Dark Matter by Brett Adams

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kept going with “Who’s hot,” but Rasputin's attention was stuck on the blackjack
table. Without realising, he began nodding or frowning at bets, smiling when a
player made a haul, and tut-tutting big losses.
    The third player at the table, a stick-thin
woman whose hair was so long it brushed the felt, bet $20 on Queen and Four.
    “Bad move,” Rasputin said, so loud the
dealer and players looked at him. The dealer frowned. Rasputin attempted to
shrink.
    When he felt safe to move again, he turned
to the bar and swigged lukewarm Guinness.
    He continued to watch the cards fall and
reappear with growing boredom until a strange sensation crept over him.
    He wasn’t sure when it began, but all of a
sudden he was conscious of a sense of the weight of the decks left in
the shoe. The feeling was the synaesthesic offspring of his eyes and grasp. He
weighed the remaining cards with his gaze, and found them heavy. He was certain
of it, without the remotest clue why: the shoe was hot.
    It was on this knowledge, he realised, he
had been critiquing the players. The dealer had to hit on anything under
seventeen, with the object being twenty-one, blackjack, but no higher. But on a
top-heavy deck, chances were that he would bust. The dealer busts, the player
wins.
    The player wins.
    With rising excitement, he watched and kept
a loose count of card values as the shoe was played down to the last deck and a
half before being reshuffled. It was hard to follow. Each hand consisted of two
or three cards for the dealer, and the same again for the three players, which
made up to twelve cards, and more if there were double-downs or splits or
improbably low sequences. And all of these cards appeared quick-fire on the end
of the dealer’s arm-cum-machine, and were just as rapidly swept away.
    All the same, by his rough tally, the
remainder of the card pool had indeed been high. His gaze had weighed right.
    He leaned against the bar and let his arms
slide out either side, resting on their length, and exhaled. He still felt
tipsy. His smile remained, as if it was the only shape his lips made.
    To the casual observer, he probably looked
borderline catatonic. But his mind was churning. He quested inward to
interrogate himself for the source of the intuition about the cards that had
proven correct.
    Within, he found the memory of the
preceding twenty minutes. He focussed on the game table. As suspected, and to
his delight, he saw there every hand that had been played, indelibly printed.
Every cough, every call for drinks, every polite smile from the dealer, every
sniff from the man with the nicotine-stained fingers ( Fourteen in total. On
drugs? ), and most importantly, every dealt card.
    Every card.
Here was his lever.
    Each of the eight decks that made the pool
of cards from which the game was played had a known make-up: four aces, four
kings, four queens, and so on. When the game began, the chance of dealing a
given card was fixed. But over time, as cards were dealt, the make-up of the
card pool changed, and so did the chance of dealing a given card. If early
rounds were thick with royalty, later rounds would be thin.
    It was this knowledge that could be
exploited to gain an advantage over the House, whose every move was prescribed.
But only if you knew the cards remaining in the pool, and only if they were
favourable.
    All of this was obvious to Rasputin, and it
came as no surprise that he could trawl back through the hands as easily as
paging through a spreadsheet and tally the totals. What anchored the grin to
his face was the realisation that his brain had birthed this information
quietly on its own. Somewhere in the shadow of his attention, a little program
had run, tallied the card values, calculated their distribution, and floated
this into his perception of the game as an intuition.
    He sat watching the fall of cards with euphoria
reminiscent of Christmas mornings. The couple next to him left in an embrace.
He didn’t notice. He