about an hour before our tee time, just enough time to read my email from home and tell the folks at work to carry on without me. The round was uneventful, which is to say, the Dice-boy wasn't there to help me tilt Phil to his full potential and add the crucial strokes to his score necessary for me to make some money. It was good just being out there and not in the office fidgeting away the hours though.

Devotion like that just brings tears to your eyes, doesn't it? I choose to spend my day more productively, collecting a group pool from around the office for a blackjack parlay. (Flashback to the last trip: I had collected $60 from several co-workers, with the understanding that I would let it ride 2 times at blackjack and return everybody fourfold their money, or nothing. I considered this just a nice gesture for those poor souls back at work missing out on all the fun. The profitable upside of this arrangement revealed itself at the BJ table -- I won the first hand, thus giving me $120 for the second bet. I was dealt presto (5,5) against the dealer's 6, and was able to double down with my own money -- and win -- thus not only earning the undying gratitude of my co-workers but allowing me to place a seriously positive expectation bet at no cost to me, and make $120. Kind of like real estate leveraging using Other People's Money. I vowed to continue this practice with all future trips.) Anyway, I raised another $60 for this trip, which I was to lose on the first hand; and my coworkers undying gratitude? Dead. When I wasn't busy with the pool, I was busy sending e-mail to the other Tiltboys at work, badgering them to leave early and meet me at Bay 101...

Bay 101

So I arrive at Bay101 at 5:00 ;-) and quickly sit down at the 10-200 game. I've never played a game like this: blinds are $5 and $10, and you can bet any amount between 10 and 200 at any time. But all the regular limit games are full, and I can't possibly wait. I decide to play conservatively and buy in for the minimum ($200.) Ten minutes later I'm reaching for my second $200. I then suffered a flashback to the last trip when my entire bankroll was only $1000 and I dropped $250 of it playing 3-6 before getting on the plane to Vegas (How does one lose $250 at 3-6? By winning only 1 hand in 3 hours of play). At least this time I had $2000 -- gotta be careful not to lose it all here though. Ten minutes later, the pot came to me on the big blind after one raise to $30 and one call. I go all in ($180) with QQ, and get a mere... 3 callers! (Even the big blind didn't want to miss the fun.) Ai-yaaa! This pot has $800 in it! Please no card above a J, please no card above a J... Flop came with no card above a J, turn came a blank, river a K. Somebody asks to see all the hands: my QQ, AQ, AK, KQs. I had 3-to-1 odds in the pot, and these guys were drawing to 4 cards between the 3 of them! (Plus possible straights and flushes). Anyway, I reached back for what I vowed would be my last $200 at this game. Fortunately I was in a good mood and avoided tilting massively.

Rafe showed up at 7:00, by which point I had made back my $400 and made another $300 on top -- and loved this game! Uneventful from here on, until one last hand before leaving: I am big blind with TJs. Four callers for $10, I pump it $10. Flop comes 884, one of my suit. I check, checked around. Turn comes a 7 of my suit (straight and flush draw). I bet $60 as a semi-bluff into a $80 pot, hoping they'll put me on a pocket pair that slow-played the flop. I get one caller. River comes and makes my flush. I bet another $60, thinking that I won't get called for a much bigger bet unless I'm beat. Somebody raises $200! I think for a long time, and decide to call because I realize I have a tight image at this table and this guy probably thinks I'd fold with a pocket over-pair. Sure enough, I catch him bluffing -- he had turned an open-ended straight draw. I cash out up $600 -- man this is going to be a great trip! Rafe gives his version of Bay101:

After golf, Tony and I didn't have much time before we had to meet the others at Bay101. I rushed down as fast as possible since I needed to get started winning quickly to reach my goal of 500 the first night. You see, we have this rule that if anyone is up more than 500 by the end of the first night (which in fact can, and usually does, stretch into the mid morning hours for most of us), he is required to purchase a massage from the hotel spa for himself. I'm not really sure how this started or why it makes sense, but believe me, after hours of sleep deprivation it seemed obvious to each of us that this is the way it should be. While there's no rule against a massage under different circumstances, it never somehow seems justified. Perhaps because if you are not up 500 you undoubtedly stuck or close enough to even where you don't feel like shelling out the 70 bucks. After my last two Vegas performances, er, shellackings, both well documented, I had established a pattern of getting stuck early and spending the rest of the trip trying to dig myself out of a hole. Which is to say I felt way overdue for both the massage and the cash it would imply. That, and if you haven't figured it out by now, the Tilt Boys are just a tad compulsive^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H competitive when it comes to outdoing each other.

When I get to Bay101, I'm shocked to find only Fried, Stern and Bruce already there with a half hour to go before we have to leave! Had I not been tied up at the golf course, I would have been there at noon. Sheesh, where are these guys' sense of corruption?!?! At least this meant that I didn't have to catch up to many people for the 'biggest winner of the trip so far', which is an unofficial badge of honor kept throughout the trip, not unlike the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, and certainly more important. Bruce is sitting in the short handed 10-200 game with a good stack of chips and a smug grin on his face. Perry is sitting watching over Bruce's shoulder, practicing his moves (Phil agreed to give him $1 for every time he put one of Phil's opponents on tilt, $2 every time he throws up on a poker table and $10 for eating a poker chip). I give Bruce the old conspiratorial is-this-a-good-table? raised eyebrow, and he counters with the this-table-is-so-juicy-that-even-a-numskull-such-as-Stern-could-win-here subtle nod. So after watching the relatively young Bay101 prop (forgot his name) set a perfect trap by checking his flopped top set of jacks into pocket aces which put him all in, only to get brutally snapped by the river ace, I sat down.

Now I'm not yet a big limit player, 15-30 being about my highest comfortable limit currently, but for some reason 10-200 and even no-limit games don't scare me as much as the prospect of a no-foldem 20-40 game. Betting $400 with the nuts isn't nearly as hard as having to call down a family capped pot to the river with the nut flush draw only to miss more times than not. Plus I like being able to isolate players I think I can beat up on.

As you can guess from the build-up, I won a few hundred in that game. Had I lost, the build up would have sounded like this, "I really am more of a limit player, and don't like spread and no limit games because I don't ever get the pot odds for my draws and the sharks can isolate me easier, but I sat down anyway". Don't you hate it when dorks like me extrapolate wildly based on a small number of trials?

{Editor's Note: Yes.}

Fear not, I'm not about to claim I'm any kind of superior no-limit ring game player. No, my forte is actually no-limit heads-up freeze-outs played on airplanes...

And so the fun began...At 9:45 we file out of Bay 101 and head for Dave's van, which we traditionally take to the airport. Now, this van has no back seat, so it's always a priority to get the front seat. Otherwise, you're stuck on the hard floor (no carpeting) in the back. So, being the eight disciples of Roshambo, we decide to settle the matter like you knew we would -- a Roshambo tournament. Single elimination, until it's heads up. "Are you in Bruce?", somebody asks. (That should have been my clue that trouble was brewing...) Eight of us stand in a circle in the Bay 101 parking lot, getting eyed suspiciously by the security guards. I fail to notice covert snickering around the circle, as we get Ready, Set, Roshambo! Seven simultaneous "circles" appear below each waist, one ignorant sucker goes rock, then goes on massive tilt. Seven punches in the shoulder for me, leaving me almost paralyzed, and these assholes are 33% toward their goal of 20.

Of course, everybody is too busy laughing to hear me try to explain that I couldn't possibly have seen all seven circles at the same time. They chalk me up for 7 anyway, and someone whispers that the circle line on me is pretty much a lock. I really can't disagree.

San Jose Airport

We are bustling to get on the plane and start the freeze out tournaments that will give us first bragging rights for the trip, when somebody says (for the first of many times on the trip) "Hey, where the hell is Josh?"

Looking back, Josh is being thoroughly worked over by airport security, who seem convinced that he was planning to hi-jack a SouthWest flight to Vegas. It takes him several minutes to break away, at which point he joins us looking a tad flustered. Josh explains:

We are headed for Vegas, and we need to pass through security. Being the good traveler, I put my keys in the little dish so as to avoid any complications, but I end up being asked to stop, nonetheless. Apparently, there is a problem with the contents of my duffel bag.

I am quite confused, perhaps wondering if one of the Tiltboys has set me up. I had a lot packed into the bags--everything from poker supplies for use on the plane to nutritional supplements.

"What is that?" asks the woman handling security? She is pointing to something that looks very much like sticks of dynamite.

"I don't know," I responded. I was a little worried now, since I really couldn't figure it out. What were seconds seemed like, well, seconds by the time I realized what it was: poker chips.

I got to open the duffel ("slowly") and open the case ("slowly") before I was on my way to the gate again.

Then Phil and Rafe abscond with the chips and I never see or use them again for the trip.

I ended up sitting in a two row seat, so I play a couple of freezouts with Tony. He's very hesitant to play for more than a few dollars (could this be because last trip he joined a $50 no limit freezeout with Rafe and I and busted out in the first hand?) so by the time we got to Vegas I had won... $8.

Meanwhile, Rafe (airborne freezeout king that he is) worked Phil and Dave, helping him break the $500 mark before even arriving in Vegas and hence earning the coveted massage. Josh beat up on Johnny; the $10 Josh won on the plane was to be his only positive poker session.

