- The original point of this trip was so that Phil could be an unseen chaperone for his daughter Casey and her friends who had planned to go to Las Vegas to celebrate graduating from high school; however, Casey and her friends ended up not going.
- Mary Whelan ended up "surprising" us by showing up Friday night (her birthday).
- The boxman at a craps table at The Mirage made one of the most amazing mistakes I've ever witnessed in Vegas.
Mike, Mary and I were playing, and this guy at the other end of the table got on a nice, hot roll. By the end of it, I had $1,195 in front of me, after having bought in for $400. A nice $795 profit, which put me up around $200 for the trip. I asked to be colored up, and when the boxman totaled the $1,195, Mike threw him a five-dollar chip and said, "Make it an even twelve hundred!" So, the boxman gave two $500 chips and two $100 chips to the dealer, who passed them along to me. I thanked them and headed to the cashier, leaving Mike and Mary behind to play a bit more.
The line at the cashier was too long, so I loitered around the poker area for a while to kill some time. Once the line had gone down, I went to cash out. I put the chips in front of the cashier, and he said, "Okay, twenty-two."
"Twenty-two?" I thought. "What does that mean?"
I looked down, and instead of two $500 chips, the boxman had given me two $1000 chips! I was cashing out for twenty-two hundred dollars instead of twelve hundred. A $1000 mistake! The fact that the boxman made such a huge mistake was unbelievable, but even more amazing is that the dealer didn't notice it either. Nor did I!
It's very possible that the catalyst for the whole thing was Mike tossing him that extra chip.
So of course I paid him back the five dollars.
