by Ubukata, Tow
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.
The suit revealed his hand. His cards were an extremely impressive A
and K
.
A full house, aces over kings. Surely an unbeatable hand.
–I think I’ve won.
The suit’s hands were already reaching for the pile of chips when Balot interrupted.
His hands stopped deadly still, and the only sound was the cowboy roaring as he clocked Balot’s cards.
The suit withdrew his hands from the pile of chips and, with the dealer, looked on in horror at Balot’s hand.
–I have the ace, two, three, four, and five of clubs.
Not royal, but a full-on straight flush nonetheless.
One of the very few hands in the game that beats a full house of aces over kings.
The mechanics blanched, and even the cowboy and the old gentleman were stopped still in their tracks. The Doctor was the Doctor, and played his part of the overenthusiastic country bumpkin with relish.
Balot proceeded to rake in her winnings. Oeufcoque nimbly changed her altered card back to normal, and the cards were returned facedown. Ever the professional, the dealer returned the cards to the cutting machine and opened a new deck, but even as he did so his eyes flitted to the other two mechanics.
–And so it begins…the seeds of doubt have been planted, and they’re about to reap what they’ve sown.
Oeufcoque explained that it was only natural for the dealer to assume now that the two other mechanics were taking advantage of him, cutting him out and somehow using Balot to defraud the casino. At the same time, from the perspective of the two mechanics who were playing, it looked like the dealer was deliberately manipulating the cards in order to sting them and drive them from the table and out of the casino so that he could keep all their ill-gotten gains for himself.
–Let’s have the Doctor win a round now.
Balot knew her cue when she heard it and gave a cue of her own in turn.
–You need to show a bit more courage, Uncle—you’ll never win anything unless you keep betting lots right to the end of the hand.
She had her impression of the eager niece down to a tee—how could anyone imagine in a million years that she had just given the Doctor his cue to bet heavily on his next hand?
“You’re right! Well, it seems to be working for you, so let’s see if I can ride your coattails.” The Doctor understood her perfectly.
The game commenced, mutual suspicion swirling around the three mechanics.
Balot’s cards were 8
and 7
.
The flop was K
, 8
, and A
, and the suit was the blind better.
There were a number of raises and calls. The cowboy, evidently shocked back into a measure of cool-headedness by the two straight flushes on the trot, folded without a second’s hesitation.
The potbelly, on the other hand, was doing everything he could to catch the dealer’s eye to try and communicate his intentions.
–Look, the dealer’s started cheating, so he’s committed—might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. You’ll see he gets increasingly bolder now.
And, sure enough, Balot clearly caught the dealer as he dealt a card from the bottom of the deck in the card shoe.
The turn card was 8
.
Amid the melee the potbelly folded, followed by the old gentleman.
They moved on into the final round, and the river card was revealed. At the very same instant Balot interfered with the overhead cameras again, snarcing them, and Oeufcoque pounced. In a movement that was too fast for human eyes to pick up on, he switched one of the Doctor’s cards, then:
–Time to fold.
The river card was A
.
The suit raised, and the Doctor raised again, and at this point Balot folded. The dealer and the two mechanics seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Then the betting was over, and the hands were revealed.
The suit had A
and K
. Another full house. The best full house there was, twice, back to back. Even the cowboy seemed suspicious.
But all that was put aside in the next moment. The Doctor paused for a beat, then said, “Hmm, looks like I might have won.”
The suit had his hands over the chips again, but all the strength seemed to flow from his body when he heard the Doctor’s words, and he almost swooned as he turned to look at the bad news.
8
and 8
.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. There was no way the Doctor could have had a better full house, so he had gone one better—four of a kind.
–Their system is quite a simple one, really, and it’s just based around getting high-scoring full houses. They haven’t really planned ahead as far as being able to deal with hands such as a low four of a kind or straight flushes.
Oeufcoque had nailed it. From that moment on, either the potbelly or
the suit always seemed to turn out a full house of one shape or another. No thought for averages or odds. Caution was thrown to the wind, prudence out the window.
