We participated in “The New York Rangers Casino Night“ several times as a fan prior to exchanging fan status for professional reporting on the organization. As someone trying to maintain a professional relationship with the players & officials, it’s not really appropriate for us to go anymore.
However, we found the experience of going to “Casino Night” one of the most fun things that we’d ever done as a fan. It’s just a great opportunity to get to meet the players in a really exciting, different and fun environment.
We’ll share this one funny anecdote that happened several years ago at “Casino Night.”
I had brought my wife and she was playing Blackjack all night. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that she’s just not a good player. While I’m certainly not going to be invited to participate as a pro any time soon, I’m pretty decent at it.
So we were at a table playing with ex-Wolf Pack and then NY Ranger, Jed Ortmeyer as the dealer. Sitting to my right was Alex Kovalev who was a pretty good player at Blackjack and certainly not that shabby on the ice either.
In any event, my wife was losing hand-after-hand and kept reaching into my growing stash and taking money out of it…hey, no surprise to you veteran husbands out there, right?
So Kovalev was getting annoyed because he was on the right end of the table and my wife was sitting at the far left end and kept drawing cards that he needed.
At one point, after drawing so much of my money out of the cup that I had, she turned to me and said, “I need more money to keep playing.” I said, “I don’t have any more to give you and you’ll just have to wait until I could win enough to give you more.”
With that, Kovalev got up from his seat, went behind the table where Ortmeyer was dealing from, and gave my wife the entire bank that Ortmeyer had. A couple of the others at the table were annoyed at it and said it wasn’t fair. At that point Kovalev said, “Have you guys been watching her play? Don’t worry about it. All the money will be back there in a few minutes.”
Oh how those marital and sports memories collide…
One of the other major reasons to go is that the net proceeds go towards The Garden of Dreams Foundation which is a great cause that does great work.
If you’re interested call Mike Hollis at 212-631-5627. He’s a good guy who’ll take good care of you. Tell him you read about it here on Howlings.
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