Arriving in Vegas, we have to wait for the golfers to get their bags off the carousel, and endure the usual "first golf bag betting pool", "golf bag side bets" and "luggage volume over-under" betting lines. Dave of course gets his bag first, repeating his performance from the previous trip, and proceeds to break out his putter and win $20 on various carpet putting proposition bets ("okay, around the baggage carousel, down the wheelchair ramp, past security and out in 2").

Everybody finally has their bag and marches out of the luggage area, without bothering to show their luggage tags to the attendant. Phil however, gets stopped by the attendant and asked to see his tag, at which point he discovers that he left his return ticket and tag on the plane. And suddenly, to the amazement of the rest of us, Phil is on Mega-Overload-Tilt-From-Hell. Maybe it's because it's midnight and he's tired. Maybe it's because he missed out on Rafe's and my own great Bay 101 action. Maybe it's because the baggage check guy seemed to have it in for Phil, picking him to check while the rest of us walked right through. Maybe it's because the other Tiltboys are in tears laughing at Phil's predicament. For whatever reason, Phil just lays into this guy full force, while the guy gets more and more defensive and more and more stubborn, and continues to bar Phil's exit. Phil breaks out a pen and paper and takes down the guy's employee number. Phil assures the guy that he will lose his job if he persists in badgering Phil. Phil does everything but threaten to take out the guy's family, but Phil is still standing inside the luggage area with his golf bag, barred by this little old man. (Phil stands 6'9", and I'm pretty sure that if he was towering over me with that red-faced look like he was going to beat the shit out of me, I'd let him take the damn golf bag, even if he was stealing it.) Somebody finally convinces the guy that Phil is legitimate, and Phil storms through the gate ready to sue SouthWest for the expected value taken away from his poker time.

Phil wasn't the only one who was inflamed. Or should I say flamed? Dave explains:

We were in the cab from the airport to the hotel. Someone, probably Rafe, made a comment about a syntax error in some article that they had read. I responded, "Yeah, it's sort of like flammable and inflammable. They both mean the same thing." At that point, everyone in the cab turned around, looked at me like I was crazy (of course this is how they usually look at me), and made a few comments about the level of my intelligence. Although I was fairly certain I was right, everyone seemed to disagree with me. I figured that I was wrong, and I began to back down. Then the cabbie jumped into the argument and said, "Ya know, I think he is right, flammable and inflammable do mean the same thing."

That was all the convincing I needed. If a cabbie with a high school education agreed with me, I knew that I was right. Obviously, all of that higher education had screwed up everyone else's vocabulary. I immediately offered a $10 wager with anyone over the definition of the two words. Rafe took the bet, and paid me $10 in pennies two weeks later.

Mirage

Ah, yes, the familiar sights and sounds of the Mirage poker room, our home away from home. Chips clattering, smoke rising, players cursing. Boba the floorman's disconsolate sigh when he spots Rafe. The local wearing enough gold and diamonds to make your eyes water. The almost audible "snap" as another pair of pocket aces goes up in flames, reminding me that I want to play at the same table as Dave "Diceboy" Lambert sometime this trip.

The Tiltboys walk in like we own the place. We're all quickly seated, and before I've even played my first hand, Rafe comes by to report a massive snap Dave has just administered. Rafe was able to spend a lot of time watching Dave; they played at the same table most of the weekend. As Rafe reports:

Some people will argue with you over whether the best show in Vegas is the Cirque Du Soleil or Sigfried and Roy. These people are all misguided if you ask me. The best show in Vegas is watching Dave 'Dice Boy' Lambert play poker. Dave can drive a table from zero to mega-tilt in 10 minutes flat. Observing him in action has even lead us to extend the poker-theoretical concept of implied odds to its more useful form of "implied tilt odds."

When asked "Dave, how could you stay in with bottom pair and only the runner-runner flush draw against the local rock who will obviously not pay off your flush more than one bet even if you make it -- haven't you ever heard of implied odds?" the smug-grinned (Diceboy grins a lot) reply is "The implied tilt odds were huge. Did you see how he hemorrhaged his last $600 after I sucked out on him?"

Rafe stayed up watching Dave until 7 or 8 AM, by which time his sensibilities were so offended that he had to drop off to sleep. The rest of us dropped off one by one as well. Of course, every person was eager to be the first up and back into the card room, so they could earn the sleep deprivation title for the trip, which is awarded to whoever goes home with the least sleep after three days. Dave started this by sleeping only 7 hours during the entire first Vegas Trip, and even now, you have no hope of taking down the title if you sleep more than 9 or 10 hours during the three days.

Now I certainly don't intend to question this practice of ours, lest I be called a pussy endlessly, but on the whole, I have to believe that it doesn't make too much sense. We are all pilgrimaging to Vegas to win the most money we can at poker, a game that ostensibly requires some mental acumen (even if Diceboy says otherwise.) How this goal is furthered by sitting in the card room in a bleary sleep-eyed stupor, covertly looking around for other Tiltboys to find out whether you are the last one to go to bed, is well beyond me. Yet somehow I find myself caught up in the near-all-nighters every trip; I average 11 hours a trip. Of course, I've never won the title, but at least I haven't lost the Tiltboys' respect by trying to sleep a reasonable number of hours.

And so it was no surprise to arrive in the cardroom at 1 PM -- having slept fitfully for four hours and taken a long, hot shower in hopes of achieving some level of coherency -- and find most of the gang already playing. I played all day myself, getting up only when the call came to cash in our comps and eat dinner. I recall the significant hands in the course of this session, which I walked away from with a pretty $1500 profit (playing 20-40.)

Hand #1: I have JJ on the big blind. A rock raises it from middle position, and the button calls. I just call, figuring there is a very good chance I'm up against an overpair, and deciding to see what the flop brings. The flop: 3-4-6, two spades. I bet out, rock raises, loosey-goosey button calls. I just call, planning to lay down the turn if rock bets again. The turn is another spade (I have no spade in my hand), and I check as does the rock -- he's worried one of us made a flush. The lovely, cooperative button player bets, and I, fairly sure he doesn't have a flush, check-raise. The rock reads me for a flush and chucks his hand, and the button calls. I bet the river (a 9, I think) and the button calls with pocket 7s! Cha-ching! The rock later admitted to mucking QQ -- even begrudgingly told me I made a nice play.

Two Obligatory Bad Beat Hands

Hand#2: I have AA on the big blind. Somebody raises early, one caller, then the small blind calls. I make it three, the original raiser makes it four, the original caller caps, the conservative and tight small blind calls (no, this isn't foreshadowing or anything) and I call. Flop: K33, rainbow. I'm sure somebody has a K, and hope I'm not up against KK, so I check. Original better bets, second guy calls, small blind calls, I raise. First guy calls, so I don't put him on KK -- probably AK. Second guy folds, small blind raises! Ai-yaa! There's the KK. I just call, as does the other guy. Turn and river are blanks, me and the other guy call down the small blind. He then proudly turns over his T3 suited, and drags my $800 pot. This same guy had been playing so cautiously just prior, and had lost a lot on a few bad beats. He apparently went on tilt just before this hand, and as he stacked my pot, I heard him say, "I was stuck so much, I figured calling a big pot like that was the only way to get even." sigh.

Hand#3: I have QQ on the button. A maniac in middle position raises, a medium guy calls. I reraise, and it's just the three of us. The flop: 67Q. Checked to me on the flop, I bet, both call. Turn is a J. Checked to me, I bet, both call. River is an A -- oh joy! This should mean an extra call from the medium guy, right? The maniac bets out, medium guy calls, I raise, maniac re-raises! I stare at the board, already on tilt, as the medium guy folds and I have to call down and see the TK offsuit that beats me.

Enough bad beats. That night as we convened for dinner, I was able to hear the adventures of the other Tiltboy's, as recounted below by Rafe.

Sitting at a 10-20 table in Vegas on Saturday night at the Mirage I was playing and watching the Dice Boy Show in rare form. As usual he had everyone on tilt with his antics. Everyone was after him and he just kept racking up the chips. Snap after snap after snap. This one poor local grind-it-out pro was taking the brunt of Dave's high-variance style and was not very happy about it. Lambert kept getting extra bets out of him with lines like, "Boy you are paying off just like a slot machine tonight. Let me pull the handle here one more time..." Dave bets, guy steam calls, Dave goes "...cha-ching" and turns over the suckout nuts. Shortly thereafter, Dave is up about $1500, everyone else at the table is stuck, and he announces that he's going to go play some craps. Later I met up with him and he asked, "Should I be insulted that the game broke up as soon as I left?"

Josh wasn't anywhere to be seen all day. Of course, Josh wasn't anywhere to be seen for most of the trip, although we later pieced together that he had hung out with Perry a lot of the time, which accounted for the crazed look in his eyes on Monday morning when we gathered for the flight out. Nobody maintains proximity to "the Fried" for that length of time without some serious side-effects. He did play a little poker, but apparently wasn't enthused with his results. Josh explains:

Pocket aces. Multiple pre-flop bets. Flop comes Axx, all spades. Some guy had J9 of spades. Not the worst beat in the world, but perhaps a microcosm of the way poker went for me.