The cowboy went into a sulk, throwing chip after chip at the table. And it only took another hand before the old gentleman reached his limit; the old man silently stood up and walked away from the table.
Neither the dealer nor the two other mechanics had any idea what was going on. They grew impatient and frustrated, and were exactly where Oeufcoque wanted them, dancing to his tune.
They had been doomed to failure from the beginning. However good a poker face was, there was no human being on this planet who could control their body odor at will. Oeufcoque read their emotions precisely and to the most minute of details, and Balot almost started feeling sorry for the mechanics, as their very essence seemed to be, layer by layer, exposed raw.
The cowboy’s chips ran out mid-hand, and as he was now all in, a second pot was created in accordance with the tap-out rules. In the end, he lost.
The cowboy left the table, spitting in disgust, and it was all the mechanics could do to watch him as he disappeared.
Other customers milled around the area, but none of them came near the table directly—there was a general sense that all was not quite right with the table. So now it was just Balot, the Doctor, and the three cheats.
Before long, though, the dealer stopped paying any attention to the other two mechanics. And soon enough, one of the remaining mechanics slipped up with a hand signal—or was it the other one who misread it?—and the trust between them completely broke down. All three mechanics were fit to burst. Oeufcoque noted everything, sliced away at their innermost feelings, and ruthlessly took their chips.
It wasn’t long before the potbelly was out of chips. He rose up and left the gaming table without a word.
The suit watched him go before getting up himself, his handful of remaining chips clenched tightly in his hands. He looked as if he could murder the dealer, but in the end stormed off in the opposite direction of the potbelly.
“Well, well—didn’t that game turn out all fine and dandy?” the Doctor roared.
The dealer just about managed a smile, though it took his every last remaining drop of self-restraint to do so. When the Doctor rose and turned his back to leave, the dealer’s eyes went black immediately.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone who looks as if they could bite another person’s head off, thought Balot.
For, at that precise moment, this was indeed how the dealer looked.
04
“Truly marvelous!” bellowed the Doctor.
They were at the baccarat table. The high rollers’ corner. Men puffing on cigars, women sporting jewels and low-cut dresses, all in thrall to the mountainous piles of high-value chips.
–Why did we win? The other side had a higher hand than ours.
The Doctor answered Balot’s question as he was raking in the pile of his winnings. “The side whose hand adds up to the number closest to nine wins. The player side only had a four so was obliged to draw another card, which turned out to be a six.”
–But four and six make ten—that’s closer to nine than you were!
“A hand that adds up to ten is called baccarat and equals zero in this game—it’s the worst hand possible.”
Balot nodded vaguely. Baccarat wasn’t one of her designated games, and the rules were now only a faint memory. She was standing right behind the Doctor now, left hand on his shoulder. Her knavish left hand. Oeufcoque could read almost any game in progress and pass the message on through Balot’s left hand to the Doctor—this was the setup.
Baccarat was supposed to be a game of pure chance; participants would bet on the player or banker side, trying to guess which one would draw closer to nine. But, of course, once Oeufcoque entered the game the rules went out the window.
He was able to sniff out the people who drew on the player side or the banker side, and use this to work out roughly what cards they had drawn, what numbers they had seen, and what sort of plan they were hatching.
The Doctor had completely grasped every little habit and tell of every player at the table, and said to Balot, “Here you go—some of the winnings. Go have some fun.” He passed a whole basket of chips over to Balot.
This was a cue to say that he no longer needed Oeufcoque’s help and could manage perfectly on his own now. Balot was impressed as ever by the Doctor’s superhuman memory and observational skills, but she couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that she would be walking away from this game without really getting it, without understanding why it was supposed to be so absorbing.
–I’ll be at the place you told me, so come and find me if you start losing.
She tapped the Doctor’s shoulder as she left. What she really meant, of course, was that he should come and find her if he needed Oeufcoque’s help again, but the Doctor just smiled back at her to show that he was invincible.
