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“And what do I need to know?” said Mary Ann.
“Not a lot. The basics of Hi/Lo counting, just to understand what I’ll be doing from the platform,” said Erica. “But mostly you’ll be acting.”
“To tell them when to bet more?” said Mary Ann.
“To distract them when the deck is cold,” said Gabrielle. “And to get them excited when it’s hot. The reason card counters get caught is they need to be looking at the cards and change their bets a lot, and supervisors spot them. But the guys we’re helping won’t even be looking at the table. They’ll be drunk, chatting up their waitress, staring at Erica’s a—tushy on the platform.” She glanced at her toddler, who seemed concentrated on his cooking. “Pit boss will be happy to see them bet big.”
“What happens if they get caught?” said Mary Ann.
“Nothing. They get asked to not play blackjack anymore,” said Gabrielle.
“And what happens if we get caught?” said Mary Ann.
Gabrielle looked down at the cards.
“We go to jail,” said Erica, with a matter-of-factness Mary Ann found concerning, but kind of inspiring.
so cool
Relieved of her daily nursing duties, Mary Ann found in her anger a natural way to channel her newfound energy. Karen’s bedridden languishing might have been over, but the patent injustice that had caused it, the evil that had threatened the life of her lifesaving aunt, sure wasn’t. While her earlier, effortful attempts at self-improvement had done nothing to make her feel better, helping her aunt became a welcome distraction from self-centeredness. It was a reflex, something that just seemed to happen. Opening herself up to the possibility that what made her feel marginal and used about Las Vegas might come not from her but from the city itself suddenly made her less alone in her struggle. And doing something for them—the thousands like her Vegas hurt and exploited—maybe really could help her too.
Opportunity presented itself with incredible punctuality. In the staff changing room at the Pos, where an overlapping of schedules enabled her weekly encounter with Gabrielle, Mary Ann found herself suddenly receptive to her colleague’s usual brand of locker-room talk about the exploitation of the workforce. Finally willing to listen, she discovered that her anger was not unique to her. That after years of what they perceived as too-cautious compromise with the powers that be—with the new CBA years away in the future, and a staggering number of nonunion professions still at the mercy of Wiles’s whims—a small, more intransigent group of waitresses, dealers, and various employees had decided they’d had enough, and formed a Shadow Union. Most importantly—and here, thought Mary Ann, lay the perfectly timed coincidence—she learned that this group of rebels now needed her.
hellyeah
The rebels’ stated goal for the so-called strike was “to systematically shrink the owner’s profit margins by means of nonconfrontational casino-wide sabotage, including but not limited to slowdowns, instigation to sobriety, noninvasive advantage gambling coaching et al., both as retribution for and as leverage against the unfair and discriminatory treatment of the workforce and the industry’s demeaning and unconstitutional staffing policies.” What it meant in practice was that, in the CBA-sanctioned impossibility of an actual strike, the Shadow Union (SU) had elected to go stealth. Cocktail waitresses were, as the recent wave of layoffs had abundantly proved, one of the most replaceable job figures in the country, given the intersection of low skill requirements and high rewards/desirability of position. Bartenders and hotel staff had it just as bad, with technological advancements threatening the very existence of their jobs and making redundancies easily justifiable. And, of course, models and dancers had it worst of all. The CBA’s generic arbitration clause, covering a broad nondiscrimination provision, rendered legal action against the layoffs more or less impossible—even discounting the obvious difference in firepower of the legal teams involved. In short, the only way to get back at Wiles effectively was to do so invisibly.
ugh so cool
The first meetings of the blackjack saboteurs, before Mary Ann’s recruitment, had been a complete failure. The Committee had wasted weeks on a wild goose chase involving gift-shop decks like the one Gabrielle had cracked open for Erica’s lecture. A bold plan. The two rounded corners on each card were all that distinguished recycled decks from the otherwise-identical real deal in play at the tables, thus preventing gift-shop customers from getting funny ideas. Without the canceling corners, cards could be furtively reintroduced in play by any close-up magic enthusiast to get a substantial—and very illegal—advantage over the house. So the committee had debated the possibility of acquiring noncanceled decks from collaborationist inmates at High Desert State (Nevada Department of Corrections, Clark County), the unwilling labor force in charge of the actual rounding out of the used cards for mass souvenir-market introduction. While, as it turned out, there was no shortage of SU members with close (sometimes very close) personal ties with more or less every prison in the state, the idea was voted against by the Board of Directors of Strike Modalities (the Board, for short) and officially ruled “dumb as fuck.” A bit too bold. Chances of saboteurs ending up themselves shaving aces of diamonds at High Desert State projected in the high 90s. The committee had gone back to work, looking for something more subtle.
so. cool.
Maybe they could get away with this. Maybe they really were invisible. Even Mary Ann’s appearance, the thing that had made her stand out throughout her life and filled her head with foolish ambition, became part of a pattern, repeated and ubiquitous like the cameras overhead. This could work. She felt a sense of calm wash over the preoccupations of the last few days. The dealer announced the numbers softly, with a slight, endearing lisp: twentythix, black; thixteen, red. Alongside all of it, Mary Ann could feel a growing desire not to disappoint Erica, an urge to make her proud. Erica seemed to like her, to believe in her contribution to the cause; to think she was worth something. The glossy white ball sank into the number pockets with a satisfying click. She wanted to help, she really, honestly did. She could feel it now. She wanted to be part of something bigger and do something for Karen and for all the others here. She’d been selfish for far too long.
