The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Give me the case back,” I said. “Yes, all of it.”

  Their looks were questioning, but after all they didn’t care.

  I walked back to the Paiza, where the doormen greeted me without surprise. Over the next hour I proceeded to lose most of what I had with me, but thereafter my fortune revived a little and I swung between light and dark, between surplus and deficit. It was almost midday before I got to bed. I had left neither worse off nor better, and the next night (for there was always a next night; my life was a series of next nights) I went down more confidently in my smoking jacket with the velvet lapels and sat at the larger fourteen-person baccarat tables between nine and ten.

  Perhaps it was the sleep. I was now loaded with betting power, though of the negative kind, and I was feeling belligerent, aggressive, so unsure of myself that I was sure of myself. I was the only gwai lo there that night, and the regulars who knew me glanced at me with their usual contempt.

  No matter. I had their measure, the little scum. If I lost again I’d do it with an exceptional indifference that would show them who was who in the pecking order of life. I took the case with me and when I opened it to pull out an enormous sum to place my first bet, the other players paled and bit their lips. These were small-timers, or medium-timers, and they weren’t used to heavy bets. I was discreetly advised to perhaps split my bets into smaller sums. As a matter of fact I was happy to oblige. I didn’t need to win on one big killing. I split my treasure into $500 HK shots and played them one by one, eleven in a row. Complete success.

  I looked up at the numbers board and saw new digits slip into place, changing its complexion. My table was now announced as highly fortunate. A slightly larger crowd developed around it. Onlookers pressed in, smoking with wild intensity until the table was thickly shrouded with smoke. I heard their guttural oaths and expressions of disbelief in their crude Putonghua, their imprecations against the dirty foreigner and his goddamned luck. I could understand every word and they didn’t know it, but I let it go. I won and won. Chips rolled in, waves of them.

  At ten thirty I got up and bagged the lot, taking them over to the cashier’s window followed by dozens of stares. I bundled the cash into my attaché case and rolled out of there, moving on to the Hong Fak, certain that I had scored at least a half million, which I probably had. It was a decent day’s work.

  FIVE

  The prince of card games was introduced into France from Italy during the reign of Charles VIII and is similar in some ways to systems like faro and basset. It is the simplest of the card games and also the most honest from the point of view of the punter. It’s hard for the house to cheat at baccarat, and there is a satisfying instant gratification to its simplicity and relative speed. It kills you quickly.

  There are three variations played in different parts of the world: chemin-de-fer, banque, and the North American version, punto banco. This last is the kind played in China and it is a pure game of chance, with no skill involved. The player’s moves are forced by the cards, whereas in the two other versions the player can make choices, which allows skill to play a part in the outcomes. The rules are as follows.

  The game is played with eight decks of cards, which are dealt by three bankers. Each player is given two cards, traditionally by a shoe that moves up and down the table. It couldn’t be more simple. Whoever turns the highest-scoring hand wins the round. Cards two to nine are worth face value, tens and face cards—jack, queen, or king—are worth nothing, and an ace is valued at one. Players calculate their hands by adding up the values, then subtracting the ten digit if that total is higher than ten. This is known as modulo ten.

  For example, a hand of six and eight is worth four: six plus eight equals fourteen modulo ten. If the hand is a four and five, however, then it stands at nine. And nine is the highest value a baccarat hand can be. It is called a natural and conquers all other hands.

  There are three options for betting: the banker (banco), the player (punto), and what is known as tie. These do not necessarily correspond to the actual banker or player; they are merely betting options. The cards are dealt facedown, first to the player and then to the banker, and are turned by the banker. He establishes what is called the tableau, the state of play. If a natural is turned, then the game is over and the lucky holder of the perfect nine is the winner. If not, a player has the right to a third card if he has drawn five or less.

  It is usual for the player to be paid even money while the banker collects ninety-five percent, with five percent to the house. Some casinos pay even money to both player and banker except where the banker wins by a six; he is then paid fifty percent of the bet. If the player and banker hands are equal, then a tie is called and both are paid at odds of eight to one.

  It’s difficult to explain what makes baccarat so compelling. Because it is such a high-stakes game, sometimes played at ten thousand dollars a hand, gaming corporations may see their entire quarterly profits or losses affected by a single night’s play. You can win or lose millions in a short space of time, and so can the house. It has danger, a steel edge to it; it is a game of ecstasy and doom. There is nothing like it in the gambling universe. It was the game of kings and nobles, a game of tycoons, and now it is the game of the Chinese masses. But it is still the game of the reckless rich.