In two times around the table, I had KK (twice), QQ (once), AKs (once), and (if memory serves) AK offsuit. I remember the pocket kings and the AKs in that those hands got two callers with capped pre-flop betting. One hand I lost against a 52 of diamonds on a runner-runner flush (no pair on flop). On the hand where I had AKs, I lost to Q3 (same suit) on a 3 on the river. In each of these big hands, I was the leader pre-flop against drunken loons. Oh well.

A7s on button. Not a great hand, but with no raises before the flop, why not? Flop comes A63, rainbow. A guy who has been completely tight bets. Since I haven't seen him bet without top pair, I feel like folding, but decide to call. The turn comes a 7. He bets, I raise, he calls. I now put him on either worse aces up or an ace and a good kicker. The river is a 3. He shows me 3s full of 6s.

Josh wasn't too much the worst for having spent as much time as he did taking bad beats and watching Perry in action. He did mention reading the Magician' Sculpture in front of the Mirage as "Sig, Fried and Roy" on Sunday night -- a minor Perry-induced delusion. I'm sure, however, that the ripple effects of this trip will be felt by Josh for years to come in strange neurotic flashes, such as sudden spontaneous cravings for black crayons. (Don't worry, this will make sense later.) Here's the rest of Josh's Saturday, in his own words:

I have just received a lecture from a guy who, in a 1-4-8-8 spread game, ALWAYS bets weak with a marginal hand, so you know you have him dominated if you have top pair. Better still, he does this a lot, and he is sitting on my right. So, three times, I raise him the full bet to get him heads up only to have him suck out on me on the river, and, EVEN BETTER, to have him explain, "I never raise until I have a complete hand because people catch up. You will lose a lot of money betting on the future." And then he would shake his head as if he were disappointed in me as a human being. Oh, what a joy Saturday night was.

Anyway, after being put on hyper-tilt by this bozo, I decided to retreat to Treasure Island to play some cheap blackjack, a game that I am notoriously poor at playing. Perry shows up, and it is clear that he is planning on a night full of Green Apples. I am Tripe Boy, so I cannot drink alcohol, but it appears that Perry can do the job for both of us.

At some point, I get two 8s against a 7 which has me psyched since I had a $13 bet on the hand (a lot for me). So, I split 'em, get another 8, split those, get ANOTHER 8, and I end up with 19, 18, 21, and 18. I figure CHA-CHING but then the dealer shows a 4 for an 11 total. Not to fear. Along comes a 3 and then, you know it, an 8. At this point, I start to explain to the dealer how I "use the 8 like a weapon."

Two hands later, same shoe, I get two more 8s against a 9. I hate this sort of thing, but I still have to split them. I hit another 8, get 18, get a 3, double down and hit 21, and then get another 18. After hitting the 21, Perry and I are both going nuts about the "8 like a weapon" business. After the dealer goes bust and I win 4 bets at $30 a pop (my biggest wager ever on blackjack), the dealer is rolling his eyes. Whatever 8s were left in the deck seemed to pop up in time to match my 13s against 10s, or show up in the dealer's hand to do just enough to let me win. It was beautiful. We are winning, after being almost cleared out.

So I'm on this rush and I get an ace, and as the dealer slides out the second round of cards, Perry and I are shouting, "... he steals the puck at center ice (seat 3 gets card), he's in on goal (seat 4 gets card), he SHOOTS (Perry gets card), HE SCORES (I get a Q)." The dealer is totally on tilt. I realize, as I stack my red chips, that if I were anyone else in the group (except maybe Tony or Johnny) I would be up a couple grand with this run.

On the next shoe, third hand, I get a pair of 8s against a 10. I get pissed when only one of them wins (the other was a push). Perry has had many Green Apples and continuously debates whether to hit 15s and 16s against a 7 (AIII-YAA!) and one hand has a soft 15 against a 7. I try to tease him by suggesting that maybe he should stay with his soft 15 because "you never know if the next card will bust the dealer." He points out the obvious, "But I am soft," he says and hits a jack. "Are you hard now?" I ask him. The dealer actually grins and half the table is laughing pretty solidly. Of course, the dealer reveals a 9 underneath and then hits a 3 to make 19 and crush us both. Fortunately, Perry is a little to tipsy to realize what's happening.

I am convinced that this is the strategic advantage that Perry has to which the rest of us can only aspire. He starts out so far away from the "normal" thought process (a state that for most others would be described as "on tilt") that nothing can faze him.

So, Perry and I both won a few bucks and we go for food. Then came the moment which would have me out of sorts for the duration of the weekend. Up until this point, all the music we had heard in the casinos was along the lines of The Carpenters, Carly Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, etc. The kind of stuff you think of when you think casino or elevator. But all of the sudden, this Del Amitri tune, not more than a month or two in the record stores, hits the casino. I am in disbelief. And it was just the beginning. They kept piping in contemporary music for hours. How is one supposed to concentrate with modern rock being played in a casino?

I had to go to sleep. So I did.

Kotter meets the "Fried"

Then came a story that would be a thematic highlight for the trip. Thematic, in that: a) it involved Perry unintentionally putting somebody on tilt, as he does consistently and completely by accident, just by being himself, and b) it involved Gabe Kaplan, who you by now have noticed is a recurring element in this trip report.

In the course of playing that day I had heard several people whispering that Gabe Kaplan was playing 3 way pot-limit at the corner table, and appeared to be on tilt.

When I got up to eat dinner, I watched a few hands, and the last one I saw was Kaplan raising a pot-sized bet ($3000) on the flop and getting called by a flush-draw, which got there. Kaplan had flopped the nut set. I mention this to the gang, and everybody starts cracking up. Then Perry takes credit for Kaplan being on tilt, which I ignore until everybody else confirms it. Perry explains:

So, I'm hanging out just outside the poker room at the Mirage telling Stern, Dice, and Phil about the goings on in the lobby of TI with myself, Rafe, and this random woman who I challenged to a roshambo match. (I cleaned up 5 to 0). Well, as usual I was talking loudly when from the high rollers table a familiar face turns around and says "would you please take it somewhere else." It was Gabe "Welcome Back Kotter" Kaplan. Resisting my urge to say "Sure thing, Mr Kot-TAIR!" or to reply with the Vinnie Barbarino "Who? {you!} What? {you're talking too loud!} Where? ..." I merely quieted down a bit and continued. So we get ready to head out for craps when Stern says "OK. From here on, I don't want to hear the 'S' word." So I turn to Stern and say "What 'S' word?" He says, quietly, "Seven." To which I loudly say "Oh! I thought you meant 'SWEATHOG!'" OK, maybe I had had a few too many green apples already.

Perry may have single-handedly be responsible for Gabe Kaplan losing thousands that day. As if that wasn't enough, Perry later put numerous tourists to Caesar's Palace on tilt. Phil and Russ where hitting on two ladies, and Perry offered to get lost and leave the four alone. Apparently, one of the women asked Perry to hang around and protect her from Russ, since she already had a boyfriend. In any case, the five of them found themselves walking by Ceasar's fountain, when Phil calls Perry on a dare we had discussed during the Wednesday Night game. Perry agreed that for the right amount, he would swim through the fountain. The "right amount" turns out to be $10, which Phil produces. Perry takes the plunge. According to Phil, Perry actually did "the elementary backstroke" for at least 10 yards, before getting out, wringing out his shirt, and then walking into Mirage dripping a torrent.

Another dare we had discussed on Wednesday was Perry eating a playing card while playing poker or blackjack. Fortunately for us, and probably more fortunately for Perry, he wasn't able to follow through on this one:

I never did eat a card. I did spend most of the trip trying to get a card to eat. Among my attempts were:

• Asking them for a card when they'd bring in new decks.
• Simply asking for a card.
• And the most elaborate play of all. I am sitting playing blackjack when I notice that a seven of spades is cracked on the corner. I point it out to the dealer, with whom I have a good rapport, but my mind was actually far more devious. Clearly, it CAN'T be to my advantage to report a marked card. It may not be a big edge, especially for the stakes I was playing, but still, why give up anything? Well, because I figured if he took the card out of play, I might actually get a chance to EAT the card, thereby earning the respect, and money, of the fellow Tiltboys. This dealer decided to play on, but the next dealer took it out when I pointed it out to him. The floorman was called over and I asked him if I could eat the card. He looked at me kinda weird, and then to reassure him that I wouldn't use it to cheat, I told him I'd eat it right there at the table. He left, came back, took the card. And then came back again and gave me a full deck and said to put it in my pocket! Aii-yah! OK, so I didn't get to eat a real card that was in play, but I did get a free deck of canceled cards.

As for the dealer with whom I had the good rapport, well, he had spent much of the evening pointing out some gorgeous women (and there were plenty of them, this being a fight weekend and all). Well, at one point one of the fellow tiltboys had was watching me play and I can't exactly say what overcame me but the mood was rather wacky at the time and the dealer had just pointed someone out and we were joking around so I asked him "Have you seen one of these?" The dealer, of course, looked and in due fashion I punched him in the right arm and wiped it off. A stare of disbelief encompassed the table but not a word was spoken and the game went on. Ay yah! One dealer circled and punched. Add it to the books. Hell, if I can't eat a card...

