Tunnel Rat

Milo had figured out the main problem with the casino: No one was supposed to win.

All the games of chance offered in the casino were slightly in favor of the house. Mathematically, 'slightly in favor' meant that eventually, the house won. The longer you played the games, the more chances the house had to win, and the free drinks, food, and enjoyable atmosphere were the traps to keep you playing.

This was why Sassy had been so very attentive to his needs, offering to bring him drinks, food from the feeding troughs, and even real cheese from the kitchen. (The free cheese had turned out to be a type of myconic sludge similar to what Harry made, mixed with fermented bean curds and a sprinkling of grated cheese on top for flavor.) He'd taken one sniff of it, and passed on eating any, but saw three ratkin sitting in a corner enjoying large bowls. Truly these welps needed a good Cheese Master to teach them about quality cheese.

But that was their problem, he had enough of his own to deal with.

The only food that he asked Sassy for was water and dry crackers. She helpfully brought a small tray and held it for him while he gamed. He was beginning to get odd looks from some of the casino staff and his Danger Sense was tingling as some of the bouncers walked by. Someone wasn't happy that he was winning so much. He endured their glares, and even waved at a woman called 'the pit boss'. She didn't wave back.

His 'Lucky Streak' was because of two reasons. The first was the nature of the games. A half-hour studying such games online had given him not only the rules and basic strategy but also the theory behind why, in general, casinos came out ahead. But while the average player walked in with money, and out with empty pockets, some gamblers consistently won at similar games in the real world. Their strategies were varied but most involved 'counting cards' and reading the emotions and body language of their opponents. Counting cards Milo could learn to do easily. His memory was perfect and he could calculate the odds of any hand and the correct way to play.

Reading the other players was more difficult. He understood the concept but had always been bad at dealing with other people. Mostly because he liked to avoid talking to other people. It helped that most of the other players were dwarves. He had experience with dwarves more than he had with humans. He wasn't having much luck reading his opponents though, so he concentrated on winning by counting cards and using his goggles. He had to split his mind into two parts. One part counted cards, ignoring input from his goggles. It was hard to learn card counting if you knew what all the cards were. That was the main reason no one left the casino with their winnings: The cards were marked and every Shark with a certain type of monocle knew what was in your hand. And his new goggles were far better than the monocles, as he'd discovered during his earlier scouting trip.

After his luncheon, Milo had scouted the Casino thoroughly. He wanted to know all the escape routes if things became complicated. His goggles showed him the magical traps on all of the doors and windows and helped him find several hidden entrances. He also investigated the thickness of the walls, and the main load-bearing pillars holding up the roof. You never knew what might come in handy. Using one of the hidden entrances in the rooftop, he had skulked in the rafters above the main floor, observing the games.

His goggles immediately saw the small runes on the backs of the cards. They were similar to simple engineering runes and contained very little mana. A mage wouldn't notice them. Without his goggles, even Milo would have missed them, and he worked with runes regularly. The monocle he'd acquired from the Shark in the ruined submersible showed him the vague outlines of the marks if he was close enough. Like the runes, they were low-powered items and their abilities were subtle. His goggles were far more powerful and could see the marks from across the casino. Better, he could see the marks on individual cards many layers down into a deck, seeing what the next several cards would be.

To learn card counting, he turned off his goggles and observed all of the tables from his perch in the rafters, simultaneously. After an hour of keeping track of eight tables simultaneously, he was certain he had learned the ins and outs of playing 21, or Blackjack, as some of the dwarves called it. The System seemed to agree with him.

For as many risks as you take, it is ironic that you are just figuring out how to Gamble.

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You have gained the skill: Gambling (INT) at Rank 0.

With the new skill acquired, he retreated the way he had come, changed from his skulking outfit into his new look as Professor Tallsqueak, and re-entered the casino from the front, picking up his new friend Sassy and enjoyed playing 21. He tried it both ways with his goggles turned on and off. It seemed to be a simple mathematical puzzle with calculated outcomes, but the play style of the rest of the patrons was erratic and unskilled. He had a theory that involved the copious amounts of cheap alcohol everyone else was drinking, but didn't want to test it himself.

Eventually, he learned to see the marks even without the aid of his goggles, but only when concentrating hard at very close range. The Sharks had a master of subtle runework in their clan, that was obvious. After cleaning out his first Blackjack table, he moved on to Poker.

Poker also proved to be a fun game, with many variations depending on the number of cards you were allowed to draw, the number of wild cards, and other special rules. Different tables hosted different varieties and Milo cycled from table to table, slowly winning and learning seven-card stud, five-card draw, forty-four, acey-ducey, and a nine-card variety using a special deck called Dragon Poker. The rules were insane and a set of rulebooks at the end of the table had to be consulted every hand to see who won.

Most of the tables played a variation called Five-Card-Draw. It was ideal for what Milo wanted, with lots of chances to raise the stakes of the game, and enough variation to keep him interested. Being able to see the cards let him quickly realize that not one, but three players represented the casino. They worked together with subtle hand signs or shifts of their drinking glasses to indicate which would fold, and which one would win the hand, with the Shark with the Monocle giving information to the other two. This would normally have put Milo and the other players at a huge disadvantage, playing against three opponents, one of whom could see their cards. Milo began sweeping up his cards from the table with a flip of his claws, and then hiding them with his hands. It wasn't perfect, but it kept the Shark from seeing most of his cards.

Play had continued, with Captain Goldtooth and the mate losing steadily, while Milo won steadily against the Sharks, and sometimes folded to help the other two players who were unaware of the manipulation going on around them. Eventually, he decided it was time to leave, a decision confirmed when the owner of the casino began trying to get him to stay. The movements of people beginning to surround him didn't go unnoticed. He'd been given some not-too-subtle hints of their disapproval. He scanned for an escape route while eyeing the main support pillars of the building and mentally building his spells.

To his surprise, he found he might have misread the situation, as instead of a physical altercation, he was invited to play with the other Captains. That would at least give him a chance to consolidate his chips into higher-value ones, more easily scooped up when he had to flee. The thought of tasting a new flavor of cheese was the deciding factor.

His plan to play carefully and enjoy his cheese ran into a new variable when the table and cards were brought out. The cards were beautiful works of art on so many levels. The pictures were pretty, but it was their construction that amazed him. Each one was an ultra-thin sheet of some material he wasn't familiar with, hiding a massively complicated runic array beneath the surface. This went far beyond marking cards, into unknown territory. And if he wanted to know more about the cards, the only way was to play poker with several Scavenger Captains, his wits vs theirs.

"That sounds enjoyable. Count me in."

Note: I won't even try to put a full explanation of Dragon Poker into my story. I'm crazy, but not that crazy. It is a unique invention from the crazed mind of Robert Asperin in his Myth Adventure novels. The main character won by putting down his hand and letting everyone argue over it. Special rules are affected by the color of your shirt, the facing of your chair, the last digit of the current year, the name of the king, the number of people in the game, etc etc. Over the years, fans have made up their own versions of Dragon Poker.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/HoylesRulesOfDragonPoker

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