The rest of the game
Jun. 11th, 2006 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithThe rest of the game sequence. If anyone notices any errors, please let me know.
"You're awfully quiet, ní Tsecha." Jani glanced across the table and watched him study his hand. "You've scarcely spoken since we started."
"I concentrate, nìa. I learn the game." Tsecha rearranged his cards, then laid them face-down on the table. "I still do not understand why I cannot see the cards you toss away."
"Because then you would have a much better idea of which cards are still available." Dieter glared at his own hand, just as he had glared at every hand he'd been dealt over the course of the evening, good or bad. "It removes some of the risk, and risk is the point of the exercise. That's why it's called gambling." He fingered a ten-dollar marker, then tossed it into the middle of the table. Over the course of the game, the minimum bet had migrated upward, from a dollar to five and now ten, which accounted also accounted in part for his mood.
"Too much risk is called stupidity." Tsecha pushed a ten-dollar marker into the pot, then folded his arms and slumped, seemingly oblivious to the nervous laughter that greeted his remark.
"Too little risk is called no fun at all." Lucien riffled through his cards, then pushed a twenty-dollar marker into the pot. "Call and raise."
"I'm out." The security guard tapped his cards together and set them next to the markers. "Getting a little too rich for my mixed-up blood." He pushed back from the table and walked to the line of chairs along the wall, to which the two members of the greenhouse crew had decamped an hour before.
Jani scanned her cards. All her old guides for the calling and raising of bets--rent payments, billet prices, her growling stomach--no longer applied, which removed some of the tension from the game. That leaves beating Lucien into the ground. That, unfortunately, wasn’t working as well as one could have wished. They had played even for the first few hands. Then Jani hit a bad patch, Lucien displayed his usual skill at bluffing, and Tsecha added an entirely new dimension to the phrase 'beginner's luck.' My old teacher is a card sharp. Jani tried toting up the stack of markers piled at his elbow, and lost track after the first thousand.
"If you're going to fold, just do it."
Jani glanced across the table at Lucien. His eyes, rich brown and usually sharp as a cut jewel, shone dull, as though he regarded a stranger. "Call." She set a twenty-dollar marker next to his, then added another. "Raise twenty." She avoided looking at her cards, which were a mess. All four suits. No pairs. No apparent patterns. Oh well. At least she'd set Lucien back on his heels until it came time to show all.
"Forget it." Dieter set his cards atop the guard's. "Some of us are prone to nosebleeds at this altitude."
"Call." Tsecha set two twenties next to Jani's markers, then added three more.
"Raise...sixty." He bared his teeth as a few gasps sounded from the spectators.
Lucien looked from Tsecha, to Jani, then back to Tsecha. "Call." More markers joined the stack.
Dieter stared at Tsecha and shook his head. "My little boy's all grown up."
Jani stared at Tsecha in an effort to draw his eye, but he remained fixed on some middle distance, as though all about him was distraction. Oh, what the hell. "Call." She pushed her remaining markers into the center.
"Ní Tsecha?" Dieter held out the deck. "How many cards do you want?"
Tsecha shook his head. "None."
"None? You're sure?"
"Yes, Dieter."
"You're standing on your cards?"
"No, I am sitting on my chair." Tsecha paused as the light laughter made the rounds. "I have the cards I wish."
"I'll take two." Lucien tossed two cards onto the heap, and picked up the replacements Dieter dealt him. Glanced at his new cards, then sent his last two twenty-dollar markers to join their brethren. "You seem to be experiencing a marker shortage." He smiled at Jani with an innocence that begged a lightning strike. "You can always fold, I suppose."
Jani studied her hand. I have a deuce, and a four. A seven, a ten, and a king. She held her breath, flipped the deuce, ten, and king onto the discard heap, and picked up the replacements Dieter flicked her way. Five. Six. Her heart hammered. Eight. She assembled the straight, then looked down at the bare table in front of her. "This brings back a few memories, too." She smiled as the nervous laughter chittered. "I was forced to bet my boots once."
"Did you win, ná Kièrshia?" came a voice from the spectators' gallery.
"No." Jani's smile faded. "The take-away lesson being that good socks are never a waste of money." She studied her cards until that round of laughter started to die, then quenched the remains by slipping off one of the rings Tsecha had given her. The green stone flashed as she set it atop the markers, like an accusing eye.
Lucien picked up the ring and studied it with an appraiser's air. "Has this been valuated?"
"It was mine, Lucien," Tsecha said quietly. "It is of some value."
"I didn’t mean--" Lucien set the ring down, then eased his hand away. "I didn’t realize we were allowing unconventional betting is all."
"This is Thalassa, Lucien. We are nothing if not unconventional." Tsecha bared his teeth, and set out his cards.
Oh. Boy. Jani tallied them once, then again. In the old days, her augmentation sometimes played tricks at the damnedest times, leading her to hallucinate. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? She checked Tsecha's cards one last time. Three through eight. A straight, just like hers.
Lucien scowled for a bare instant, but recovered quickly. "Three of a kind. Congratulations. Ní Tsecha." He set out his cards, three aces, a king, and a nine, then fixed Jani with narrowed eyes. "Your turn."
