Always know your exits.
Apparently, my husband’s training had turned me into a walking anxiety algorithm. Or maybe I was just trying to figure out how I could slip out of here without anyone noticing. This definitely wasn’t my scene.
We wandered by a large round table with a noisy crowd around it. I suspected it was a craps table. I didn’t understand the rules, though Xavier had tried to explain them to me one time. “Craps,” exclaimed Basia. “Best odds in the house, they claim.”
“Only if you know what you are doing,” I responded. “And none of us do.”
“She’s got a point,” Gray said and we moved on.
On the other side of the craps table was a roulette wheel built into a table surrounded by green felt. Black and red numbers in squares and other betting options were printed on the surface. Almost unable to resist, I calculated the odds for the various bets. It took me only a few seconds to realize that the odds were stacked against the player in the long run. Even betting red or black, which seemed like an even bet, wasn’t. All players lost about one time in twenty, and that was the house margin.
Gwen spotted the blackjack tables first. “Oooh! Lexi, come on! You’re going to represent us since you’re so good with numbers.”
“Define numbers,” I said, but I was already being towed toward a semicircular table with six seats. Besides the dealer, dressed in a white dress shirt and black bow tie, there was only one player, a large man with pasty white skin and wearing a cowboy hat. “If you mean statistics, probability, and encryption coding, sure. If you mean socially calibrated risk-taking, I?—”
“Perfect!” she interrupted, shoving me into a chair.
The dealer, a middle-aged man with tired eyes and a name tag on his shirt pocket that read Joseph, had the forced smile of someone who’d been working at the casino way too long.
“Welcome to blackjack, ladies,” he said. “Table minimum’s ten dollars.” There was a sign on the table that read “Triple Deck Shoe.” I had no idea what that meant.
“We’ll take fifty,” Gray said setting down a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “She’s the only one playing. We’re the moral support.”
The dealer shrugged and pulled the bill toward him, counting out fifty dollars in six red chips and two blue chips before sliding the money into a slot in the table and pushing it down with a clear paddle. I glanced at the cowboy, who sat two chairs down sipping brown liquid from a glass. His heavy, white face was a bit flushed, and I suspected that despite the hat, he rarely spent any time outside. He looked like he’d already had too much to drink, even though it was just after five o’clock.
The dealer pushed the two small stacks of chips to me. I picked two red ones and placed them in the circle. “Hit me.”
The dealer stared at me. “I haven’t dealt the cards yet.”
“Oops,” I said, my face heating. “Sorry. I got a little excited.”
He gave me a long look. “You do know how to play blackjack, right?”
“Of course,” I said, perhaps a bit too emphatically. “Just not in a casino.”
I’m not sure he knew what to make of that, but he said nothing. He took the cards and shuffled them. There were many more cards than in a single deck. I estimated at least three decks’ worth. He then placed them into a card-holding device where he could slide them out one at a time. “Okay then, if you’re ready, ma’am, we can begin.”
I nodded, and with a practiced sweep of his arm, he dealt cards to me, the cowboy, and himself. My cards were a ten and a six. The cowboy had an eight and a seven. The dealer showed a five.
“Stay,” I said before the dealer even asked me.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Gwen leaned over my shoulder, whispering, “Shouldn’t you think about it?”
“I did,” I whispered back. I had calculated the dealer’s odds of busting at about 42 percent with one deck. I wasn’t sure exactly because of the multiple decks used, but I believed his odds of busting with three decks would be slightly higher. My odds of busting if I hit were 62 percent. So, my chance of winning improved by 20 percent if I stood.
The cowboy asked for a hit, but he was over twenty-one and busted. The dealer flipped his hole card, and it was a seven. He had to hit, and he too busted on his next card.
I won that hand and then the next three in quick succession, leaving my original bet and the winnings on the table each time.
Gwen cheered, Gray patted me on the shoulder, and Basia clapped. I decided to sit out a hand and stacked my winnings into three piles, as I now had some twenty-five-dollar chips, and chaos in chip management was just begging for bad luck.
“You’re our lucky charm,” Basia said.
“It’s not luck,” I said, and she grinned. Well, maybe it was a little, I conceded to myself. Even with a perfect strategy, the house had a small edge and would win in the long run. However, in a short period of time, anything could happen if you played smart. And I was into playing the odds.
