“Okay, what’s the game?”
“Well, you drop the three chips into a bag, or a box — or a hat.” Simon did that. “You shake ’em up under the table, where nobody can see what happens to them. Then if it’s your turn, you pick out any one of ’em, without looking. Go on, you try it. You take it out and slam it on the table, so that anyone can see what’s on the top side — whether it’s marked or not — but nobody knows what’s on the under-side. Then you try to guess what’s underneath, an ‘X’ or nothing.”
Mr Way thoughtfully turned over the chip he had put down. Simon spilled out the other two beside it. The little man picked them up and examined them. A newcomer would have wondered why anyone ever called him Loud Mouth.
“Here’s how this chap explained it to me,” said the Saint, reaching for his pen and a handy piece of ash-tray advertising. “And it might help you to visualize it quicker. Let’s pretend we can see both sides of these chips at once. I’ll draw both sides of each chip and tie them together. Here’s the one with a cross on both sides, for a start...”
He drew it, followed by two similarly attenuated dumbbells.
“... and the one with a cross on one side only, and the double-blank. Now, as this chap says first, anyone can see there are three crosses and three blanks, altogether, so if you just shut your eyes and guessed what side was down — or up, for that matter — you’d have an even chance.”
“Yeah, if you’re guessing—”
“But suppose you’re looking. Suppose the chip on the table shows a cross. Then you know it can only be one of these first two, don’t you? In other words, the underside is either a cross — or a blank. An even chance... On the other hand, if the side that’s up is blank, you know the chip must be one of these second two. So the bottom either has a cross — or it doesn’t. Again, it’s fifty-fifty. Or it seems to be.”
“What d’ya mean, it seems?”
“Well, that’s what was bothering me. Because when I was doing the guessing, I was right about half the time. But this other chap guessed right much more often than not. I lost quite a packet playing with him. So I’ve started wondering if I was unlucky, or whether there’s some trick to it that I haven’t seen. I’m sure that the crosses were all exactly alike, and there was nothing on the chips that you could find by feeling them — I thought of that. And the way we played, he couldn’t have done any sleight of hand. But if it’s legitimate, why go through such a complicated business to set up an even chance?”
Mr Way fiddled with the chips and frowned over the diagram for a full minute, which is quite a long pause in a conversation. And if his had been an electronic brain instead of the old fashioned variety, one would have sworn that one could feel the churning incandescence of his tubes.
It had been manifest from the start, to his practically single-minded instincts, that some deceit was involved. But the same ingenuous presentation which had caught his interest had also effectively nipped off any branch lines of thought which might have led towards mechanical props or common legerdemain. He knew that he was confronting some subtle trick of skillful misdirection from the same family as those which had long provided him with a fairly painless livelihood, but a trick which he had somehow failed to master before. It had given him a twinge of professional jealousy to discover that some cheesy plagiarist must be exploiting a colorable imitation of his own method in positively overlapping territory, but this pang had been rapidly alleviated by more constructive thoughts of the profits he might derive from swiping this Dong Hai routine for his own repertoire. All he needed was to twig the trick, and he even had a self-confessed pushover already set up and waiting for the shove.
It may be cited as some kind of testimonial to his misguided genius that he found the solution in those sixty seconds of seething cogitation — a par for the problem which only the most razor-witted reader is likely to have equaled, although in this case no abstruse mathematics whatever were involved. Perhaps it was only the gigantic blatancy of the logical pitfall that made it so hard for a devious mind to see.
But when it did dawn on him like a blast of lightning, it was purely to the credit of Mr Way’s personal discipline that he did not emit a screech of triumph like the orgasm of a banshee, or even exhibit the faintest furtive smugness. He merely wagged his head, with a disillusioned and contemptuous weariness.
“There’s nothing wrong with the game, bud,” he said. “The only thing wrong is that some bum sports always think they’ve been robbed if they don’t win.”
“But why go to all that trouble to invent a game like that when you might as well flip a coin?”
“Don’t ask me, my friend. Maybe these mandarins were too rich to carry small change. Maybe the concubines would’ve been offended about being flipped for. Maybe they got bored with flipping coins and had to think up something different. How do any betting games get started?”
“But an even chance—”
“What’s more complicated than a roulette table? — And yet half the people you see in a casino are playing the even chances — red and black, odds and evens, high and low. It just seems more glamorous, or something, to do it that way. I could get bored with tossing heads and tails myself. I’m a sucker for a new game. Why don’t we try this one? This time, you might be lucky. That’d prove it was on the level.”
“I could use a bit of luck,” Simon grumbled, declining the gibe. “How much d’you want to play for? Would five bucks be too high for you?”
“I thought you told me you’d lost a packet,” sneered Mr Way. “How long did it take you, at those prices? Or how much do you call a packet? Most times, I’d say that any bet less than a ten-spot wasn’t worth the effort, but if you’re strapped—”
“Okay,” said the Saint. “Make it ten dollars.” He scraped the chips into his hat and shook it under the table.
“Who goes first?”
“After you,” said Mr Way.
Simon brought out a chip and slapped it down. When he took his hand off it, it revealed a penciled “X.”
“Blank,” said the Saint, and turned it over.
The other side was blank. Mr Way pulled out his roll, peeled off a bill, and handed it over. Simon threw the chip back in his hat and passed it to Mr Way under the table. Mr Way took out a chip, laid it down, and exposed a cross.
“Another cross,” he said, turning it over.
He was wrong. The other side was blank again.
On the next draw, Simon showed a blank, called for a cross, but turned up another blank. Mr Way also picked a blank, called it blanks back-to-back, and lost — when the chip was turned over, it showed an “X” on the other side.
Mr Way paid off with equanimity. He was betting on a cast-iron percentage, and he could afford to wait for the dividends.
Several plays and some three hundred dollars later he was still waiting. He had won a few times, but not nearly so often as his opponent. That was when, convinced that the laws of probability could not be defied indefinitely, he made the utterly amateurish mistake of suggesting that they should double the stakes to speed up the action.
The Saint let himself be cajoled and insulted into that with the most irritating reluctance, and had soon taken another five hundred and forty dollars of Mr Way’s cash. They doubled the stakes again, and Simon won another forty dollars on his correct guess and another forty on the little man’s incorrect one.
“This can get damn monotonous, after all,” Mr Way conceded. “Let’s try some other game.”
“But I’m just getting lucky at this one,” Simon protested. “Don’t be discouraged because I’m having a winning streak. Let me have my fun. It probably won’t last long.”