Jani set out her cards without a word. The gasps rippled in all directions.
Then the applause started.
"Ná Kièrshia and ní Tsecha have tied." Dieter paused and bit his lip hard in an effort to keep the smile off his face. "They split the pot."
"You get your boots back, nìa!" Tsecha plucked the ring from the pile and handed it back to her. "Except that it is a ring, not boots."
Lucien's stare never left Jani's face. "That will teach me to take on the home team." A grin broke through eventually, which seemed genuine enough if one avoided looking at the eyes.
"You're awfully quiet, ní Tsecha." Jani glanced across the table and watched him study his hand. "You've scarcely spoken since we started."
"I concentrate, nìa. I learn the game." Tsecha rearranged his cards, then laid them face-down on the table. "I still do not understand why I cannot see the cards you toss away."
"Because then you would have a much better idea of which cards are still available." Dieter glared at his own hand, just as he had glared at every hand he'd been dealt over the course of the evening, good or bad. "It removes some of the risk, and risk is the point of the exercise. That's why it's called gambling." He fingered a ten-dollar marker, then tossed it into the middle of the table. Over the course of the game, the minimum bet had migrated upward, from a dollar to five and now ten, which accounted also accounted in part for his mood.
"Too much risk is called stupidity." Tsecha pushed a ten-dollar marker into the pot, then folded his arms and slumped, seemingly oblivious to the nervous laughter that greeted his remark.
"Too little risk is called no fun at all." Lucien riffled through his cards, then pushed a twenty-dollar marker into the pot. "Call and raise."
"I'm out." The security guard tapped his cards together and set them next to the markers. "Getting a little too rich for my mixed-up blood." He pushed back from the table and walked to the line of chairs along the wall, to which the two members of the greenhouse crew had decamped an hour before.
Jani scanned her cards. All her old guides for the calling and raising of bets--rent payments, billet prices, her growling stomach--no longer applied, which removed some of the tension from the game. That leaves beating Lucien into the ground. That, unfortunately, wasn’t working as well as one could have wished. They had played even for the first few hands. Then Jani hit a bad patch, Lucien displayed his usual skill at bluffing, and Tsecha added an entirely new dimension to the phrase 'beginner's luck.' My old teacher is a card sharp. Jani tried toting up the stack of markers piled at his elbow, and lost track after the first thousand.
"If you're going to fold, just do it."
Jani glanced across the table at Lucien. His eyes, rich brown and usually sharp as a cut jewel, shone dull, as though he regarded a stranger. "Call." She set a twenty-dollar marker next to his, then added another. "Raise twenty." She avoided looking at her cards, which were a mess. All four suits. No pairs. No apparent patterns. Oh well. At least she'd set Lucien back on his heels until it came time to show all.
"Forget it." Dieter set his cards atop the guard's. "Some of us are prone to nosebleeds at this altitude."
"Call." Tsecha set two twenties next to Jani's markers, then added three more.
"Raise...sixty." He bared his teeth as a few gasps sounded from the spectators.
Lucien looked from Tsecha, to Jani, then back to Tsecha. "Call." More markers joined the stack.
Dieter stared at Tsecha and shook his head. "My little boy's all grown up."
Jani stared at Tsecha in an effort to draw his eye, but he remained fixed on some middle distance, as though all about him was distraction. Oh, what the hell. "Call." She pushed her remaining markers into the center.
"Ní Tsecha?" Dieter held out the deck. "How many cards do you want?"
Tsecha shook his head. "None."
"None? You're sure?"
"Yes, Dieter."
"You're standing on your cards?"
"No, I am sitting on my chair." Tsecha paused as the light laughter made the rounds. "I have the cards I wish."
"I'll take two." Lucien tossed two cards onto the heap, and picked up the replacements Dieter dealt him. Glanced at his new cards, then sent his last two twenty-dollar markers to join their brethren. "You seem to be experiencing a marker shortage." He smiled at Jani with an innocence that begged a lightning strike. "You can always fold, I suppose."
Jani studied her hand. I have a deuce, and a four. A seven, a ten, and a king. She held her breath, flipped the deuce, ten, and king onto the discard heap, and picked up the replacements Dieter flicked her way. Five. Six. Her heart hammered. Eight. She assembled the straight, then looked down at the bare table in front of her. "This brings back a few memories, too." She smiled as the nervous laughter chittered. "I was forced to bet my boots once."
"Did you win, ná Kièrshia?" came a voice from the spectators' gallery.
"No." Jani's smile faded. "The take-away lesson being that good socks are never a waste of money." She studied her cards until that round of laughter started to die, then quenched the remains by slipping off one of the rings Tsecha had given her. The green stone flashed as she set it atop the markers, like an accusing eye.
Lucien picked up the ring and studied it with an appraiser's air. "Has this been valuated?"
"It was mine, Lucien," Tsecha said quietly. "It is of some value."
"I didn’t mean--" Lucien set the ring down, then eased his hand away. "I didn’t realize we were allowing unconventional betting is all."