By the way, if you're thinking to yourself -- "Maybe this Perry guy isn't as weird as the Tiltboys make him out to be. Sure, he swims in Ceasar's fountain and drinks Green Apples by the score, but at least he doesn't eat playing cards." -- you should know that just to prove the point, Perry ate a KEM plastic playing card at the next week's home game (an event precedented by his eating a perfect five-card low in college). Not to mention what happened at breakfast Sunday morning, as Rafe tells it:

Breakfast at the Mirage is usually a no brainer. Just order the American Breakfast from the Caribe Cafe, which gives you two eggs any style, hash browns, bacon or sausage, toast, etc. Well, that is unless they have a fresh stock of Keno crayons! Perry swears by 'em. But then Perry has been known to eat flowers, fliers, and other things you might find on the tables of a college food service. Often there's money involved, but sometimes it's just because Perry decides that doing it is a better idea than not doing it. So when Perry, Josh, Tony, Tony's brother (who none of us had met), and I sat down for breakfast on Saturday, Perry immediately seized the opportunity: "How much would you guys pay me to eat the Keno crayon?" Having seen his schtick before, and because I was pretty sure it would get a rise out of Tony's brother, I tried to think of the minimum it would cost me to get him to eat the crayon. "I'll toss in a buck," I said, along with a few others. "Deal," says Perry. It took less than a minute for Perry's mouth to turn completely black, and for Tony's brother to turn green. Best dollar I ever spent.

Josh corroborates the experience:

How much would it take to get you to eat a crayon?

In the case of Perry Friedman, it costs $3. Tony, Rafe, and I all chipped in to watch Perry eat a keno crayon. Tony's brother, sitting across from Perry at our table, only sat and watched in disbelief.

Incidentally, I suggest to those of you who even dabble remotely in keno that paying someone to eat a keno crayon offers a far better return on investment than using the crayon to play keno.

That weekend I heard this story about four times, and in each case somebody mentioned the look on Tony's brother's face. Apparently the guy was absolutely aghast. He was here on a business trip from Australia, and I'm sure his impression of Tony's American friends will be a lasting one.

Statistical Deviants

The final discussion of dinner was to be a monumental, almost religious experience. Certainly the conclusion took on religious importance, the conclusion being that Dave is indeed Six Sigma Man. Dave remembers it thusly:

This started over dinner. Phil posed the question, "Do you believe that there are people in this world who vastly over or underperform their expectation over their entire lives?" (Keep in mind that he is saying this after getting stuck $1200 counting cards at Blackjack.:-) Rafe and I insist that there are no such people because everyone goes through life with so many trials that it would be statistically impossible to vastly over or underperform one's expectation in the long run. I'm not quite clear what happened next, but I think that I hinted at the fact that Phil was obviously referring to himself as underperforming. I think that Phil then retorted, "shut up Six-Sigma boy," referring to my apparent overperformance of expectation in the recent (and some might argue, distant) past.

Yes. For those who haven't gleaned this yet, there are some among us in the group who think the Diceboy's prowess at the craps table, and his winning at poker despite a penchant for playing hands that Malmuth would politely call, "ABSOLUTE FUCKING TRASH", (at least that's what he'd call them after Dave had snapped him off with one) all indicate that Dave is one of those rare individuals who lives on the far right hand side of the normal distribution for luck meted out over one's lifetime. The consensus is that he's actually about six sigmas out. A sort of statistical singularity, if you will. No wonder he's always got that damn self-assured grin on, even when he's drawing slim against you in a huge pot. Rafe helps illustrate Dave's knack:

Here's a typical example from one time when Dave and I were traveling in London and we stopped at one of the card clubs to see what poker was like in the U.K. (at least this is how I remember it ;-):

Diceboy and a Brit are head's up on the river in a hand which the Brit raised preflop under the gun. Flop had come AA2, turn 2, river 2. Dave leads into him every round, the guy raises every time, and Dave calls, except the river which he reraises. The Brit now is thinking what to do.

Dave: You have an ace? I thought so. I started 3-2 off, and just sucked out, so you should probably fold. Unless you want to donate, in which case you should probably raise again.

Brit: [frown]

Dave: Ahh, that frown is a tell. I think you are going to fold. Nice laydown.

Brit: Listen up you young hooligan, you might be able to get away with coffeehousing in the colonies, but here in Great Britian we frown on that sort of thing.

Dave: Aha! I put you on a stuffy British attitude. I just won another 5 pounds in a side bet with my friends. I could tell just by looking at you that I was locked.

Brit: [tilt]. Raise!

Dave: Well, I guess you've got me. I should probably lay down, but instead I'll pop it back once more. If you call, I'll muck though. I'll even show you one card. [exposes the 3]. If you have pocket aces, you should raise.

Brit: [mega tilt]. I raise, you imbecilic twit.

Dave: Did you know that 'imbesilic' and 'besilic' actually mean the same thing? The cabbie on the way here told me. I'll just call.

Brit: [flips over AK]

Dave: Nut full house no good! Runner-runner quad deuces! [flips the 2, does his body-builder's clench]. Grrrrrr!!!

Brit: [hard power tilt, wings the cards at Dave and says] How can you bet and call me the entire way with that fucking trash, you bloody fool?!?!?!

Dave: Didn't anyone tell you? I live about six sigmas out on the tail of the normal distribution. My adjusted odds makes me a 3-1 favorite to win with 2-3 offsuit. I can't believe you called me with AK suited.

Floorman: [Hears the Brit screaming and comes over]. I'm sorry sir, but we have strict rules against throwing cards and using profanity here. I'm afraid I'm going to have to have you removed.

Brit: [froths at the mouth and screams unintelligible profanities at the top of his lungs as the security guards drag him out]

Dave: [to the rest of the table]: Geez, that guy should take it easy, he could burst a blood vessel in his brain. Kinda reminds me of the time I was in India and was playing a no-limit karmic freezout with the Dalai Lama. Good player, the Dalai, but has a tendency to go on tilt. So anyway, I put him all-in with 3-2 and snapped his pocket kings. He wanted to pay me cash instead of karma, but I didn't fall for that trick. I've got good karma for the next twenty years now. So I've got that going for me...

And the conclusion stands. Dave is Diceboy, and Six-Sigma-boy, and has proved and will continue to prove that there is no such thing as a "negative-expectation game" where he is concerned. He's already beaten the Normal Distribution to a pulp at poker, craps and the stock market. I personally refuse to buy a lottery ticket whenever Dave does, choosing instead to take a piece of his action. I wait with eager anticipation for the day Dave appears on the Big Spin, rolls five consecutive "doubles" followed by the top prize, then turns to the camera in a muscle-clench and "Grrrrs" at 50 million people. If anybody can bankrupt the California Lotto, it's Dave.

Now I'm not going to make outrageous claims like that with out substantiating them. The very next night, Dave dropped by the poker room and casually mentioned that he was thinking about going and shooting the dice a bit. Four Tiltboys immediately dove out of their chairs and grabbed him, dragging him to the nearest craps pit. We find a $10 table, and eagerly wait for the dice to pass to Dave. They first have to pass through the hands of some rather dangerous looking black dudes. (No I'm not prejudiced. These guys had the jewelry, the attitude, the pagers... let's just say that if you were looking for some stimulants, I think there's a pretty good chance these guys could have provided them.) The bad dudes shot horribly, and dropped a couple grand before passing the dice to Dave. So they weren't in very good moods, while we, knowing that Dave was about to shoot, were. As soon as the dice touched Dice's hand, we started in with our craps chant. This creative and poetic mantra had served us good stead at many previous sessions, and we weren't about to stop now. "Dave is DiceBoy, Dave is DiceBoy, (ad nauseum)." Beautiful, ain't it? Somehow our table companions didn't think so. "What the fuck is this dice-boy shit?", says one. "Cut out that dice-boy crap", says another. "Fuck dice-boy," says a third. At least, that's what they said at first. 10 minutes later, when they were all up a couple grand, they were singing a different tune: "Dave is da dice-boyyyyyy!" No, I am not making this up. 3 bad-ass dudes joined in the chant until Dave sevened out after shooting for 15 minutes, and accepted a high-five from each of them. Soon we were all feeling pretty chummy, smoking stogies and just waiting for the dice to come around again. Stern was going nuts and almost got kicked out when he tried to take a dealer's head off while high-fiving across the table.

But back to Saturday. Phil hadn't been seen very often in the poker room, and it turned out that this was because he had taken one too many bad beats and had decided to count down some blackjack decks and do some scamming instead. He didn't get off to a good start, though, as Perry describes:

OK, so I'm playing BJ and Phil is counting cards and betting on my hand when it's right, and is waiting for a chair to open up. To my right is a beautiful young women sitting down and a friend of hers standing up. Phil and I are flirting, with Phil being the aggressive flirter that he is and practically propositioning them. A guy leaves and suddenly someone else sits in his place. I don't know why Phil wasn't alert and didn't take the seat right away, but he tells the guy that he's been waiting for the seat and the guy blows him off. Phil starts really getting on the guy, making comments about him and rooting against his cards and so on. The women to my right leave in consternation and tell Phil off for being a jerk.

