Off shift at 3:40 a.m. and still smelling of industrial bleach from the hospital laundry, he drove the twenty-six minutes out to the casino because the two-five game goes loose at that hour. He had eighteen hundred and fifty dollars on him, which was rent plus the part for his mother's Corolla. He had been up four hundred earlier and had a number in his head.

The hand was queen-nine suited, which is not a hand anyone pushes with, and he knew that, and he explained it to himself anyway in the four seconds before the stack went forward. Position. Table image. The way the man in the visor had folded twice. He would have made the same speech holding any two cards. He was standing before the river landed.