Full Tilt, Borgata, craps and more
Last night was interesting.
First, I can’t say the name of the person who I’m writing about for various reasons, so we’re going to call him Sean.
Anyway, I am friends with Sean from way back when and we’ve become better friends over the last few years. Since I live in Atlanta and Sean lives in Philadelphia, we don’t hang out too often and we hadn’t hung out at all over the holidays yet, so last night I headed down to his apartment. He was playing on Full Tilt and his friend John (also a changed name) was hanging out too. So I think Sean had maybe $30K in FTP at the time when I got there. He played for an hour or two while we watched the Cleveland v Dallas game (which Sean won a $500 bet on), then we went to get some food. By the time we left to get food, Sean had his FTP balance up to $50K, which isn’t out of the ordinary at all for him.
So after food at this place called “Irish Pub” in Philly, all three of us went back to the apartment and watched the Boston v Seattle game for a bit. John headed out a few minutes later, but not before Sean had run his FTP account up another $35K to $85K. At that point I moved to sit by the computer and watch Sean play for a few minutes. After I moved, it was like his account balance was just on an increasing counter of some kind. He went up by a decent-sized pot pretty much every minute or two for the next 20 minutes. Before I knew it, he was at $180K or so.
So to recap, he’d gone from $30K (and $8K before I’d gotten there) to $180K in a few hours, with a food break in between. Pretty nuts.
After losing a little back and making some transfer to other people, Sean decided it was time to head to AC. So at like 1 or 2 AM, we headed down to AC and Sean had $26K in Borgata chips with him. We weren’t even thinking about playing poker, he just wanted to play some craps. While he has dabbled in craps, this was his biggest craps attempt ever.
We got to AC and headed straight to the craps pit. Sean started with $200 on the pass line, backed up with $1K and $600 on three numbers. The first roll went okay even though the guy who was rolling didn’t hit a point. I think that was the only time that Sean was up. He seven-outed a few rolls instantly, won a few on the don’t, kinda fluctuated for awhile in the 13k-18k area. Then he started making some big don’t bets for close to five figures, bounced around for a bit, got basically back to even at one point and basically busted the craps money after like 20 minutes.
Then something weird happened. The size of the gamble had attracted a little attention so there were some random lurkers at the table who were just watching. After Sean busted down to like $400 (too little for a craps roll obv), we initially went and stood in the line at the cage which is like, right across from the craps pit. One of the lurkers had started gambling small at the craps table, but he got up in the middle of the roll and semi-followed us to the cage. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that he had left the table and was lurking like 15 feet behind us. Then Sean realized that cashing out $400 was dumb and that it made way more sense to go put it on a number on the roulette table, so we went over to the roulette area and the guy followed us again!! I was a little worried that he was going to follow us to the parking lot and try to rob us. I suppose he didn’t really realize that Sean had just dropped $26K at craps and didn’t have more money, but maybe he thought one of us might. Or maybe he noticed that I was wearing an expensive watch, who knows. Either way, we foiled his plan by going to the Met (a diner-like place at the Borgata) before leaving the casino. I didn’t see him follow us from the roulette area, but I made sure to stare at him to let him know that we noticed him following us around the casino. And make no mistake, he WAS following us. He wasn’t doing anything that could even possibly be anything else — plus I saw him watching us while trying to not be obvious (he was anyway).
So we left the Borgata and headed back to Philly at like 5 AM or so. On the whole, a good day for Sean and an entertaining day for me.
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