Profiles in Courage: Vegas Edition

By Spencer Hall
Don’t say that coming to Vegas for tournament weekend doesn’t involve some degree of courage and fortitude. It may sound like easy work to come out, sit in a chair, put a little money down, and then while away the day with one or nine cocktails in a posh sportsbook in Vegas.
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Au contraire, friend: this is an endurance match not for the faint of heart and weak of will. Take Allen, who was wrapping up his Vegas weekend at Mandalay Bay and filing one more bet for the road. (“I’ll watch it and see how it works out at the airport. I’m taking this beer with me, too.”)
This year was his first visit, and Allen had the punch-drunk of look of someone who’d put himself through an obstacle course of festivity. “I get to get away from the wife and kids for a while, do whatever I want, and it’s great,” he said. How far was he down, I asked? Four hundred bucks, he said, not missing a beat.
Was it worth it? “Totally. My friends and I are already making plans to come back next year.”
The ultimate profile in Vegas courage goes to our man Luke, the one who dropped 500 bucks in the first half-day of the tourney. Luke took as mean a blow from the gambling gods as possible, going 9-23 on his picked games and sinking to 1700 dollars in the red. Lesser men would have tucked tail and spent the rest of the weekend playing penny slots.
Luke, however, was no mere mortal. Champions are champions because of how they respond to adversity, grasshopper. Luke pushed through, hit the craps table, and won $900 of his debt back...finishing at a piffling eight hundred dollars in the hole and showing what true Vegas courage under fire means.
Luke, we at TSB salute you and all the other sportsbook samurai who raged for four days straight in Vegas. When the chips were down, you poured on more chips, and then even more chips, and then sometimes even more chips after that. And if you won them back, all the better; and if not, well, that’s what yard-long drinks and penny slots are for, man.
Salut!
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