Here's strike two, again from Perry's perspective:

Phil was hitting on this one woman (same that went to Caesar's) and we meet up with some drunk/stupid guys. This one guy is also hitting on her. Well, he starts saying how he is so in with her and Phil is like "Well, we'll see who Jen goes home with" or something like that, and the guy says (looking dumbfounded, or at least dumb) "Who's Jen?" Phil is laughing too hard to straighten this out, and a few minutes later these girls take off.

This only appeared to be strike two. Phil later proved to still be the Scam-King, in the following incident which put him on ultra-tilt.

Bruce Tilts Phil Without Even Trying

Sunday morning when I enter the room, the message light on my phone is lit, and I figure it's a message from the guys before they left to play Golf. I'm none too coherent as I pick up the phone for the message, and I'm somewhat surprised to discover that Mirage has voicemail instead of a live operator. So I listen to the message, at which point it is deleted automatically. The message just says something like, "Hi, this is Jen, I just wanted you to know I had fun and would really like to hook up, so give me a call." No mention of who she's calling for, no phone number. Not having been around Phil yesterday, I had no idea who Jen was. Probably a wrong number. I fell asleep and forgot the message completely until Sunday night at dinner, when Phil mentions being on tilt about this Jen girl who never called. At that point, some dim light cuts through the fog and I hazily mention that I think I got a voicemail from her (turns out Phil had given her the wrong room number.) Phil immediately leaps to his feet, grabs me by the collar and attempts to shake some details out of me. He is fully spasing out, but I'm am just too confused and can't recreate the message. Rafe and Perry are busting up in the corner at Phil's predicament, and while I feel helpless for not being able to offer any information, I have to giggle a bit as well. Phil is tilting more and more, and starting to look like he did when that baggage check guy barred his way at the airport. Unfortunately, this time he remained barred, as we were never able to piece together how to get a hold of Jen. Phil missed out on his best opportunity -- two ships in the night and all that -- and also missed out on his over line for scoring. Such is the life of the Tiltboy Scam King.

As for Strike 3, Phil would be able to watch instead of live it. Phil tells it:

So, sometime around 1:00 Saturday night Russ finds me at the blackjack table lamenting my terrible luck. I'm stuck like a pig, and not at all happy about it. The only thing I have to show for it is a great buzz...

Russ: Phil, let's go check out the women scene around here.

Me: [always eager to scam, and remembering the over/under scoring line has yet to be filled] I'm in, of course, just don't tell Perry, or else we won't have a prayer!

Russ: [in a most reverent religious tone] Amen to that!

So, we walk around to the Carribean dance joint and start talking to some girls. Need I remind you? Russ is a New Yorker. As such, he has no fear of the approach -- I'm no slouch in that respect either, so the two of us were hitting on just about anything that moved and had breasts. It was a total blast. We're at it for about an hour when Russ meets "Tanya", a really good looking Asian woman dressed in an outfit to kill.

We decide to go to the Mirage piano lounge for a drink. Sit down, Russ and Tanya are getting along really well. Now, I'm pretty naive when it comes to the Vegas prostitute scene, so it didn't strike me at all odd when she said she was in town for a "convention" and out on the town by herself...

I eventually get bored watching Russ try to angle Tanya. I notice that the piano player has quit -- I'm up for it. So, acting like I own the joint, I walk right up, stuff a dollar or two into the brandy glass on top of the piano, and start twinkling the keys. There were about four couples in the lounge at the time. When I started, people were a little shocked that the Mirage was classy enough to hire a piano player to play for the 3AM shift, even if he was wearing rumpled jeans and a Tiltboy t-shirt and looking broke and very, very tired.

I sat there and played my heart out for about an hour, which totally relaxed me and hopefully the other patrons of the bar. My professional piano playing debut -- at the Mirage no less! Highlight of the evening came after a particularly stirring rendition of "Arthur's Theme" when some guy came up and stuffed $1.25 into my tip jar. Hey, another 600 hours and I'll be unstuck for the trip!

Brief Golf Summary

But Phil had other reasons to be on tilt, as Rafe describes from the golf game Sunday morning:

Golf was surprisingly uneventful given the amount of sleep deprivation everyone was on. But, of course two things can always be counted on: 1) Dave putting Phil on mega-tilt, and 2) me losing to Phil on the skins match, but angling him out of larger proposition bets.

Phil, to his credit, tried to avoid the former by taking me in confidence before the round and saying, "Rafe, you gotta help me out. Please ride in the cart with me this time. I'm already feeling a no-sleep-tilt coming on and I'll lose it if I ride with the Diceboy. Please?" Of course, being the nice guy that I am, I consoled Phil by telling him that I'd ride with him, and I wouldn't try to angle him any more than necessary to win the bets. In the middle of this conversation, Dave comes up and says (unaware of what we were talking about), "Hey Phil, I assume you and I are riding together, right?" As if taken over by lurking demons, contrary to the immediate conversation we had just had, Phil's tilt-meter goes off and I hear him say "Of course!" I just walked away shaking my head. By the seventh hole, Dave has Phil in such a lather that, after missing a key putt for several skins, Phil wings his putter into the sand trap, and breaks the head clean off.

The second inevitable came on the 18th hole, when Phil was about 100 yards from the green, I gave him 7-1 odds on $10 that he wouldn't be up and down in two from where he was. (My reasoning was that, while those were about true odds, if he didn't flub the first shot --a not uncommon scenario -- the putt for $70 would have him shaking like a leaf and he'd be locked out.) He made a decent pitch shot to within 15 feet of the hole, but he had a tough putt, and, it being hard to putt with your hand shaking like a widow's vibrator, missed. This profit helped make up for my skins-match debacle.

For those of you who appreciated the much longer and more detailed golf report from the last trip, too bad. I mean, sorry. Fact of the matter is, everybody was so incoherent and sleepy that the golfers could barely piece together what had happened. Rafe of course remembers his successful angles, and since "Phil on tilt when golfing with Dave" is pretty much a redundancy, he remembers that. But descriptions of the brilliant weapons that Dave uses to repeatedly drive Phil into the depths of tiltdom are unfortunately lost, at least until the next trip...

The Math Brain Speaks Up

During the cab ride back from golf, Tony, Math Brain that he is (he could tell you whether you had pot odds on a 4-way side pot, drawing to a double-gutter with one over-card and a flush draw on the board, down to the penny) would demonstrate his great talent. Rafe tells the story best:

In the cab on the way back from golf, we continued to talk about people who were way off their expectation in stochastic events over the course of their lifetime. How many Diceboy's really exist? Some of us were arguing that it would be nearly impossible for such people to exist. A lifetime of betting is a long enough run for the proverbial long-run to kick in for everyone. We decided to get practical about it and do some calculations.

Assume for the sake of argument that the every person has the equivalent of 30,000 coin-flips that they wager on in their lifetime. We agreed that if someone were to be off by 2000 or more from the expectation of 15,000 heads (i.e. had more than 17,000 or less than 13,000 heads) then they'd be considered in Diceboy's league. Several of us guessed that with 5 Billion people on the planet, not one would be expected to accomplish this feat. Others, like the more statistically brilliant among us, guessed that at one in every 50-100 Million people would. "And furthermore", says Tony 'Math Brain' Glenning, "I'd be willing to wager on that."

The true answer, we discovered after doing the calculations back home, is that only one in 10^105 people would be expected to accomplish such a feat. Ai-yaaa! (and cha-ching!) See Math Brain Tilt. Tilt Tony Tilt.

Dave came back from the golf game in exceedingly high spirits, his patented Diceboy grin practically splitting skin. He was in such good spirits that he immediately sat down in the 20-40 game I was playing at, instead of working his way up as he usually does. Finally, I would get to play at the same table as Diceboy and witness the six sigma phenomenon first-hand. "Just remember to stay out of his way," I thought to myself, as he unloaded his rack and asked the table at large: "Okay, who's going to double me up first?"

Cooking Cooke

And the answer turned out to be... (no, not Gabe Kaplan) Roy Cooke! Yes, within twenty minutes I would witness, though not be involved in, the following slaughter:

Roy pops it from middle position, Dave calls on the button, one of the blinds makes it 3, called around. 5 handed pot, $300 already in there. Flop comes King, blank, blank. 3 suits. Checked to the guy on Dave's right, who bets. Dave calls, all fold to Cooke, who check-raises. Dave and the other guy call. Turn is an 8 of the fourth suit. Cooke bets, other guy folds, Dave calls. River is an 8, Cooke bets, Dave raises! ("Ai-fricking-yaa!", says me to myself. "Diceboy has done it again!") Sure enough, Cooke calls and disgustedly mucks his AK when Dave shows his A8s! I casually pointed out to Dave that runner-runner flush and runner-runner 8's were his only outs, since his Ace draw was dead. He shrugs, grins, plays with the money, tips his straw hat to Cooke for the payoff, and generally appears to not realize that he is surfing the whitewater of the Normal Distribution curve. Six-Sigma boy lives!

