by Ubukata, Tow
Suddenly the game she was playing didn’t seem so interesting anymore. She had lost all thought of amusement. Everything was riding on this battle—her whole world. She couldn’t allow herself to be flustered by a dealer such as this one.
–Cool it.
A strong admonition from Oeufcoque. He sounded blunt—harsh, even—but it was a clear sign of just how attuned he was to Balot’s thoughts and feelings. He wasn’t about to let her make a grave mistake.
–Before you go charging in, you need to have the full measure of your opponent. Forewarned is forearmed.
Balot squeezed her left hand in lieu of a nod. Tightly. Then she focused her full attention on the game at hand. On the dealer. On the other players. And on the cards. Telling herself that the long and winding road could yet be the shortest and surest route to her final destination. After all, hadn’t Oeufcoque and the Doctor been right about everything so far, showing her the best path to take?
Oeufcoque’s words were sinking in properly. The full measure of your opponent—Oeufcoque wasn’t just helping her out of a rut. He was teaching her. Empowering her. Showing her how to fight against her own powerlessness. So that she could win. He was showing her that she had a chance, a choice. She felt fiercely in tune with the mouse at that moment.
Her reverie was interrupted by the voice of the monocled man. “Is this the sort of hand I should hit with, would you say?” He was asking, of all people, the dealer.
The man’s total was fifteen.
The dealer’s upcard was 8.
It was a delicate call, certainly. But the dealer answered without hesitation. “It depends on the circumstances, of course, but if you were playing by the book then the correct move would be to hit, sir.”
A first-class dealer was always ready to respond to such questions from the player. He would have all the possible combinations memorized, ready to reel them off pat. A dealer who didn’t know the 290-odd possibilities “by the book” wasn’t a first-class dealer.
“Having said that, it’s up to the player’s mood whether he wants to double down,” the dealer continued calmly.
Doubling down seemed to have become something of a signature tune for the monocled man.
“Of course, those who want to determine the flow of the game have to be prepared to pay the price.”
The monocled man nodded in agreement with the dealer’s words and boldly hit. A jack to his fifteen. Bust.
But the man now had his eyes closed; he seemed to take at face value the dealer’s suggestion that it was inevitable he had to pay the price and just shrugged his shoulders.
–It’s a double bind.
–A double bind?
–That’s what it’s called when you manage to implant an idea in your opponent’s mind, inducing them to act in a certain way. The way the dealer handled that then, by mentioning the doubling down—it made hitting become the default option for the player.
–But that was the right decision, wasn’t it?
–As a basic tactic, yes, it was the right move. But the basic tactics stop being of any use once you’re under the dealer’s spell. What he’s doing is conditioning the man’s mind, ridding him of the possibility of any move but hitting.
–Ridding him…?
–Doubling down—that’s quite a big call to make, not one you do lightly. By drawing focus to the difficult move and juxtaposing it with an easier one, the dealer is basically suggesting that the only really sensible move is the easier one—to hit. All other possibilities are forgotten. On top of that, the dealer appealed to the rather vague and ambiguous idea of the “player’s mood.” Caught between the rock and the hard place of the difficult decision and the ambiguous instruction, the player ends up choosing the “only” sensible option, which in fact is nothing of the sort. That’s what the double bind is.
–So what should the man have done?
–What he should or shouldn’t have done isn’t really the issue. What the man should have been focusing on—or rather, resigning himself to—was the fact that he had a losing hand. But now he only has eyes for victory. He’s convinced himself, or allowed himself to be duped into believing, that losing along the way is a necessary part, a price that he has to pay in order to achieve his ultimate goal. But it’s not. A losing hand is just a losing hand, nothing more, nothing less.
The monocled man and the fat lady played in the same way: the more cards they drew, the more they focused on their own hands, paying less and less attention to the dealer’s cards.
“Double down,” called the man, only a couple of hands later. He drew a 9 to his existing hand of thirteen and went bust.
The dealer’s upcard was a 6—playing by the book, the man should have stayed.
It was the beginning of the end for the monocled man. He might have been crumbling silently up to this point, but now he started crashing down with a roar. Perhaps he was playing with “scared money”—money he shouldn’t have been touching, money meant for living expenses or even to pay his hotel bill during his stay. Either way, he was now on the edge, in sharp contrast to the woman, who seemed to be enjoying herself in a far healthier manner, even as she frittered away her chips.
