Betting on Hope by Kay Keppler Page B

women’s restroom off the card room was way too small to have accommodated all the uncles at the same time. If they’d all squeezed in there, they’d have looked like a Marx Brothers routine.
    “But I was thinking. About the two large,” Marty said. “Especially now, when you gotta pump up your stake.”
    That’s what Weary had said last night, Hope realized. Figure out what you did wrong. Evidently Marty had a plan.
    “I gotta plan,” Marty said.
    Hope stopped in the middle of the casino floor and beamed at him. “You’re the best,” she said. She put her arms around him and gave him a hug.
    “Hey, what?” Marty said, startled and embarrassed. “What did I do? Come on. Stop.”
    “Okay,” Hope said, letting go. “What’s the plan?”
    “We gotta be careful about it,” Marty said, and Hope felt her dreams fade.
    “Nothing illegal,” she said.
    “Oh.” Marty looked thoughtful. “Well, it’s not illegal .”
    “If it’s not illegal, what is it, then?” It would have to be something.
    Marty glanced at her, cleared his throat. “Well. Ah. It’s, ah, disliked. Probably. Yeah. Disliked.”
    “Disliked?”
    “Here’s the plan.” Marty took Hope aside. “You know about them kids from MIT.”
    Hope nodded. Who didn’t? In the eighties and nineties, a bunch of really smart kids at MIT had figured out how to win at cards by beating the odds. They watched tables and counted which cards had been played. When tables had a disproportionately large number of high-value cards left to play, they placed big bets, knowing that although they would lose sometimes, they had a higher proportionate chance of winning big, too. The students won possibly millions of dollars before they were discovered. But when the casinos finally figured out the scam, the students were banished for life from all the gaming establishments in the country.
    “ Jeez, Marty. We can’t do that.” Once she won the ranch back, Hope didn’t much care if she herself was banned from the casinos and never saw another card room again. But she couldn’t let the uncles jeopardize their careers for her.
    “It’s nothing like that. Don’t worry.”
    “What is it like, then? You’re scaring me. What exactly is the plan?”
    “First off, you’re gonna move back to the twenty dollar tables until you build up your stake.”
    Hope nodded. “That was my plan, too.”
    “Okay, then we’re on the same page. We’ll split up. All of us. We’ll watch the tables. Here at the Desert Dunes, across the street at the Golden Palace. At the Casbah. Six casinos, one guy each. We’ll be looking for a full table with a couple of lousy players. When we see a setup like that, we’ll give you a call, and that’s the table you play. You got your cell?”
    Hope nodded.
    “Okay. You play the table until you get too much competition or you beat their socks off and they walk away, whatever. When the table’s done, you walk away. Then you call me, and we’ll pick you a new table. You gotta be ready to move around.”
    “You think that’ll work?”
    “Worked for the MIT kids,” Marty said. “Two worse-than-average players in a standard hold’em table of nine means that the guy who wins takes home twenty times the income than he would if everybody was evenly matched.”
    “Really?” Hope said.
    “Yeah,” Marty the Sneak said. “You wanna win these days, you gotta study. Statistics. Probability theory. Regression analysis.”
    “Regression analysis?” Hope said, amazed at Marty the Sneak’s apparent intellectual bent. “Really?”
    “No,” Marty agreed. “I’m just kidding about that. But that other stuff—that’s part of the game now. You gotta know what your odds are to win a pot, what you have to win to make the bet worthwhile, like that.”
    “Won’t the casinos notice you guys staking out their tables?”
    “We have Little Hope they’ll discover us,” Marty said with ponderous humor.
    Hope grinned at him. The jokes on her name