It was a long time ago and I was young, broke, and willing to break social convention and ask for the money.
We had played alone almost the entire time except when one guy "intruded" at first base to play a couple of high limit hands. (Yeah, $25 was high limit at the time, although Harvey's did have $100 tables open on occasion.)
I really was betting over my head but it was my birthday so I said, #$% it. I was still perfecting my early card counting skills (using a combo of Thorpe and Revere) and spent most of my time at the $2 tables. Turned out better than I could have ever expected.
There's another weird story from that time and place. A couple of years or so later I was playing there and won enough to get one of those bone-pink $500 cheques. The dealer colored it up but the a**hole pit boss refused and insisted that she give me five dark blue $100s instead. The dealer and I were both surprised at his behavior, which wasn't typical at all.
...Fast forward about 10+ years. I'm playing at the Morongo casino in southern California, at which I was a regular at the time, and I tell the story to the female dealer, who often dealt to me... and she pipes up and says, "That was me! I remember that night." The pit boss' nasty attitude and flat refusal to allow a pink out of the tray had stuck out in her memory of thousands of days dealing and there we were together at a table a decade later. Small world.