The man started doubling down on hands such as fifteen and sixteen, busting left, right, and center. He bet large amounts on single hands and then seemed largely oblivious even when the dealer had an ace as his upcard, recklessly doubling down regardless. The dealer started commenting on the man’s choices, bolstering up his recklessness, and the man clung to these crumbs of comfort.
In true Confucian style, the dealer said, “Doubling down is an extremely aggressive move. Some hands are suited more for attacking, others for defending.”
The dealer said, “Of all the players I’ve ever met, sir, may I say that an attacking style seems to suit you the best.”
The dealer said, “Do please take all the time you need to decide whether this is the place to press your advantage, sir.”
The dealer said, “Regrets at what might have been are the surest way to ruin your game. Do make sure you play as your heart tells you—that’s the best way to ensure you have no regrets. Going with your gut instinct is often best.”
The dealer had the monocled man by the snout, well and truly. The lady, too, seemed to be responding—she was slowly but surely increasing her bets. Oeufcoque, on the other hand, responded to each of the dealer’s precepts with increasingly disdainful commentary.
Thus:
–Attacking, defending. What does that even mean in the context of this game? Nothing—they’re completely ambiguous terms. As is the idea of hands “suiting” a particular style of play. All this sort of talk does is hook the player into going along with the dealer.
Then:
–“Do take all the time you need to decide”—that’s just a bind to force his hand. The only “choice” left in the man’s mind is to double down.
And:
–A bust is a bust, full stop. You can give it whatever name you like, call it “regrets” or what have you, but it’s not going to help you one bit. Even if the game does throw him up the odd high-paying blackjack, that’s not going to change the fact that overall the man is hemorrhaging money.
At each step Oeufcoque was warning Balot, but he was also teaching her the game. And in a far easier and more effective manner than any sort of long-winded plan concocted at the planning table.
The monocled man and the fat lady were now losing money hand over fist. Both were down well over thirty thousand dollars.
–What sort of person is this dealer?
–A bit of a prima donna. Good at his job, a real rainmaker. He knows the game inside out and he’s good with the customers. As far as the casino is concerned, he’s a real golden goose—and he knows it.
–I don’t like him.
–Fine. Just don’t let him know that you don’t like him.
–What do you want me to do?
–When you win, smile. When you lose, sulk.
She did just that for the next few hands, and the card shoe started running low.
The monocled man had switched to lower value bets, a hundred dollars a hand or even less.
–Looks like I win our little game. Oeufcoque’s voice was confident.
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.
Despite this, the woman showed no sign of worrying about where her next chips were coming from. It was as if she had a bank of chips on hand that she could draw from without limit w
henever hers needed replenishing.
Then Balot had her epiphany.
The woman did have a bank of chips at hand. A bank that guarded the chips carefully, sometimes even increasing the available number, ever so steadily.
The woman hit on a thirteen, drawing a 10. Bust. Bad luck, plain and simple—it was the right move, nothing wrong about her style of play.
But the number of chips she had riding on just that one hand—now, that was something else. The dealer raked in well over a thousand dollars from her.
Balot, the Doctor, and the old man all won that hand.
In other words, the lady was the only one who lagged behind.
Not that this seemed to bother her in the slightest. “I just have this feeling that my luck’s about to turn any minute,” she murmured.
To whom? To the old man, of course. “Well, why don’t you give your luck a run for its money, then,” he replied, a broad, generous smile covering his face.
He had given his permission.
The woman grabbed a pile of chips with her chubby fingers. Where from? The old man’s basket of chips, of course.
–I see…
Balot snarced Oeufcoque, almost unthinkingly.
–So that’s how she does it. I did wonder how she was able to bet so much without worrying.
–Ah, so you’ve realized what was bankrolling her bankroll?
–Is that why you chose the old man to leave the table first?
–Naturally.
–No fair!
She felt Oeufcoque chuckling somewhere at the back of her hand.
Balot had got it all wrong. At first she thought that the old man was being paraded about by the younger lady, the helpless gent reliant on the woman’s kindness. But that was all an act that he put on for her sake; in reality, she was the one who was utterly dependent on him.
–Don’t be too hard on yourself, Balot. You worked it out for yourself and pretty quickly too. That’s impressive—you’re allowed to give yourself a little pat on the back once in a while, you know, particularly when you deserve it.
In other words, the plump lady didn’t have any chips of her own. Only those that she was allowed to play with. The dealer knew this all too well—it would have been one of the first things he worked out. And that’s where he was targeting his manipulative inducements.