"This is Thalassa, Lucien. We are nothing if not unconventional." Tsecha bared his teeth, and set out his cards.
Oh. Boy. Jani tallied them once, then again. In the old days, her augmentation sometimes played tricks at the damnedest times, leading her to hallucinate. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? She checked Tsecha's cards one last time. Three through eight. A straight, just like hers.
Lucien scowled for a bare instant, but recovered quickly. "Three of a kind. Congratulations. Ní Tsecha." He set out his cards, three aces, a king, and a nine, then fixed Jani with narrowed eyes. "Your turn."
Jani set out her cards without a word. The gasps rippled in all directions.
Then the applause started.
"Ná Kièrshia and ní Tsecha have tied." Dieter paused and bit his lip hard in an effort to keep the smile off his face. "They split the pot."
"You get your boots back, nìa!" Tsecha plucked the ring from the pile and handed it back to her. "Except that it is a ring, not boots."
Lucien's stare never left Jani's face. "That will teach me to take on the home team." A grin broke through eventually, which seemed genuine enough if one avoided looking at the eyes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:33 pm (UTC)Logic problem: "Three through eight. A straight, just like hers." 3-8 is six cards, and the narrator has a 4-8 straight.
I didn't see any poker problems. :-)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:35 pm (UTC)Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:47 pm (UTC)From a believability standpoint, 2 identical straights in a 5 card draw game are wildly unlikely. It's probably about on par with seeing a royal flush in a 5 card draw game. If you would like a more probable way to split the pot, Jani and Tsecha's hands being identical pairs backed by the same high card is better. Then Lucien can have a failed flush, failed straight, a lower pair, etc and the hand works out the same way.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:55 pm (UTC)I used identical straights because the rules site I found mentioned them. And I wanted to give Lucien a decent enough hand to justify his betting. Three of a kind seemed the lowest that would allow him to go a little overboard.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 09:46 pm (UTC)I'm assuming splitting the pot is key. If you *really* want this scenario to be believable mathematically, it might be better to have the characters play Omaha or Texas Hold'em. It's far more common to split a pot in those two games, and it's far more common to see a straight. I've actually seen *multiple* Hold'em hands split because 2 people had the same straight. If you're ok with the hand being wildly unlikely, the scene reads fine as is tho.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 12:10 am (UTC)The easy way to rework the math is give both Jani and Tsecha a pair of aces and a king. That's a pretty solid hand in 5 card draw. To keep the flow the same, have Jani draw into an ace. Give Lucien either a failed flush or a failed straight, with a king or queen as the high card. That gives him a hand that's strong enough that he'd try to scare everyone out, but he still is taking a bit of a risk with it.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 12:16 am (UTC)*mutter*
I probably should fix this tonight. A failed flush/straight is 4 of 5 cards, right?
Gonna color my hair first...
no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 01:22 am (UTC)I actually think identical flushes, as I suggested earlier, would make for a better scene -- partly because the sheer unlikeliness of the occurrence makes for better poker folklore, and partly because it makes the early betting play better -- improving three or four cards to a flush is a longer shot for Jani than improving a pair of Aces with the king (and remember, for a split pot, both hands would have to be AAKxx, where the two x cards also are identical in rank, which will take longer to explain in the scene).
no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 11:05 pm (UTC)Improbable is one thing; pulling a straight out of a garbage hand as Jani does is nothing short of miraculous. With the hand she's given pre-draw, any rational player would either fold (most likely) or at best keep the ten-king and draw three, barring prospects for a flush, which we're told she doesn't have. Keeping only the four-seven and drawing exactly the three cards that duplicate Tsecha's straight is beyond astounding. [The easiest way to address this may well be to give them identical flushes instead, perhaps with Jani keeping three cards to a straight-flush draw. That would also make her betting pre-draw somewhat more defensible. Since there's no ranking of suits in poker, that will work just as well as the matched straights.]
On the betting: all of the call-dramatic pause-raise action, while not out of line in a home game, would be flagged as "string betting" in a casino or tournament game, where you need to announce the intent to raise before putting chips into the pot. (You don't need to specify how much you're raising, just that you intend to do so. If you say "call", you cannot then add a raise to the bet. OTOH, if you say "raise", you can then fiddle with your chips for a bit before announcing how much you raise and pushing the chips into the pot.
I mention this because of the references to a spectators' gallery; I'd think playing with an audience would tend to impose at least some social rules on the action, and a rule against string betting is one I'd expect to see in such a situation -- particularly where unconventional raises like Jani's ring are possible.)
Most public games would probably also be run as "table stakes", precluding Jani's addition of the ring to the pot after she's committed all her chips pre-draw; she would instead be "all in" at that point, eligible to win only what had been bet to that point in the hand. The remark about unconventional betting tends to reinforce this; however, most friendly games also wouldn't have the upticks in betting limits mentioned, so this might be covered with someone announcing before this hand that the game has graduated again, to "no limit" status.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 12:15 am (UTC)This is Jani vs Lucien. She admits that she will play stupid just to rattle him until the final show of the cards.