Then, I guess I must confess, I somehow got caught up in Six-Sigma fever, or was it beat-up-on-Cooke fever? A couple of hands later, I have a 89s on the small blind and call a 1-raise 5 way pot. The big blind of course feels he must reraise, and the original raiser (Cooke) puts in 4, so here I am with a mediocre hand in a $400 pot. The flop is A56, one of my suit. Now usually in this position, I would call one bet but not two. This time however, when it came to me as two bets, I called (I was pretty sure the original better wasn't making it three.) The turn was a 6, and for some reason it got checked around. The river was a blessed 7, which I bet and got called in two places, including Cooke with, yup: an AK. He was an idiot for checking the turn -- cost me 4 big bets. I drag a beaut, high five Dave and start thinking I like this high-variance stuff. Then I realize that this way madness lies, unless you're the Diceboy. When I fully grasped this, I took my $800 profit for the session and walked, as Roy shook his head disgustedly. I think Dave stayed and snapped him around a bit more.

The Blackjack Debacle

I managed to find Rafe, getting ready to go hang out and drink with Phil, Perry and Johnny who are playing blackjack. Phil is counting, and Johnny is coattailing, trying to vary his bets along with Phil. Perry is of course doing his own thing, paying no attention whatsoever to the deck count, as long as he can keep chugging those green apples. He'd had at least 10 when I got there.

Shortly thereafter, the count goes way up, and Phil bets $100. Then I see an amazing sight. Johnny bets the same amount! Without even thinking about it! This is the same Johnny who deliberates a $1 call on Wednesday's as if he won't be able to eat Thursday if he loses. I stare at Rafe with my jaw open, and Rafe says that Johnny's been coattailing Phil the whole time. I look at Johnny again, and he shrugs, carefree, even as the dealer collects his losing bet. We must be in Vegas, this is too weird. And it was to get weirder.

A few hands later, Phil bets $300. Ah, I say to myself, he's just trying to shake Johnny. No way Johnny matches that bet. What... Johnny, what the hell are you doing?!? Johnny appears oblivious, like he's in some hypnotized state and just performing actions automatically. No indication that he's risking more on one hand then he wins or loses in the home game in a year. Phil, whispering something about the shoe being +25, puts another $100 on top of Perry's $5 bet. Johnny does likewise.

Perry threatens to hit the hand to 29 unless Phil and Johnny pay him off for space usage. Phil hits Perry.

Then I watched in slow motion as the dealer hit 3 cards to his 13 to score a 20, beating all three of the Tiltboy hands for a total of $805. And suddenly, Johnny seems to gain comprehension of what's happening. 'Course, it's a little late at this point -- but suddenly his face looks like somebody who's just dropped 4 bills in 20 seconds. Fortunately, he doesn't look like he's going to slit his wrists or anything, but I decide I've watched about as much as I can bear. I have a new respect for "Coffee" Johnny. He and Phil would go on to a session score of only losing 100-200 each, so it wasn't all a bloodbath. (Phil at one point earlier in the day was stuck a $1000 from poker and blackjack. With the deck at +20, he bet the big black and got even in 3 hands! Ai-yaaa!)

The Stranger Side of Stern

Meanwhile Dave had left the poker table up seven bills and joined us, reporting that Roy Cooke had got up to go when he saw Dave leaving. At that point Rafe said something that triggered a hilarious memory for me: he said, "Have you guys noticed that Mike is acting weird?" I started laughing because Mike had actually done two weird things in my presence that day, both baffling me, and I had intended to ask these guys whether he was okay.

The first was, he had sat down at a game I was playing in, looked right at me without saying anything, and just started cackling. He laughed for a couple of seconds while unloading his rack, smiled conspiratorially at me and never said a word. If he was trying to avoid giving the impression that we knew each other by not talking to me, he failed miserably. If he was trying to entertain and confuse me, he succeeded admirably. But not nearly so much as the other strange thing he did.

I was playing at a different table a little later, and Mike walked up to the table and beckoned me. It was the beginning of a new deal, but I got up anyway and missed a hand or two to hear what he had to say. I mean, it had to be important if he's calling me away from the table in the middle of the game like that. Maybe he knows that there are partners at the table, or knows of a really juicy game with an open seat? So I slide out and walk up to him a couple of yards away, where he whispers: "That lady in seat 3? She'll always call before the flop if she has an Ace in her hand." I kind of laugh, I mean, he's gotta be joking right? He didn't just want to tell me that, right? Wrong. He walks away with a self-content smile, his burden lifted by telling me that somehow critical piece of information. I went back to my game and puzzled over the riddle hidden in these seemingly simple words. Never did solve it, either.

So I relate this to Rafe, and he and Dave go ballistic. It turns out they have had almost identical experiences with Mike! Dave recounts:

Rafe and I had noticed Stern was exhibiting some psychotic tendencies. We were trying to figure out if he was on drugs, and, if so, what drug, or if his sleep deprivation was so massive that only the prime numbered neurons in his brain were firing.

Here are two of the strange encounters I had with Mike:

Stern comes up to me while I'm at a poker table and in a hushed, secretive tone whispers "she's gonna get him" in my ear. He then lets out a slight laugh, like an insane physics professor who's been sniffing glue, and returns to his table without any explanation. I am left completely baffled.

Russ and I walk up to use a phone that is near the table where Mike is playing. Mike looks at me, gets a very concerned look on his face, and blurts out, completely of the blue "man Dave, are you ok? Is something wrong? I'm really worried about you, lets go and talk." I tell him that I'm fine, but Mike is unconvinced. He insists that something is wrong and tells me I look like I am about to cry. (I had just cashed out +$700 from a 20-40 game having had a great suck-out on Roy Cooke, so sadness and misery were about the last things on my mind.) I insist again that everything is ok and I spend the next two minutes convincing him of that fact in front of his table. The other players at his table were trying not to stare, but were too bewildered not to.

Here's Rafe's version:

Let me just add that this was Sunday night, and Mike had had about 2 hours of sleep the entire trip. I was playing with him at the 10-20 table and he's acting really weird. At one point he says to me in a hushed conspiratorial tone. "Rafe, remind me to tell you something later". Thinking that he was going to criticize my play of the hand before which I thought I played correctly even though I lost, I say, "Okay, Mike, whatever". Realizing I was blowing him off a bit, he says in an even more serious tone, "Something important." Getting the feeling he is about to reveal some deep dark secret, I say, "Okay, Mike, let's go walk around and talk some." He rejects this idea and goes back to his alternation between mania and brooding.

About an hour later I ran into Dave and Bruce sweating Phil, Johnny and Perry at the blackjack table and overheard them talking about how Mike is acting funny. I got all excited because now I knew I'm wasn't imagining things and proceeded to tell them my story. We were debating whether Mike a) has dropped acid, b) is really sleep deprived and starting to hallucinate, or c) is loonier than we've all given him credit for in the past. The debate turned into a philosophical discussion of various drugs and which of them would make him act like he's acting. We narrowed it down to several likely candidates but thought that, since he hadn't offered us any, the smart money was on options b) or c).

And, as if simply acting weird isn't enough, Stern also spends the whole trip proving to us that he is more superstitious than a Vietnamese rice farmer. Stern is a Stanford grad computer programmer who works for Oracle, and actually took a year off to play poker professionally. Not the type of person you generally put on a superstitious bent. But witness, as Dave explains:

I walk by Mike while he's playing craps. I ask him how things are going and he replies, in a serious tone "things are going fine, but this guy next to me is starting to spook me out." (of course, he is saying this across the table so that everyone can hear him.) I ask him why, and Mike says, "he's been using the 'S' word." I say "what?" and Mike whispers quietly, so that the craps gods don't hear him, "he's been saying 'seven.'" I suggest that he come with myself and Perry to play at a different table. He agrees.

At this new table things are going very well. We're all up a lot. Mike is rolling and hits his mark. He his about to start to roll again when Perry yells as a joke, "come on seven!" Mike's eyes light up, he jumps back five feet, pushes Perry out of the way, and yells at the top of his lungs "Friedman, are you insane?!?" (obvious projection) "I can't believe you just did that!!!" Within five seconds, Mike has grabbed all his chips off of the table and is running away. Perry, myself, and the rest of the table just stand there silent with our mouths hanging open.

Anyway, we decided that we would be unable to resolve the question of Stern's state of mind without actually joining him in it ourselves -- a prospect that personally gave me the heebie-jeebies to no end. The discussion turned to Dave's apparently endless knowledge about recreational substances. He kept Rafe and I enthralled by revealing to us such gems as:

"Actually, there are no physiological side effects from heroin usage, providing you don't overdose."

and

"Did you know it's impossible to overdose on acid? You body stops assimilating it after a certain saturation level."

As Rafe remembers it:

We were just a bit intrigued with the Diceboy's rather extensive firsthand knowledge of various recreational pharmaceuticals, and the discussion continued for an hour or so as we pounded free drinks intended for the Tiltboys playing blackjack. I was vaguely aware of the parallel between our conversation and Stern's own interpretive rendition of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To top off the surreality of it all, I happened to glance over at the blackjack table where Johnny (Mr. agonize-for-hours-over-a-$2-bet in our home poker game) spread his bet from $5 (which he'd been betting all night) up to $300 in a desperate attempt to take advantage of a +24 count, mumbling all the while something like, "that Kelly guy never did know how to bet a rush".

