Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

I ate a chocolate soufflé and wondered if I should finally buy a decent watch if I won, since my fake Chinese Rolex was beginning to slow down and I felt the itch to spend some of this future cash that had suddenly descended upon me in the realm of probability. I wanted to kill it dead by spending it, like an exorcism. But if I lost—

To Hong Fak VIP again, then. Its First Empire lamps were looking sultry, the gold Corinthian capitals newly washed and sparkling. A landscape of wish fulfillment, and therefore of disciplined madness. The potted trees had been sprayed with water like supermarket legumes, and the neoclassical gold everywhere was almost a struggle to behold because the brightness fought its way violently into the eye and increased . I sat at a table of fourteen, mostly young and indolently thuggish men in leather or velvet jackets, the kinds with wide lapels like the accoutrements of famished princes. The rings and watches burst with Indian diamonds and they played like tycoons, though they were nothing of the sort. They played rapid hands, crying loud when they lost and won, saying prayers to themselves. The smoke stung the eyes. I played quietly, speaking in Mandarin, and I lost two hands of three hundred dollars apiece. I lost for an hour and then gave up and went up to New Wing.

There’s always a way to win at baccarat if you are patient and stay cool. It’s like any other game. In fact, where skill is not involved you have a better chance against the house than you would otherwise. The house always knows that most people play incompetently and without a cool head. If you play better than averagely the odds are still stacked against you, whereas if you are playing with luck alone you have a fair chance of not losing too much and occasionally breaking even. With baccarat the secret is in pacing your bets, spreading them out evenly. Keeping a cool head, not with regard to a strategy aimed at deceiving others, but with regard to your own eagerness to win. It is a different kind of coolness that is required. The opponent is yourself.

Moreover, you are up against laws , and the laws will favor you if you show no arrogance toward them. They will not harm you if you never assume that you are superior to them.

It was a realistic concept to a people like the Chinese, whereas to Westerners it is anathema. We think of laws as inert principles that we can overcome and manipulate in our favor. I had certainly thought that way when I decided to become a lawyer! Gradually, I was learning to lose this conception of the world, and to accept a more realistic attitude toward the laws of statistical odds. The Chinese seemed very superstitious about these things, but side by side with the superstition was the recognition that it is far more powerful to pit yourself against Luck than against a guy in a leather jacket and winklepicker boots. Humans are not as formidable as the principles of the universe.

Luck was the force that ordered the universe, and it could create or destroy you in a heartbeat. I played my first hand against a full table, and I was glad that no rumor of my loss at Hong Fak had made its way up to New Wing. The players here, in fact, were more serious and the bets were higher. I watched them pay down their sheaves of cash and then turn their cards with hard-bitten alacrity. I turned an eight and won the round. There was a low exclamation — drawn-out, animal — around the table, and the three bankers shot me an incredulous look that could have been synchronized by puppeteers. I raked in the chips and asked for some iced water. Three people left the table and we were down to eleven. I felt high and now at last my mouth went dry, emptied out like a chalice.

“Look at that foreigner,” the boys muttered. “He’s got it fixed.”

Why they should have said this I didn’t know. It was only one hand and I hadn’t won with a natural.

Yet I felt exceptional as the next hand was dealt, as a shaman might who had been selected by a higher power to perform a single extraordinary task. But what was that task? Who had done the selecting?

I laid down a five-thousand-dollar bet. The room turned like something that has a rotating axis. I won two more hands. These consecutive wins suddenly induced a mood of hysterical superstitiousness in the entire room, and I noticed the tables thinning out as people migrated to mine. Success is irresistible. It’s like a crime scene, something that enchants the worst side of the mind. It was a spectacle for them, and soon the word flow circulated around the smoky space and became a wavelike sound, a word that ebbed and flowed itself.

“Sir,” the principal banker asked me, “are we going on?”

“Why not?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Do I look otherwise?”

“As you wish.”

“When I say I want to go on, I go on.”

“Yes, sir.”

His tone was jittery. Beneath his show of concern for my risky behavior lay a distinct apprehension caused by the unpredictability of gwai lo behavior when Luck suddenly reversed. He glanced toward the door, through which he appeared to be expecting someone to walk at any moment. But as he did so it was a couple that appeared, or at least a man and a woman going through the motions of being a couple, and I saw at once that the woman was Dao-Ming and that she was dressed up for the night with a certain level of taste and refinement that she had not had the last time we met. She also saw me at once and her face went cold and tense, and yet it was also possible, I thought, that it was not Dao-Ming at all but someone else altogether. This woman, whoever she was, dropped the man’s hand and as he went off to a table she sat alone on one of the sofas and waited for a server. Her escort was middle-aged and obviously familiar to her, and I watched him sit at a distant table, oblivious to our glances. It was definitely her, I then realized, and my heart slumped a little.

Iwaited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling that it was going to be a natural, a perfect nine.

As I waited for the cards to be turned, the woman on the sofa watched me with great interest, and as she did so she occasionally turned away and powdered her face in a hand mirror. I was now emboldened by something — by the thought of a winning streak, by the woman watching me as if with sexual interest (but it couldn’t be) — and I could have withdrawn at that moment and saved myself, but all these other factors were weighing in and this is the way we are, we addicts. We can’t ignore signs. So I played on. I said to the croupier that for the fuck of it I’d place everything I’d won on the last hand on this one. Insanity, but that’s the whole point. The thrill is in the edge of the blade and sliding along it.

“It’s a bold move, sir.”

“It’s just a move.”

I cut open a cigar like a braggart and had it lit. The chips were laid down and there was a pause in the instruments of fate and I must admit I rather enjoyed it, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that is the feeling that every player lives for. Centuries of players, of brothers in arms, have felt the same.

At that moment I looked up and past the crowd and saw a middle-aged woman playing at a full table at the far side of the room. She was wearing a bulging cocktail dress distorted by her mass and a black hat of some kind stuck through with an emerald feather like the plume from a giant extinct cockatoo. I recognized her at once. It was the bitch from that night at the Greek Mythology. She was chain-smoking and throwing down cash like nobody’s business. I caught the banker’s eye and asked him who it was. He shrugged scornfully. “That’s Grandma. She’s always in here on a Wednesday night. She cleans us out.”