Love’s Gamble

The group of men that were sitting around the table were all looking at the wad of cash. They seemed impressed that Freema had the ability to buy in. They had not been expecting that at all.

“Look,” said Freema. “I have the money to play, and I have the skills. The money I have shown you already. Now, I need to show you my skills. Let me play with you, and if you feel like I am not up to your usual standard of gamblers then by all means kick me out. But let me prove myself before you make your judgment.”

“Very well,” said the man in charge. “My name is Hiroshi. The others will introduce themselves in turn. Now, we play. Sit down, we are not the kind of people who would wait for someone to take their time while we are itching to play a game.”

Freema sat down, she herself itching to start playing. She was betting a lot of money on this and she was starting to feel like she was making a mistake. In order to make herself calm she had to immerse herself in this game. She had to start playing so that every other aspect of her personality faded into the background.

The cards were distributed. She picked up her cards and saw that she had an ace of spades and a king of hearts. She had two good cards but she would need something from the cards on the table. The question was passed around the table.

Everyone said check. Everyone except Freema. She raised by a hundred dollars, maintaining her poker face. She looked around. Everyone was surprised by the fact that she had raised. They had all assumed that the first round would end up with three cards turned face up out of the five face down cards that were on the table.

“Match it or fold, boys,” said Freema. She knew that this was a risk but she was the best bluffer in the world. She was providing them with enough risk to match her raise, but too much for them to raise in turn. It was the perfect play, and only a player as good as Freema could pull something like this off. She was the only person who had the ability to work a table full of seasoned players in this manner.

She knew how to read people, and she knew that each and every one of these men were far too proud and arrogant to allow her to make them fold in the very first try. Slowly but surely, each one of the other players matched her raise.

She looked around at them and noticed their faces. They all had pretty good poker faces, except for the ones that didn’t. This was another reason that she had raised. She had wanted to examine everyone’s poker faces and see which one of them were actually good at this subtle masking of emotion. She saw that two of the players at the table did not have very good poker faces. Or rather, a player of Freema’s caliber was easily able to see their poker faces for what they truly were. She knew that these two players did not have very good cards and were nervous about raising.

The six other players had pretty solid poker faces, however, and they were able to mask their features so that Freema had absolutely no idea what their cards were like. It was alright, though. She had a quarter of the table down, she knew what the cards of a quarter of her opponents were like. Those two with the bad poker faces were already as good as defeated, she was not going to have to worry about them much longer.

The dealer placed the poker chips in a neat pile in the center. The only play now was to upturn three of the five down turned cards in the center of the table. Everyone waited with bated breath. The cards were upturned. Freema’s breathing increased, her heart rate went up. There was an ace on the table. She had a pair of aces. That was a very good thing for her. Now she had something to actually back up her raises.

She looked at everyone around her. Everyone’s poker faces were intact, except the two that did not have very good poker faces. She looked at them and saw that one of them had not gotten a very good result, whereas the other looked quite happy. That meant that there was something on the table that he liked, something that he was going to use to try and win this thing.

Freema looked at the table. There was a queen there as well as a two. It was pretty obvious that he was not going to be happy about the two, which meant that he had a queen in his hands. Freema thought about the possibility of him having three of a kind which would supersede her two of a kind but then remembered that he had been nervous about raising. If he had had two queens already he would not have been nervous at all.

She tried to see if there was something going on with the suit of the three cards. She saw that the two was a two of hearts, the queen was a queen of diamonds and the ace was an ace of clubs. There was no theme in the suits of the cards either which would allow the person looking happy right now to get a win. There was no possibility of anything like that happening either. He had two queens. She had no idea what everyone else had but she was pretty sure that they did not have anything as the odds of one of them having two aces when Freema already had such a hand were miniscule. There was a chance of a three of a kind, but no chance of a straight, a flush or anything else. Freema felt like she could risk it. She had already raised before, she could just raise again and people would follow suit.

However, she knew that there was a smarter way to play it. The guy with the queen in his hand was going to become confident now. She could tell that he was that kind of a person. That meant that even if she did not raise, he was going to raise anyway. There was a very important benefit attached to this. This benefit was that him raising would mean that she would be able to achieve her goal of increasing the size of the pot, and she could pretend to be weak as well. She could pretend that she did not have any good cards, that she was starting to regret the bravado she had shown by raising during the very first round.