Dave was a veritable walking encyclopedia of drug knowledge. As I stood there caught up in his stories, I began surmising that I too could become a Six-Sigma boy by wandering down that path of psychedelic experiences that Dave has traveled and gaining that same adventurous and carefree attitude. But no, there is and only ever will be one Diceboy, as proven statistically above. What would happen to the home game if more than one of us consistently caught our diminishing outs? The poker table just isn't big enough for more than one Lambert Clench.

The Expedition

The conversation ended as the Blackjack mavericks got up, Johnny wiping the sweat that was heavily beaded on his forehead. At that point, all of us were kind of swaying in a sleep-deprived delirium, barely able to stand. So Phil came up with a great idea: let's hit a strip club! This would be a Tiltboy first: doing something other than gambling or golfing while in Vegas. My personal conjecture is that Phil was feeling flesh-deprived, having missed out on many female-related opportunities. Whatever the case, Phil argued passionately that sleep was completely unnecessary and even though it was about 2 AM and we were flying out at 6:00 AM, anybody unwilling to join him was definitely a pussy. Several of us, myself included, managed to avoid this persuasive pitch and did succeed in getting a few hours of sleep before flying out. Unfortunately, it was at the expense of a tremendous amount of fun, which the non-pussies ended up having. Phil tells the tale:

Fresh off a murderous run at the blackjack table and another 3 rounds of Green Apples, Johnny, Russ, Stern, and I decide that it's time to blow the casino scene and pursue the more primal vices... we're off to the Palomino Club. It's 2:30 AM, and our plane leaves at 6:30, so there's plenty of time!

Well, we get there and the flesh flutters around us like moths to a lamp. Johnny was unfortunately ready to pass out by this time, and was missing a lot of the fun. (He only weighs about 140, I'm 200, and he's been keeping pace with me all night.) He's ready to fall asleep at the table.

One particularly well-endowed creature, call her "BB" (Buxom Blonde) comes over and asks us if there's anything she can do for us. Mike, always ready, says "sure, try to wake Johnny up. He's a little asleep, don't you think?"

Well, BB walks right over to Johnny, grabs his head, places it firmly in her cleavage and starts shaking almost violently back and forth with Johnny's head bouncing back and forth between her breasts. When he "came to", he was visibly startled -- man, that look was priceless -- as he transformed from sleepy-eyed confusion to shy-grinned content.

(I'll add briefly that during our visit to the Palamino, I learned how to tell beyond a doubt whether "a pair" are real or phony. But let's not get into that.)

After a couple of private dances (go Johnny!) and the mandatory drinks, we walked over to the stage to watch the girls dancing around those poles any man would love to take the place of. A girl walks up and asks if we would like another private dance.

Well, I had had about enough of this (believe it or not) so I said no. She looked a little disappointed, so I caved in a bit...

Me: "How about we Roshambo for it. If I win, you give me a free private dance. If you win, I pay for a private dance."

Unbelievably, she went for it, but had to go talk to her manager about the arrangement... While she was gone, Stern and I discussed the most probable Roshambo strategy of a strip dancer:

Stern: "I'm sure she'll go rock -- she want's you rock hard"

Me: "Yeah, but did you see her do those splits? I'm sure she'll go scissors, it's what she's most familiar with."

Stern: "Is paper even a consideration? I don't think so, not with her. It's either Rock or Scissors, so your best strategy is going Rock -- you'll either tie or win, no loss possible."

I had to agree with his logic -- it had to be Rock. No doubt about it. So, she came back and said that her friend wanted in on the deal as well -- if I won, I'd pay for 1 dance but get two dancers, if I lost, I'd have to convince Stern to pay for a dance as well. Okay, that's not too difficult. Next thing, we're making a big deal about getting ready to Roshambo, when over walks this huge hulk of a bouncer who says that "the boss" has nixed the deal. Shit, we were 10 seconds from the ultimate LOCK Roshambo and then the deal got overruled...

Oh yeah, before we left I asked her which way she was going to go. She didn't say a word... just slowly spread her legs apart and slid all the way to the ground in the most incredible show of going scissors I'll ever see in my entire life.

Johnny's Virgin Craps Episode

(As told by Phil)

We got back to the Mirage a good half hour before everybody started coming down for the flight home. That's when Johnny revealed that he'd never played craps before! Ai-yaa! A craps virgin! Everybody knows that first-timers always throw great. We drag Johnny to the nearest craps table, where Dennis Rodman also happens to be playing. Johnny steps right into the deal! So the dealer dumps a tray of dice in front of Johnny, who appears bewildered and has no idea what to do. "Just grab the dice and throw them," I coach. Johnny reaches down and tries to pick up all the dice! The table is roaring as he fumbles with 10 dice. "Just two", admonishes the pitboss. So Johnny picks up two dice, and (remember, he's really, really tired) throws them straight up in the air! A beautiful underhand scoop that launches them right up to the ceiling, then onto the floor. Russ and I are falling over as the pitboss rolls his eyes, certain that this is a prank. But Johnny is genuinely lost. Finally the dealer conveys the general idea, at which point Johnny hurls the lethal red things for all he's worth down the table. A die jumps straight up and almost takes out Rodman's eye, and Johnny figures out that he doesn't have to throw them quite so hard. I finish wiping the tears from eyes in time to see Johnny shoot for 10 minutes and make each of us a few bills. Cha-ching!

So these animals crawl up to their rooms for a quick shower and change of clothes, while the rest of us actually have to try to wake up. Eventually we all stumble downstairs.

The Fried Factor

Everybody's complete exhaustion as we gathered in front of the Mirage to catch a shuttle made for a hugely humorous morning, although none of us were in any shape to appreciate it. For example, I was one of the first outside, and there I encountered Perry. Perry had just finished pulling an all-nighter, drinking about 20 green apples, and not eating. Yet for all appearances he was supercharged, and his babbling just did not stop. He didn't seem to notice that as he went through all his trip stories for me, I never uttered a word; I was just staring at him in a bewildered stupor. His being drunk and my being asleep made for a few complete misses on the comprehension scoresheet. Somehow, though, one story he told managed to stick.

It appeared that he had spent hours playing blackjack with some newlyweds who were honeymooning in Vegas. This same couple found Perry's antics highly entertaining, probably never realizing that what seemed like crazy, alcohol-inspired behavior on the Fried's part was actually just his natural conduct. They appreciated him so much that they told him he was by far the most entertainment that they'd had in Vegas -- even better that Sigfried and Roy. Perry of course fell in love with the couple immediately, and obediently performed the Perry magic for them for hours while they played blackjack: eating assorted inedibles, badgering floormen and dealers, consuming Green Apples by the bushel. And then, the couple let slip a little detail that Perry judged to be the greatest inhumanity ever visited on, well, humanity. They said that although they'd been playing for hours and lost a bunch, the floorman had refused to comp them. Perry just went absolutely ape-shit over this news: how dare the casino show such lack of respect to Perry's favorite admirers! And while on their honeymoon! Perry was ready to nuke the place then and there. And so he concluded on Monday morning as he ran this story by me: the Mirage sucks.

Ah, now I remember why this story stuck out of all that inanity Perry spouted that morning. It was because I had to listen to the same ravings 6 more damn times, as Perry repeated the story (with fully the same zealousness and fervor) for each of the Tiltboys as they arrived outside. Phil would finally save us from complete mental oblivion with his usual tactful grace: "Perry, please shut the FUCK up about the honeymooners!" God, thank you Phil.

Josh had been one of the lucky ones to share a room with Perry, so he was already apprised of all Perry's wondrous stories. Still, he managed to get an earful of Perry on Monday morning as well:

At 5:00 am on the day we return to the Bay Area, Rafe and I are getting ready to leave when Perry returns. He is going spastic about a newlywed couple that the Mirage was refusing to comp (in any manner) despite the fact that they had lost a bundle on blackjack. He talks about how he plans on writing the casino to complain and how it sucks and how he'll have Gauss get them comped because Gauss is great. Then he starts raving about Gauss.

"You know, I think Gauss is still a myth," I say. "You keep talking about him but I have never seen him."

Rafe, on total sleep deprivation, assures me that Gauss is real. Perry, on green apple tilt, does the same, and then he starts extolling the virtues of the man. He uses a variety of adjectives, but none seem to satisfy him. It's very funny listening to Perry, and Rafe and I somehow managed to be amused in spite of being completely exhausted.

"What's the opposite of modest?" asks Perry.

"Immodest?" Rafe poses.

"No, there has to be a better word for it," explains Perry.

Rafe and I are laughing our heads off, when Perry makes it even better.

"Brogadaccia," says Perry. That's it.

Rafe explains to Perry that not only is that not the word he wants, but he has mispronounced it in three places. I wish I could remember the specifics of Rafe's explanation in more detail, but suffice it to say that his words, in their own right, were as brilliant as anything one could expect from someone on severe sleep deprivation.

And that pretty much sums up the Fried factor. Fried is such a character that I really doubt that any write-up like this one could do him justice. You really need to meet him in person to understand, but be careful -- start with small doses and work your way up to full conversations. I hereby absolve myself of any responsibility for cerebral degradation that results from Fried exposure.

