My years of playing poker with friends with cigarettes or empty chips, watching Celebrity Poker Showdown and passing boredom on the computer with Hoyle Casino were put to the test last night when a new friend and I made a late-night and spontaneous decision to drive an hour to the Hard Rock Casino.

As if being a woman didn’t make it awkward enough for me to sit at a poker table at 5:26 a.m. (still drunk, I might add), it was quite obvious to anyone with eyeballs that A) I’d never played cards with real money, B) I had been up all night and, at one point in the evening, consumed a few too many adult beverages, and C) I had never played poker at a casino, had basically no idea what I was doing and was quite intimidated, even though everyone in the casino (minus my friend and me, of course) probably had the combined IQ of a duckbilled platypus.

What I learned during the excursion: It’s never a good idea to waste $10 on a hand if you’re waiting on the river to finish up a straight. This happened to me, in one form or another, about 50 times. Once, the gold-teeth-wearing poker Dalai Lama sitting next to me made the profound observation: “You’re going to have to watch a lot more poker on TV, baby, until you can sit at a table with the big dogs.” Yeah, thanks, go away. I know my friend was sitting across the table the whole time watching me and wondering why he’d brought an idiot to the casino with him (and probably fearing the drive home with a cranky, tired, hungover, poker-losing bitch, ha).

We sat at a table with like 10 other people, and my money literally began to jump out of my purse and into the laps of everyone else so they could buy guns and hypodermic needles. I had Hollister&Co. on one side of me, coughing like a 5-year-old girl every time I lit a cigarette, and on the other side, I had a man offering to trade me $20 in chips for his $2 in chips and “the drug of my choice.” Delightful. And the kid sitting across from me couldn’t have been older than 18, kept ordering cherry Cokes “with extra cherries” and took everyone’s money with good luck on the very last card. Punk.

No one ever folded, and they always seemed to win on the river. I had no such luck and left without the pesky weight of $46 in my purse.

Overall, we had a great time. It was definitely an experience. I split the pot once with a straight and won a tiny victory with three kings (ruined by the fact that I was too worried about making an ass of myself to do anything but check). Ahh, 1.5 wins … that’s the most success I’ve had at anything in a long time, haha.

What I'm listening to: Gorillaz
Strangest thing I heard today: "You do your makeup so well. It's like you have this little line around your eyes to make them pop out." *Hmm, that wasn't my intention. Sounds painful.*

You're the Queen of Hearts. You're pretty popular,
just because everybody knows who you are. Of
course, not being too ugly helps. Don't get too
uppity about it though.


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