What I pondered while my car slowly devoured the vastness of west Texas was that as a journalist I wrote in my article the next day for PokerNews that I had played one of the last hands of poker ever played at the Stardust. You see the last night at the Stardust was a night of nostalgia. Lots of old players, dealers and staff had come by to say farewell. Right around 10 o'clock the poker room manager told the dealers to hold up and then he announced that the next hand would be the final hand ever dealt at the Stardust. Then all four of the remaining tables dealt a single hand, most players stayed to the river just to be there for the final showdown.
As a journalist I reported that fact: four final hands at the Stardust. But today I was working on my current fiction project and I reproduced those events but, of course, I made it THE final hand and, also of course, I lost the hand on a river bad beat. I love being a writer and I am not a guy who tosses around the word love all that often.
I apologize to my non-poker readers for the nostalgia and the poker jargon. But think how my loyal poker readers feel when I write about wallabies, wombats and wampeters.