–We’ve already reached the figure we need for now. We need to consider the casino as a whole when we make our next move. If we throw one particular game too far out of kilter we’ll attract suspicion. So let’s not get carried away—you’re not here to enjoy yourself.
Oeufcoque seemed to be able to read Balot’s thoughts as perceptively as ever, and he communicated this lecture through her left hand again.
Taking her cue, Balot reluctantly left the table. She was playing out a common scene at the high stakes tables. The punter gets drawn in completely, and he throws the woman on his arm a few chips in order to get her out of his hair, telling her to go and kill some time elsewhere.
Balot watched the game from farther back for a while, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun. She felt like a left-out child, and before long she wandered off aimlessly. This was the act that she was meant to play—although she did genuinely feel it too. In spite of the barely concealed enthusiasm of the players at the table, she hardly felt interested in the game at all—and it was this more than anything else that made her feel the most disappointed.
It may well have been a deliberate ploy of the casino to make her feel like this, of course. No one liked to feel left out, and she’d be back before long.
Balot walked past the tables and into another room. Before she knew it she was in more plush surroundings with the games around her more expensive. No expense seemed to be spared on the furnishings or the dealers’ outfits, and Balot had the distinct feeling that she was now moving closer to the heart of the casino.
She was aiming for the area where the roulette tables were. Men and women of all ages were milling about, the balls chasing the numbers as they spun around. Balot realized that this was it—her first opportunity to fly solo.
The Doctor believed that with Balot’s and Oeufcoque’s abilities combined, roulette would be the best way to win a large sum of money directly from the casino; it was a game of chance, and no one could dispute the result.
Balot ran through the rules again in her head and started looking for a table when a message appeared in her left hand:
–Sit at table number seven.
It looked like Oeufcoque was onto something. Balot proceeded to the table and took a seat near the dealer. The Doctor had advised her that the closer she was to the roulette wheel, the more likely it was she could use her abilities effectively.
–We’re going to win the first spin. They’ll make sure of that.
The previous writing on her hand had disappeared to be replaced by a declaration of victory.
Balot passed her chips over to a dealer, who exchanged them for roulette chips.
Balot would be betting with red hundred-dollar chips.
There were three dealers in all. One in charge of the wheel, the other two responsible for exchanging chips, cashing them in, and paying out winnings.
The crowd around this particular table was much sparser than the others, and Balot was the only one at the table. The dealer who exchanged Balot’s chips did so solely for
Balot.
There had probably just been a big match here, and the crowd must have dispersed the moment the high rollers left the table. Or perhaps the table had been reserved for an entire party who had recently left en masse. Either way, Oeufcoque had managed to sniff out a situation that was potentially very much to their advantage.
–Where should I place my bet?
–Wherever you like.
Such was Oeufcoque’s reply.
Balot glanced at the dealer. The dealer in charge of the ball.
Balot was surprised to see that she was an older woman. An elegant, beautiful lady. She must have been at least sixty years old, but she stood tall, back straight, and her eyes were a keen blue. She wore a strong, calm expression. The casino had its fair share of female dealers, but she must have been the oldest.
–She’s so cool.
Balot was looking down at the roulette layout now but couldn’t help herself from sharing her feelings with Oeufcoque.
–According to our data her name is Bell Wing. One of the leading croupiers in the casino world.
–Croupiers?
–It’s what they call dealers whose job it is to place the ball into the roulette wheel as it turns.
Even cooler, Balot thought, still looking over the layout.
The green felt in front of her had printed on it the numbers 0, 00, and 1 to 36 in alternating black and red squares, in addition to a number of squares to denote the outside bets.
To one side of the wheel was an electronic scoreboard showing all the numbers that had come up during the last twenty minutes. A form guide. One of the enjoyments in roulette was to try and work out any biases that emerged either in the wheel or due to the way the croupier threw in the ball.