The casino was at war. Mary Ann saw it now. Everywhere she looked, workers in Positano uniforms were putting their job on the line by performing highly specialized, imperceptible acts of sabotage. Erica knew all of their names. Wraith-thin, mustachioed Ultimate Texas Hold’em dealers “inadvertently” lifted the corner of one of their hole cards just a little too much, hoping the player to their left would be smart enough to use the information to their advantage. Bartenders laced the drinks of the most unrestrained losing players with chamomile and herbs (and, Mary Ann hoped, nothing else). There was an electricity in the air, a current buzzing over the casino’s perpetual background swoosh.
And she was part of it. It was her energy too. The one she’d been feeling ever since Aunt Karen’s incident, the spontaneous, effortless drive toward others and away from herself and her obsessions. She’d traded in her personal hunger for social anger. In just a few weeks, the energy had won her a new friendship, filled her weekly schedule, given her something real to look forward to for the first time in years. She went out to East Fremont with Erica. She studied Hi/Lo counting on obscure probability theory papers, then settled for Wikipedia. She listened to visitors’ stories of lost loves, lost jobs, found fortunes, exotic travels. Las Vegas is a city of stories. She could be part of it. She could help.
A funny side effect of her parents’ accident had been the souring of her relationship with Gerardo. They’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, she a talented twenty-four-year-old medicinal chemist, he forty-seven and married and a civil engineer. When they met, he had been exactly double her age, and he’d joked he’d be sixty when she turned thirty, then a hundred when she turned fifty. Larissa was the only one she’d told; her mom would’ve lost it if she’d found out. They had been instantly, madly in love, and with him she’d felt sheltered and cared for in a way she never believed she needed, and was almost embarrassed for. So naturally, when everything happened, she’d imagined falling onto him like a shipwrecked sailor on a raft, as if that were the natural thing to do. Gerardo had thought so, too, it seemed, and redoubled his attentions while also pulling away just enough to give her the time she needed to grieve, proving his innate ability to always do and say the right thing. And yet. And yet what in the end did happen was she’d cooled off, toughened herself up to survive in a world where everything you loved got revoked from you like that, and it was better not to need anything outside of you at all. Weird how these things go.
It occurred to Ray that by taking a free cocktail and tipping $1, he could probably scale back the house edge very close to the breakeven point, maybe, who knows, even profit slightly. He needed to raise his bets a bit to qualify for the comp, but a quick math check told him he was still better off, EV-wise. He ordered a vodka and tonic he didn’t want.
the footnote says, "As a matter of fact, Ray quite disliked drinking, and hadn’t done much of it since college. But the math was unequivocal." lmao
“Las Vegas is our town. There’s a lot of good in it, in its families, in its workers, in its unions. But its industry is sick, colleagues—outdated, dying. It is a cancerous incarnation of an old perceived notion of what entertainment is, and … and I would add male entertainment … yes … and it needs to change. And they know it too. But instead of changing their product, the people in charge look for new customers who will like the product they have already. New markets to—”
“Isn’t she great,” said Erica, with a nudge.
“She … she is,” whispered Mary Ann.
“She’s my friend,” said Erica. “Maidon. Told you you should meet her sometime.”
“—so that domination can perdure. Look around,” the girl said, gesturing with a hand at the artificial spectacle of the Cavea, as if to encompass the entire city. Her plumes now trembled with confidence as she turned a smiling face to both wings of the auditorium. “We cannot let ourselves be fooled. All of this is just a show. It is … superstructure. Beneath it all, always, are the forces and relations of production. Money, my colleagues, and power. It doesn’t matter that we make ‘good money,’ it doesn’t matter at all. Besides the fact, I mean, that not all of us do, to be honest, like, speak for yourself, right? But every time we allow complacency to distract us, every time we let our anger be redirected toward someone other than the real culprits, we are just helping the rich maintain the status quo. And of all places, we cannot let that happen in Las Vegas, a town where we have to smile and look pretty as ninety-year-olds gamble a year of our rent on the spin of a wheel.”
“First of all,” said Bryan, “I can’t fucking believe you’re actually saying you’re doing this for the good of the fish, or the land, or whatever you wanna call your little poker buddies, you greedy piece of shit.”
“Well, look at that,” said Logan. “First time I hear the man’s voice in like a year! Love you too, buddy.”
“Fuck off. Second, the tragedy of the commons, like the prisoner’s dilemma, only works in an environment where the herdsmen don’t all know each other and hold each other accountable. Where if you game the system, there isn’t shame and punishment to be faced, and you can just get away with it. It only works in an environment incapable of self-regulation.”
“Self-regulation?” Logan smiled defiantly.
“Self-regulation,” said Bryan, gripping the pool cue with both hands. The room was silent.
“Look, buddy, your silver-star-sheriff bullshit could maybe fly at your home casino in Butthole, Montana, but self-regulating communities only work when they’re small, you know? This is Vegas, thousands of poker players through this town every year. Are you gonna shame and punish all the ones who don’t live up to your little honor code? Huh? The little knight in shining Armani? The selfless hero of the oppressed who drives a fucking Tesla? Give me a fucking break. It’s over—there’s just too many of us, and many more will come, now that online sucks balls. You said so yourself back when these kids started showing up,” said Logan, turning around forty-five degrees and pointing his chin at Ray, who was very glad to see Bryan’s threatening stare remained fixed forward and downward at his knife-wielding interlocutor.
this is fun