So everyone was confident that the suit would now win.
The cowboy gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes, and watched as the suit leaned over to claim his chips.
–I do believe I’ve won, Balot said aloud. Nobody quite seemed to understand her at first. A second later, the old gentleman sitting next to her let out a loud cry. All eyes were now on Balot, and all were silent.
K
and Q
.
The suit, the potbelly, and the dealer were all horrified.
The king and queen of clubs, joined by the jack, ten, and ace.
The hand so rare that it could, for all intents and purposes, be discounted for normal playing purposes. The odds against it were roughly 65,000 to one. A royal straight flush.
–I have won, haven’t I?
Balot appeared uncomfortable under everyone’s gaze. She looked as if she were worried that she might have gotten it wrong and was visibly relieved when the dealer nodded in affirmation.
Suddenly there was a burst of excitement all around. Passersby were stopping to gawk at Balot’s hand.
Balot started raking in the mountain of chips—over three thousand dollars total—when the dealer added a number of thousand-dollar chips to the pile, along with some sort of certificate. It seemed that the house provided a special prize to anyone who made a royal straight flush. On top of the bonus cash was a free night in the suite of the casino’s sister hotel, a number of tokens to exchange for prizes at reception, and instructions on how to arrange for the commemorative photograph at the table.
The dealer seemed calm and composed enough, but Oeufcoque had different ideas.
–He smells of anger and fear.
The table had originally been selected by the Doctor after he had carefully scrutinized the casino records. He chose it because its patterns diverged slightly from the house average. Not quite enough to draw the suspicion of the house—yet—but any further deviations from the norm would be likely to result in a lot of interest in the dealer’s actions.
And it wasn’t only the winners who caused the averages to go askew.
When a plan to swindle marks goes bad, it can go really bad—and that was when the most extreme outcomes emerged.
–They’ll probably start to get serious about now. And that’s when we go in for the kill. Cheaters have it tough in legal casinos, in a very different way from illegal ones.
Balot felt Oeufcoque’s explanation in the palm of her hand.
–Legal casinos consider cheats to be the worst hazard there is—they’re bad for business, and they interfere with the family-friendly image that the casinos try so hard to cultivate. A cheat who is caught faces immediate expulsion, a permanent ban from all casinos, and he’ll never be able to work in the gaming industry ever again. He won’t even be allowed to own shares in a casino or take a backroom role. He’ll be out, thoroughly and with absolute finality.
This was why the dealer and the other mechanics now had to try and bring the table back toward average. Their livelihoods, if not their lives, were at stake. If you pricked them, would they not bleed? The answer was: most definitely.
–I’m sure the mechanics have been moving from table to table, using their same tricks every time. But if we can wrong-foot just one of them—well, catch one, catch all.
The dealer’s actions and his shifty, sharp eye movements seemed to confirm Oeufcoque’s every word.
The dealer dealt the next hand, and as Balot picked up her cards she noticed a number of things looking toward her that hadn’t been there a minute ago. More overhead cameras, responding incredibly quickly to recent developments at the table.
The cameras were focused in on all the people at the table except for Balot.
The casino, after all, could draw on their records to note how much Balot had lost at the table up to this point. A duty manager was far more likely to conclude that a cheating maneuver from someone else had somehow backfired, rather than assume that Balot had anything to do with the cheating herself.
The mechanics and the dealer understood this fact all too well, and this only contributed to the intense pressure they were now under.
And yet they needed to continue cheating in order to try and bring the table back toward some sort of average. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Balot’s cards were 2
and 4
.
–That’s their game, then. No more high cards for us—they’ll be keeping the aces and kings to themselves from now on.
–What should we do?
–Raise them.
Balot did so. In the first round she acted assertively, raising and re-raising when she had the chance. She was just as forceful in the second round.
She felt the dealer and the two other mechanics give a collective sigh of relief. They seemed to believe that she had fallen for their plan, and now she was betting indiscriminately on a weak hand.
This would make it easier for them to bring things back toward an average pattern of play, or so they hoped. Even the potbelly was raising now, as if to acknowledge that this round was their opportunity to put everything right in one fell swoop.
No one folded, and they moved into the second round of betting.
The flop cards were 5
, K
, K
.
There were a number of rounds of calls and raises, during which the old gentleman folded.
–The cameras.
Balot knew what Oeufcoque meant and followed his orders automatically. She snarced the cameras, moving them by a couple of millimeters so that none of them were focused directly on her, deliberately or not. Then her gloves squished, swallowing one of her cards and spitting out another in a split second, without anyone noticing. Her cards were now 2
and 3
.
They moved into the third round.
The moment the turn card was revealed, the cowboy folded with a sigh. It was 4
. The potbelly raised cautiously, the Doctor met this and raised him back, and Balot and the suit both called. They went around the table a number of times, each performing the same set of actions.
After the raises and re-raises were finished they moved into the fourth round.
The river card was A
.
It was just like the last hand. Balot did wonder whether they might not be pushing her luck, but:
–I know for a fact that nobody has the real 3
in their hand. Relax.
So she did, silently obeying Oeufcoque’s instructions, calling when necessary. They were fighting fire with fire, and with Oeufcoque on her side Balot knew she had more or less won before the game had even started.
Eventually the Doctor folded and the potbelly too, sensing that his task of raising the stakes had been accomplished. The suit raised, and Balot called without a second thought. The suit looked troubled for a moment, unnerved by her confidence. But he couldn’t retreat at this point. There was no retreat.