They entered the final game of the card shoe—they had hit the red card, signifying time to reshuffle at the end of the hand.
It was also the end of the road for the monocled man. He had hit on twelve, drawn a 10, gone bust, and run out of chips. The reason he had switched to lower bets was simply because he had started to run out of money. Now he had run out.
The shuffle for the next game started, and as it did the man stood up and collected the hat and coat that he had checked.
“Not a good game for me, was it?” he asked the dealer.
“Some days you need to pay the price in order to make sure your luck flows smoothly on other days,” the dealer replied, his face serious.
The monocled man nodded. Then he left.
03
The talk at the table during the next shuffle was solely focused around the cause of the monocled man’s defeat. The Doctor set the ball rolling, and the woman asked the dealer his opinion. The dealer wouldn’t budge from his stated view that it was a necessary and inevitable price all gamblers had to pay once in a while, whereas the old man said that it was because he had become too heated, too passionate, so much so that his luck had deserted him.
–His defeat was inevitable.
Oeufcoque summed it up the best and the most succinctly.
–He got too caught up in his own cards, hitting too much, doubling down on high bets, too impressed by the idea of getting that magical twenty-one. Bound by these severe handicaps he was no more than a sitting duck in the dealer’s sights. In particular, he was far too attached to his small cards.
–Small cards?
–Whatever way you break down the odds, the small cards—cards with a face value of six and below—are advantageous to the dealer. In this case, our dealer kept on using the word “attack” in order to delude the man into drawing more and more of them.
The man in question was now nowhere to be seen. He was like the very cards that he had played, disappearing without a trace moments after a hand was declared bust. But he wasn’t the sort who was likely to run off and lick his wounds, reflecting on what went wrong and learning a valuable lesson. No. More likely, he was the sort who’d be back sooner rather than later, like a dog to its own vomit, aiming for that glorious victory that remained just out of reach even as he plunged headfirst into bankruptcy.
Such was the bittersweet lingering memory of the world of pleasure. Balot found it difficult to feel too sorry for him, though. The man still had something of a future, and he was always going to wake up tomorrow feeling fine regardless of what the outcome at the table had been. In stark contrast to Balot, who needed the win. The thing that concerned her was not the fact that the man had lost. It was the fact that he had been made to lose.
The spectacular victory that the man had been aiming for had never really existed. All that had happened was the man had had the sweet scent of victory wafted under his nose, leading him ever farther down the road to ruin. He’d even been allowed to taste victory, briefly, but temporarily—the dealer had made sure of that. It was part of the dealer’s act, part of the web of illusion that the casino sold, wrapped up in such pretty little boxes.
How to cut your way through that tangled web of lies? Without a proper plan, based on logic and a sound foundation, all was folly. The desire to win—all this gave you was a step up on the stairway that led to the harsh reality of ignominious defeat. Just like the Mardock, the Stairway to Heaven, that statue that epitomized all that was ambitious and dangerous about the city.
As Balot was thinking about all this, Oeufcoque’s next words floated up on her hand.
–Looks like I won our first game.
Oeufcoque seemed as casual as ever, which made Balot want to dig her heels in.
–Well, I’m going to win the next one.
–Let’s start it right now, then. The woman or the old man—who’s going to leave the table first?
–The woman, definitely.
–I’ll choose the old man.
–Because I went for the lady?
–No. I was always going to choose the old man. Definitely.
Balot couldn’t help but be surprised. How on earth was the old man, clearly an accomplished player and with the results to prove it, going to be hounded out before the fat lady who spent money like a drunken sailor?
The shuffle had finished. This time it was the lady who inserted the red marker into the cards. The dealer cut the cards again in a well-practiced movement, and it was time for the fourth round since Balot and the Doctor had taken their seats.
The old man was now effectively on the far right, the monocled man having left a vacant spot. The dealer now dealt to the old man’s tempo, reading his breathing patterns like a book. The old man was a much tougher nut to crack than the monocled man, however. Nothing seemed to perturb him. The lady next to him bet extravagantly, and the Doctor gave a convincing impression of someone betting extravagantly, and this made the old man’s actions seem particularly composed by contrast.
The dealer occasionally engaged him in conversation, offering his Confucianesque platitudes as before, but not in a way obviously designed to lead the old man astray, as with the monocled man.
The dealer said, “You certainly do seem to know this game inside out, sir. I bet people are always coming to you for advice.”
The dealer said, “There aren’t many people on this floor who know how to enjoy the game as much as you, sir.”
The dealer said, “They say that the more experience you have of life, the more likely you are to enjoy this game in a meaningful way. It seems to me, sir, that you have it all worked out—you know how to enjoy the game in the company of others as much as you play for your own benefit.”
The dealer said, “That hit was the obvious choice, wasn’t it, sir, considering the number of chips you had riding on that hand?”
The old man responded to the last of these sayings. “No, no, it was actually rather a reckless move on my part. Normally I try not to let the number of chips affect my game.”
The old man corrected the dealer without a second thought, and the dealer looked suitably chastened, as if he had spoken out of place and overstepped the mark. He bowed his head slightly.
The old man was a circumspect player, and his cautious style of play was particularly in evidence when he was dealt a blackjack.
His judgment call with such a hand—an ace and jack—told Balot everything she needed to know about his style of play.
“Even money,” called the old man. This was a special move that a player could make only when they had been dealt twenty-one. This declaration guaranteed the player victory—at the expense of reducing his payout from one and a half times the original stake to evens.
The only advantage to this move was to circumvent the possibility of a draw with the dealer; if the dealer drew twenty-one as well, the player would still win even money. It was, in other words, a particularly cautious move.
The dealer said nothing. It was hard to imagine that he was doing anything to string the old man along.
According to Oeufcoque, though, this too must still have been some part of the dealer’s strategy to induce the player to give up all his chips one way or another. Balot just couldn’t quite work out how—yet.
But then Balot noticed something out of the ordinary.
The woman’s losses were increasing exponentially. It was almost as if she were deliberately trying to throw her money down the drain. It was just after the fifteen-hand mark, and she was already down by well over seventy thousand dollars.