Tao of Poker

Novel Excerpt

Finally! Some of those long grueling sessions losing my money at the tables in Vegas actually paid off as research for a novel. I'm more than halfway done and should be back to blogging soon. In the meantime visit Gumbo for more excerpts and updates. I wrote this the other day and I figured I'd share it on this blog since it had gambling related content:

Chapter 6
As soon as you deplane and enter the terminal at Las Vegas McCarran Airport, you are greeted by a couple of rows of slot machines and a sorry lot of exhausted, hungover, and unkempt passengers awaiting to get on the exact plane you just exited. The demure scowls on their faces immediately tell you their languishing stories about the dark side of Vegas. You could see clouds of depression looming over their sunken heads. One clown from Detroit had too many Grey Goose and Red Bulls to drink and dropped $500 in a strip bar. He had to get home before his credit card statement arrived in the mail and was innocently opened up by his wife. Another Starbucks guzzling hipster from Park Slope lost his entire bankroll trying to beat blackjack at the Venetian in a failed attempt to perfect a winning system counting cards and ended up getting creamed. A soccer mom from St. Louis looked distressed as she quietly obsessed about her new found addiction to slot machines. A college kid from Tampa, with over $200 in poker books recently purchased on Amazon.com stashed in his carry-on luggage, blew his entire semester's tuition with pipe dreams about becoming the next Chris Moneymaker. Instead of returning to campus with a wad of rolled up $100 bills, he was bitch slapped into the harsh reality that he was nothing more than dead money and severely overmatched when he foolishly sat down with a table of sharks at the Bellagio only to get his testicles served to him on a lukewarm bed of bead beat lettuce. Las Fuckin' Vegas. Don't these idiots know that when they do win, they get paid with loser's money? It's a twenty-four hour endless cycle of transferring money from the trembling hands of a lifelong luckless losers into the itchy pockets of a fellow degenerate gamblers. Do you want that kind of karmic paper trail sitting in your wallet?

Copyright 2004

By the way, Vegas in 26 days. Can't wait!