  Punto banco baccarat is a struggle with the pure laws of chance. When you play it you are alone with your fate, and one is not often alone with one’s fate. When you play it your heart is in your mouth. Your pulse quickens to an unbearable pace. You feel that you are walking along the edge of the volcanic precipice made of sharp, hot rock cut as fine as a razor and capable of breaking with all the drama of glass. It is a game surrounded by threatening possibilities: instant death, which comes even quicker than it does with poker or roulette. That’s what I like about it. There’s no lingering illusion. Death by guillotine.

  I spent that day in bed with the curtains drawn. Nothing kept me conscious, not even the rain pounding against the windows or the construction crews below. I dreamed without noise or commotion or imagery, but with a dread that was like being tied up on a chair and sensing the approach of someone behind you armed with a meat cleaver. Ants massing on a tiled floor, the flap of linen curtains at a window somewhere in the tropics. At one point it was just raging sea. I was dreaming of a raging sea and the rage was in slow motion, extended to hours of repetitive wave formations.

  Then I woke, and it was night. The sky was lit with neon and signs for massage girls. SUZIE, BABYLON GIRLS, MEGA. One read YUMMY. My wrists, the sides of my throat were damp. I took a hot bath. I then lay there trying to empty my mind completely as it prepared for a long night of noisy solitude and concentration. A night of combat with Lady Luck, a night of seesaws. I had no plan of action other than to trust for a second night in the I Ching, which was working its effects through my unconscious. I must have cottoned on to something unconsciously, I thought, without any rational effort, and all I had to do was continue as I was doing and it might turn out all right. The less I thought, the better. Always the best plan, non-thought. And it was paradoxical, but I was sure I would win if I continued just trusting in my own unconscious. The unconscious is merely misunderstood. It’s not a trickster.

  I dressed up that night. Tuxedo and tie. New laces, and a dab of Romeo. One has to be reckless sometimes, to spend what one doesn’t have. I went down to Galera, the Robuchon restaurant on the third floor.

  The elevator opens directly into its atrium, in which a glass display of old wine stands, rows of Petrus ’61 and Cheval Blanc ’66, Sauternes from the fifties and the odd bottle of La Tâche. The Lisboa’s owner, Stanley Ho, is China’s greatest wine connoisseur and he can stock his Robuchon outlet with whatever wines he wants. It’s the food and wine temple of Macau, the millionaire’s crux.

  I asked if I could put everything on my account.

  “If you insist, sir.”

  “I do insist.”

  I sat by the windows. The smell of pric
y tarts rose high, tarts like chocolate boxes, but unwrapped and opened up to the consumer. I ordered a bottle of Kweichow Moutai from 1927, a liquor made from sorghum that people say is the most expensive Chinese beverage ever made. It was $47,500 HK on the list: perfumed, slightly desiccated. I drank it with some yellow and green crab cakes, then avocado and mango mixed in with the crab. I knew they would put even this on my tab and they wouldn’t reel me in until it was too late. Then, as if being punctual, I read the South China Post through my reading glasses, not really taking anything in. At length a mushroom soup appeared. It combined almonds, berries, purple gorse flowers, and pieces of blossoming thyme. On the ceiling, stars came on, flickering on and off like a night sky, and I drank lightly, then mulled over a long coffee and petits fours. It reminded me of a French restaurant that used to stand at the center of Haywards Heath that my parents would frequent once a month, on the day my father got his paycheck. It was fronted by heavy curtains and a menu was posted on the glass pane. Vol-au-vents and chicken estragon, steak Rossini with foie gras and Dauphinois potatoes. Here Mum and Dad sat in a window seat and shared a bottle of unpronounceable wine, hands entwined, over a pink lampshade with golden tassels, and reviewed their tax receipts as they cracked open the frozen snails served in their shells. Frugal and broke to the end, but able to eat steak Rossini once a month at the Auberge du Soleil on Twickenham Drive.

  I took out my notebook and tabulated all the plays I had made over the last seventy-two hours, calculating the sequences of hands and the scores I had achieved and then the money I had won. I knew more or less how I had played week by week for the previous month and I could visualize it as a flat line on a graph, with a few rises and drops here and there. Now the line was plunging downward with no floor in sight, but if I could hold my nerve for another two nights and I bet conservatively, something extraordinary might happen. My winnings might run into millions. My losses might run into millions, too, but the statistical gap between these two outcomes was virtually nothing. The casinos were so secretive on this score that one could never find out what the gap actually was, and I certainly didn’t understand it. I had a few amateur theories and nothing more, and it was likely that I had no idea what I was talking about.

  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.

  I waited 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.

  SIX

  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.”

  “Grandma?”

  “We call her Grandma. She’s the wife of a property developer. He’s Hong Kong money. He plays around with the women. She’s allowed to gamble away his money. We call it marriage. It’s a nice arrangement for us.”