Acknowledge that you can count cards out loud? You might as well prepare yourself to be dragged into a windowless room and play Fight Club with a couple of muscle-headed, steroid-taking casino security.
The dealer shows an eight of hearts, and I show two tens, one of spades and one of diamonds.
Blackjack odds place me in a position to hold at a strong twenty.
Now, some people might think it’s a good idea to split the tens, but I’m here to tell you that splitting tens will bring you nothing but bad blackjack juju and will almost always fuck you out of money. A lot of money if you double down.
The rest of my table—including my two participating brothers—play their hands. Remy and Jude hold at eighteen and nineteen, some guy wearing a gold ring busts by getting a seven on a soft sixteen, and the last one, an older gentleman with a Yankees baseball cap who looks like he’s been playing for three days straight, manages to pull a blackjack out of his back pocket by getting a seven of spades added to his jack of hearts and four of clubs.
The dealer flips over his cards and showcases a ten, which means I’m in the money on my hard twenty and Remy and Jude break even. All in all, good for the table, not good for the house.
And the game pretty much rolls in a similar fashion. The same guy who busted on the first hand continues to bust three out of the next five hands. The guy in the baseball cap makes risky choices against the typical odds that end up paying off. And I base all my decisions on actual statistics to keep my chips steadily multiplying.
When another guest joins our game, the dealer pauses to cash in the new player’s chips, and I relax back into my seat while the people at my table make chitchat about random things, like where they’re from, what their plans are for the night, and which casino has the best buffet. Basically, a whole bunch of useless chatter that I have no desire to partake in.
I’m anything but a small-talk kind of guy.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a wild mane of light-brown curls walking down one of the long, carpeted casino paths and grow intrigued. The owner of the curls is a petite female dressed in jeans, white sneakers, and a white T-shirt that showcases just a hint of a trim stomach. She looks to be late twenties, and everything about her outfit, even down to the white luggage on wheels in each of her hands, matches perfectly.
My first instinct is to write her off. All that perfect coordination screams of anal-retentive tendencies and impossible standards for every man she meets. She probably expects expensive gifts and flowery words and no food on the couch, even snacks.
“Ah, dammit,” Jude shouts, tossing his cards down on the felt and startling me out of my surveillance. “This hand’s about as good as a pair of saggy old nuts.”
Ty snorts and tips his chair back, accidentally teetering on two legs until Remy smacks him forward with a straight arm, making him bump into the table. The dealer’s nostrils flare accordingly.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize, though I doubt drunken idiots are anything new for someone who works in a casino on the Las Vegas Strip. “They missed obedience training when they were puppies.”
Placated enough to not call security, the dealer lets out a long sigh and goes back to his job, and my eyes bounce back over to the woman with the wild curls. They’re blithely out of place from the rest of her.
As she pulls her two small suitcases behind her, her eyes grow big with delight when her gaze locks on to a slot machine.
Instantly, there’s a pep in her step as she hurries over to the empty seat and plops down, and it doesn’t take long before she’s sliding money into a machine with gold lights and pictures of buffalo all over the front of it. When the big screen lights up, she giddily taps her finger on one of the buttons to bet money on her first spin.
My brow furrows as I watch her, and I almost startle when she claps her hands and outwardly shouts, “Let’s go!” as the slot machine starts to do its thing. She’s completely on her own, completely by herself, but she acts as though she’s at the center of a crowd. It’s entirely at odds with what I expected—it’s not at all refined or uptight or worried about keeping up appearances.
She doesn’t seem to have a care in the world—a lone wolf in a sea of sheep that are worried about what other people think.
Frankly, she’s a breath of fresh air.
She taps the button again and raises both hands in the air for a brief second to cheer, “C’mon, buffalo! Let’s do this! Move your big hairy asses, and show me the money!”
I fucking loathe slot machines. They’re the biggest waste of money that anyone who steps inside a casino can engage in, and if I were a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve, I’d probably be shaking my head at her blind enthusiasm for the stupid game.