Worser and worser

18 November 2014

By Frank Scoblete

The word “worser” was actually used a few hundred years ago; then again, so were leeches. “Doctor, I have a headache.” “Take two leeches and see me in the morning.”

When it comes to being a casino player, you can have good sessions and bad sessions — but sometimes, you have worser sessions, one after the other and then those get even worse. Most casino players will probably agree that the following would constitute a “worser” experience:

You’re playing on a slot machine getting your head handed to you. You need to go to the bathroom and you ask the woman playing next to you to watch your machine. As you leave the bathroom to go back to your machine, you hear roars and what sounds like hundreds of hands clapping from the slot aisles. “Wow,” you think, “someone just won a big jackpot.”

When you come back to your machine there is a huge crowd standing near it and the woman who had been watching your machine had played it and won, oh, my Lord! one hundred thousand dollars! That rotten machine gave you nothing but heartache, yet this woman — this horrible monster of a woman who is definitely going to Hell — played your machine and won all that money.

Yes, you know that a slot machine is random, but the tragic feelings you have at the moment as your money went South and her money went North defies logic and knowledge. “I lost how much and she won how much?”

So to heck with the slot machines; you now go to a craps table. Your luck can’t be worse there — can it? “How’s the table?” you ask as you put your money down to get chips. “Oh, man, it has been so great, I can’t believe it,” says the man with the stack of orange chips ($1,000 chips) in his rack.

Oh, yeah; oh, yeah; oh, yeah! So you go all in. You put a Pass Line bet up — you make it a large bet, this table has been hot — and when the “point” is established, you take full odds. Now you get really daring. A hot table? OK. “I’ll place all the numbers except the point.” You use your entire buy-in.

The shooter gets the dice, begins his throw and now you notice, too late, that the guy who said the “table is hot” is a “don’t bettor.” You look around the table swiftly as the dice arc in the air and note that most of the players have very few chips in their racks. “Oh, no; oh, no!” you scream inside your head as the dice hit the felt.

“Seven! Seven out! Take the line; pay the don’ts,” yells the stickman. Mr. Orange Chips, probably the husband of that beastly shrew who won the jackpot on your machine, collects a handful of orange chips. “This table has been great!” he says to the world at large.

“May this rat burn with his spouse in the fiery pit!” you think. Then you moan.

You have some money in the safe in your room. Your luck has to change, right?

You decide to try roulette. “I’ll look for a color that has come up a few times and bet against it. If I lose, I’ll double my bet because sooner or later I have to win. That’s the nature of things.”

You walk around the roulette pit and notice something remarkable. There is a dealer standing all alone at a table and her scoreboard shows that there have been 10 reds and then 10 blacks in a row. Since blacks came up last, you bet red. Obviously this wheel has been amazingly streaky and you are gonna jump in with a red bet and win a fortune.

You lose your first bet of $25. You double to $50. You lose that and double to $100. You lose that and double to $200. What the heck! Black has just come up 14 times in a row! You lose your $200 and now you are sweating. You put out $400 on red. Your hand shakes as you do so.

Black!

Now you decide, “Come on, with fifteen blacks in a row I have to win the next one” and you put out the table maximum bet of $1,000. You are drenched in sweat.

“Black! Black! Black! Black!” you scream in your head.

“Man,” you say to the dealer. “That’s sixteen blacks in a row.”

“What?” asks the dealer.

“I just noticed that you haven’t added the six blacks that just came up to the scoreboard.”

“Oh, that,” laughs the dealer. “The scoreboard's broken; that’s why you see ten reds and ten blacks in a row. Ignore the scoreboard.”

You have five hundred dollars left to play with. You had figured on playing for a couple of days with the money you brought and you are now down almost to the bottom. You decide to have dinner at the buffet and go over and wait on line. When you are at the cashier, you dig into your pocket to get your wallet and it is gone — your wallet is gone!

“What the heck happened to my wallet?” you say out loud.

“I am sorry, sir,” says the cashier. “Could you move aside so others can pay?”

And that, my friends, is worser and worser.


Frank Scoblete's newest books are "Confessions of a Wayward Catholic" and "I Am a Card Counter." Available from Amazon.com, Kindle or at bookstores. Join Frank on his website at www.frankscoblete.com.