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She smiles as I scoop the chips into a pile, handily palming a few fives up my sleeve as I go, and deposit them neatly back on the table.

“Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be on your knees,” I whisper as I pass. “Unless you want to be.”

She gasps around her cocktail straw and proceeds to give me a healthy eye-fucking as I salute and take my leave, though not without a lingering glance of my own at her. Strawberry blonde, cute little curves, freckles…damn, under other circumstances, I’d happily blow her back out in her hotel room while her boyfriend snores in the cuck chair.

But for now, duty calls. Alas.

Chips in hand, I find a table in the middle-back with two empty chairs and drop into one of them, giving the other lumps huddled around the dealer a friendly (but not too friendly) nod. The dealer—a lady old enough to be my mom with blonde bangs and a nametag that says LINDA pinned to her vest—cuts me in, and I nod again in thanks. I toss a five into the betting circle, knock the felt once for luck, and Linda deals the round.

I barely glance at my cards when they land—early days, no need to seem antsy. Instead, I chew on the tip of my thumb and try to not-so-subtly gnaw the dirt out from under my fingernail. Don’t want to look scruffy, after all. Desperate. I’m just another wide-eyed casino patron here to try my hand at a game of blackjack. Upstanding citizen here.

Satisfied, I tuck my cards under my chip: I’ll stand.

With that taken care of, I survey for surveillance. The Roger’s not the Bellagio, but that’s the exact problem: everyone here’s got delusions of grandeur, thinks they’re hot shit. And any floorman or pit boss working this shift is probably desperate to prove himself. A two-bit card cheat like myself is easy prey, and the pit boss’s job is to make sure no one gets away with nothing—not no way, not no how. Or, no, correction: his job is to make sure he doesn’t see nobody get away with nothing. I doubt any of these lazy fucks are monitoring as closely as they should be. Plausible deniability’s a two-way street, you know?

I find a toothpick in my jacket pocket and chew on it.

Eight feet over Linda’s head, a gold-painted signpost sprouts out of the ceiling beam, featuring cartoon pirate girls in Daisy Dukes bending over an X-marks-the-spot map that reads NEW: FIND THE LUCKY LADY AND WIN BIG BOOTY! Beneath them, an LED display reads $49,412.76. Every few seconds, it ticks up another penny.

At my elbow, a sunburned guy in a Margaritaville T-shirt with his sunglasses wrapped around the back of his thick head stares up at it. “Whassat all about?” he asks Linda.

“We’re offering a new game,” Linda says, pausing her shuffle to tap the little treasure chest painted next to his betting circle. “Side bet. You’re welcome to wager. Your first two cards the same suit pays a little. Add my upcard to match, pays more. And if all three are face cards, same suit, with a lady in the bunch”—she nods up at the wenches—“that’s the treasure.”

The guy nods, still slack-jawed at the cartoon babes, and Linda resumes her shuffle, looking almost bored. It’s a double-deck pitch game here at the Roger, which tells you everything about when anyone in this building last updated anything. Who needs to spend capital on a shoe or newfangled shuffling machine when you’ve got a veteran pair of hands that’ll work for state minimum and tips?

And Linda’s the deepest of the deep dealers. I’ve seen her work, and I’m a fan. I watch as she riffles four, five times, then plants the cut card deep in the back. Just like I knew she would. Good ol’ Linda. We’ll be a good eighty percent of the way through those cards before a reset. Which is music to my ears.

“Lotta cash,” Sunburn guy says—to me, I guess—nodding up at the BIG BOOTY sign.

“No kidding,” I agree, friendly to a fault as Linda deals us in. I drum my fingers on the table, pretending to think things over. “You know what? I’ll try my luck.” I drop a chip into my own side-bet treasure chest. “What the hell, right?”

On Sunburn’s other side, a rangy dude in a baseball cap snorts. “Nice donation to the house there.” He peers down at me. “Those side bets are a scam, kid. Don’t waste your money.”

I look appropriately chastened. “Oh.”

And sure enough, I lose: I bust my hand and of course don’t get the right suit combo. Linda docks my chips, gathers the cards, rinse repeat. I pretend to look defeated. Pretend not to notice, to glance around the room like I’m waiting for my girlfriend to show up or hoping to score a drink.

But I’m noticing.

See, some numbers guy in a Vegas office with a spreadsheet set the odds on this little side game that the Roger’s newly licensed in. But those odds are calculated based on a full, fat stack of cards. If you wait long enough, stick around to the back half of two decks that are dealt nice and deep by someone like Linda, then the balance of the remainder’s almost certainly going to have shifted. All you’ve gotta do is stay alert. Pay attention to how the suits come out during the first few rounds and sooner or later you’ll get a frontloaded shuffle. You’ll have hearts or diamonds or whatever coming out frontloaded. And that means that on the back half, you’re gonna get those suited hands turning up a lot more than the odds man’s paytable expects. From there, all you’ve gotta do is bet accordingly. Lazy man’s card counting, basically, and I’m nothing if not lazy.

But lazy doesn’t mean sloppy, and the first rule of beating a game is basically don’t look like you’re beating it. So for the first hour, I’m the most boring guy at the table. Five bucks on the main hand, every hand, rain or shine. Hit on sixteen against a ten, split eights, never take insurance. Yawn, snooze, rinse, repeat.

The only thing I vary is the chest, and I vary it by a lot of nothing: a buck in the circle when the deck’s balanced, and a buck when it isn’t, and the occasional buck just because hell, sometimes a guy just feels lucky.

But all the while, I’m attentive. Under the table, I work my thumb over the different corners of my fake ID, a little physical grounding that helps me keep the invisible count in my head. Four suits in the deck, four corners to the card, and a little flick for each that just looks like a nervous tic, if people even notice at all.

Then, midway through the second deck, the hearts get thin. And I mean thin: twenty-two gone in four rounds, by my calculations, which means the stack that’s left is fat with everything else. Time to test the waters, I figure, so I slide five bucks into the little side-bet chest and tap the felt. The big reveal from Linda, and…

Two suited cards and an upcard to match. Small payout, but a payout.

“Nice,” murmurs Baseball Cap.

“Well, look at that,” I say, wide-eyed and smiling but not overselling it. “Beginner’s luck.”

Linda slides me my chips, and I toss her one back, a tip. Then I go right back down to a buck for four hands.

That’s the hardest part of the game, for me, especially: staying poor when the cards aren’t running hot. But I’m patient, and by the next hit, Sunburn’s copying my side bets. By the one after that, half the table’s feeding the chest five bucks at a time, which works for me: now there are six lucky idiots in the circle instead of one. When a waitress circles for the fourth or fifth time, I signal her for a beer, just to complete the image: tipsy, feeling daring, might try something crazy if the moment’s right.