Circles...Damn Circles

You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of any stories about me getting circled on the trip. Well, I guess I'll have to now breach this ugly subject. Let me preface this chapter by saying that the tweaks my psyche sustained by being a circle target all trip long have become permanent scars. So you should realize that this portion of the report is not intended to be humorous, and is not provided for your entertainment. It is included purely as a study of the deranged mental state of my companions, who are somehow able to gain tremendous gratification from repeatedly abusing me. As proof of said dementia, I offer the following "angles" that were devised to put the circle to me:

• Saturday morning, Dave and I go up to our room at the same time (around 9 AM). As I'm getting ready for bed (without turning the light on because Perry's already asleep in the cot,) Dave gasps and says, "God, look at the time!" And there, in the dim green illumination of the alarm clock, he has a circle waiting.
• Saturday afternoon at the table, the cocktail waitress is serving me the meal-in-a-glass I ordered when I feel something brush against my arm. Excited by the prospect that she is rubbing against me, I glance away from my cards to see: Rafe reaching through the rail outside the poker room to circle me.
• During dinner Saturday, Dave is making shadow figures on the chair of the booth. Somebody says, "Hey, that looks like Bruce!" and I obligingly look down to see: a shadow circle.
• Sunday afternoon while playing poker, somebody walking by asks me if I've dropped these two chips on the floor. I glance down to check out the chips, and this damn complete stranger gives me the circle, then hits me on the arm. I hear Dave, Rafe and Phil, who put the pliable stranger up to this, busting up on the other side of the cardroom. (Turns out the "stranger" was Steve Russell, a rec.gambler who had read the previous trip report and picked out Rafe when somebody called him Tiltboy. Thanks a lot, Steve. It was great meeting you too, ya little putz.)
• Sunday evening at dinner, Phil and I are sitting on the ends of a wrap-around booth at the Mirage Cafe', when Phil gestures and knocks his water glass right off the table. Cold water splashed my leg, and glanced down at him picking up the ice, only to see his smirk and circle.

But I must say I was getting better at avoiding the damn things as the trip wore on. Whether this was due to my improved alertness ,or due to the fact that I began to cower and cringe whenever a Tiltboy approached, I'm not sure. Monday morning as we boarded the plane to return home, I whispered to Josh: "I don't think they know it, but I've only been circled 20 times so far. And I think everybody's too tired to remember to get me one more time, to put me over the line. I'm home free!" and I told Josh I would only sit next to him on the flight if he swore not to try to circle me. (Josh was very motivated to have me sit next to him on the flight home, as you'll see later.) Josh agreed, and I sat with him far away from the other Tiltboys, in a two-seat row. That asshole, Rafe, describes what happened next:

Bruce had tried valiantly all weekend to kick his habit of falling for the circle trick, but to no avail. By the time we were at the airport on Monday morning, he had hit the spread at 20. Problem was, everyone but Bruce had bet the OVER line, and we needed him one more circle to cover. Knowing where he stood, and in his state of heightened vigilance, we knew it would take extra measures to put him over the top. As soon as anyone in the group would approach him, he would get on the defensive. Only an hour and a half and we'd be in San Jose, with Bruce victorious on the circle angle. Clearly that could not be allowed. We looked for a confederate.

Luckily, flight attendants are trained to be helpful. We found our man and explained the situation. Realizing that the fate of the Western World stood on his shoulders, the flight attendant ("Bob") leapt into action. He immediately walked over to where Bruce was sitting and started in with this "Sir, can I see your ticket please, I think there may be a problem" routine Bruce didn't suspect a thing. Bob, to his credit, did not let Bruce off easily. He had Bruce going for about 5 minutes with, "I think we may have to reroute you", "The flight seems to be overbooked", "Not sure if your ticket was processed correctly," before he finished Bruce off with, "Ah, yes, I've found the problem. See the date stamped on your ticket... RIGHT HERE!" Bob: (circles Bruce) Bruce: (goes on mega-tilt) Group: (momentarily stunned and in awe of Bob's natural tilt-prowess), then an eruption of Cha-Ching!'s and Aiyaaa!'s. Bob took a victory lap down the aisle to high-five each of us. Bruce, previously on top of the world, sat slumped over, shattered, a shell of his once proud self.

Phil and Airports

You may recall 25 or so pages ago when Phil went on super-tilt from being baggage-barred. Well, Phil must have a way with airports, or more to the point, airports seem to have their way with Phil. He goes to the desk to claim the ticket he lost on the flight over, which they had promised to retrieve and hold for him, only to be told that: a) they hadn't found it, and b) they were going to charge him a service charge to issue a new one. Now personally, I'm sure Phil snapped the big Tiltarino at this point, but he was just too tired to simply explode. Instead, much to his credit, he maintained his cool and simply said, "Look, there are a lot of people in line behind me. I'm not going anywhere until we get this straightened out, and I am NOT paying a service charge. So we can do this the easy way, where you issue me a nice little replacement ticket, or we can do it the hard way, in which case we both waste a lot of time, Southwest has a bunch of very unhappy customers, and I still end up with the free ticket." Truly Excellent, I later told Phil, an inspired Tiltboy angle if ever there was one. Needless to say, he got his free ticket. <:-)

Josh's Last Hurrah

As we boarded the flight back to San Jose, Josh found himself in a bit of a predicament. As volunteer bookie, he had reasonably assumed that everybody was equally likely to win the most Roshambo games for the trip, so had placed the line at 8-1 on Perry. At that point, he hadn't known that Perry is Roshambo king, and we took of from Vegas with Perry holding a comfortable lead in the rankings. Josh was faced with losing $56 on this one bet alone, if he didn't think fast. Fortunately for him, I was more than willing to help him with a major scam to save his ass, having just fallen victim myself to the airplane steward circle scam described above. And thus the final angle came to be:

I would play Josh one final heads-up hold'em freezeout. If I won, I got $20. If I lost, I didn't have to pay anything, I merely had to Roshambo Josh 100 times. I managed to lose, and kept my side of the bargain. Josh went rock. 100 times. I became the trip leader for Roshambo, and Josh saved his bookie business from bankruptcy.

The End

Yes, this story does eventually end. If you've made it this far, then you must be almost as depraved as somebody who would write a 40 page story about a weekend trip to Vegas.

As we dragged ourselves out to Dave's van, unshaven, rumpled and comatose, we braced ourselves for a long, long workday. Fortunately, somebody said something to cheer us up and return a spark of life: "Hey, who's hosting the game on Wednesday?!?"

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Poop Sheet Summary

To Win Most Money		ACTUAL
------------------		------------
Bruce	 	1-1		+ 2700
Josh           	3-1		- 300
Phil           	3-1		EVEN
Rafe           	4-1		+1500
Tony           	5-1		+200
Gauss        	5-1		???
Dice Boy     	5-1		+1300
Stern          	6-1		-600
Perry          	6-1		-150
Johnny         12-1		-300

Win Most Money Over/Under
--------------------------
Bruce         	+450 	
Josh           	+250 		See above.
Phil           	+400 
Rafe           	+200 
Tony           	+50  
Gauss          	NL   
Dice Boy     	-150 
Stern          	-50 
Perry          	-200 
Johnny        	-150 
Everyone     	-200 

Lose Most Money
----------------
Perry          	2-1    		None of the above!  Stern took this title down.
Dice Boy     	4-1
Phil           	4-1
Tony           	10-1
Field          	5-1 

Roshambo differential
---------------------
Dice Boy     	8-1
Bruce         	9-1	< ---  winner thanks to Josh's last minute angling
Phil         	9-1
Rafe          	9-1
Tony         	9-1
Gauss         	9-1
Jeff          	9-1
Perry         	9-1
Johnny       	9-1
Josh         	10-1

Golf Over/Under
-------------------
Rafe           	95   
Phil           	95   		Nodody remembers Golf outcomes.
Dave          	105 
Tony             93   
Group       	388
Lost Balls     	7    
Penalty Strokes 13   
Birdies        	2    

Circle Game Over/Under				ACTUAL
----------------------				-----------
Times we get Bruce on the trip          20	21
Times we get Phil on the trip            6	???
Times we get Dave on the trip            4	???
Times we get Rafe on the trip            1	0

On Women
--------
Number of people attending a strip club	2   	3
Number of women Phil hits on            8   	(at least)
Number of women Phil scores             0.5 	000000.000
Number of women slapping Phil           1   	0

Bay 101
-------
Rafe Leaves a winner    		EVEN	WINNER
Phil Leaves a winner    		EVEN   	DIDN'T PLAY
Tony Leaves a winner    		EVEN  	DIDN'T PLAY
Dave Leaves a winner    		EVEN  	DIDN'T PLAY

Miscellaneous Over/Unders
---------------------------
Number of total roshambos     		300	OVER!!
Number of roshambos played
  by Dice Boy in car en route
  to Bay 101                    	3	???
Number of games Bruce
  plays heads up on plane
  into Vegas                    	3	3
Number of games Bruce
  wins heads up on plane
  into Vegas                    	2	2
Number of times Perry
  pukes on someone's chips,
  trip                          	0.5	0
Number of beef slabs (prime
  rib/roast beef) Josh eats on trip	10.5	???
Number of double Martell
  Cordon-blues Michael consumes
   while playing Pai-Gow in
  each sitting                  	4   	8
Michael's Pai-Gow expectation   	-200	+600
Diceboy's Pai-Gow expectation   	+200  	0 (didn't play)

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