Betting on Hope

Chapter 8



By the time Hope shuffled yawning into the kitchen, looking for her first cup of coffee, Faith and Amber were in the kitchen making waffles for breakfast.

“We just need about another five minutes and we’ll be ready to eat,” Faith said.

“I wish we could put recipes for waffles in the vegetable boxes,” Amber said. “At least that’s not hard to mess up.”

“What you do is fine,” Suzanne said, coming into the kitchen and giving her granddaughter a smacking kiss before glancing at Hope, who had pulled a chair over to the computer and turned it on. “What are you doing, Sweetie?”

“Just looking something up quick,” Hope said.

“Before breakfast? What’s so important?” Faith asked, pulling up the cover of the waffle iron and turning out a perfect golden orb, fragrant with butter and sugar.

“I met a card player yesterday,” Hope said. “I think I must have met him before. He said no, but his name is so familiar.”

“Tanner Wingate?” Faith asked.

“He said he met you,” Amber said, perking up.

Hope looked at them, astonished. “How did you guys meet Tanner Wingate?”

“He was in the Desert Dunes when we were delivering the veg,” Faith said.

“He got a snack from Kenji. He’s the chef,” Amber said. “Unagi. I had some. It was fantastic. He’s cool. Tanner, I mean. And Kenji is, too.”

“Tanner’s cool?” Hope typed Tanner’s name into the search engine and saw more than a dozen hits scroll down the screen. She clicked on the first one. “He’s a card player.”

“He’s very cool,” Amber said. “He knows stuff.”

He knows how to cheat at cards, Hope thought. She started to read the first article, a news story from a Detroit newspaper. “College Student Arrested in Card Scam” the headline read. She skimmed it, then went to the next one, as the story came back to her.

She’d been just a kid at the time, thirteen or fourteen years old, but in Vegas, the story had been all over the papers. Back then, she’d admired the daredevil teenaged card shark who’d taken his tricks on the road to Atlantic City and Las Vegas, cheating the casinos and card rooms out of almost a million dollars. His sleight of hand had been so subtle that it had taken the security systems months to catch him. But finally, they did.

The kid’s high-priced lawyer had used his client’s youth to play on the judge’s sympathy, and ultimately William Tanner Wingate had received only probation for his crimes, plus restitution to the casinos. The restitution had been the easy part. He hadn’t spent any of the money.

The probation would have been harder. Twenty years. Hope looked at the date on the news story. It had all happened nineteen years ago, and Tanner Wingate was still on probation—would be on probation for another year, it looked like.

He was probably still cheating, too. She’d seen him practicing those card tricks at the bar, and in her experience, once a cheat, always a cheat. A leopard couldn’t change his spots.

At least that explained why she’d recognized his name. As a nineteen-year-old, he’d probably been the most famous card player in the country.

“Breakfast is ready,” Faith said, putting a platter on the table.

Amber put the pitcher of maple syrup on the table. “What did you find out about Tanner?”

Hope switched screens before Amber could see any of the headlines.

“Not much. Come on, let’s eat.”

There wasn’t any reason to sully Amber’s heroes. After all, she’d probably never see him again.



Hope was back at the casino, ready to play, by eleven a.m. That would give her a solid four hours before she had to take Baby shopping again at three-thirty. Her remaining chips dug in her jeans pocket. She would not fixate on the two thousand dollars she’d lost yesterday. That was old news. Today she’d start fresh.

She met Marty at the gaudy floral arrangement in the hotel lobby as they’d arranged. When she arrived, he was already there, sitting on one of the hotel’s small, gilt chairs, drinking coffee out of a paper cup and looking as out of place as a bookie at a dance recital.

“Little Hope,” he said, when he saw her. He patted her shoulder and smiled affectionately. “Hey. Let’s go.”

“Weary told me about last night,” he said as they entered the casino and headed for the card room. “Sorry I couldn’t make it. I was in the middle of something.”

A straight flush, Hope thought, smiling. It was probably just as well Marty hadn’t seen her meltdown, too. Fortunately the women’s restroom off the card room was way too small to have accommodated all the uncles at the same time. If they’d all squeezed in there, they’d have looked like a Marx Brothers routine.

“But I was thinking. About the two large,” Marty said. “Especially now, when you gotta pump up your stake.”

That’s what Weary had said last night, Hope realized. Figure out what you did wrong. Evidently Marty had a plan.

“I gotta plan,” Marty said.

Hope stopped in the middle of the casino floor and beamed at him. “You’re the best,” she said. She put her arms around him and gave him a hug.

“Hey, what?” Marty said, startled and embarrassed. “What did I do? Come on. Stop.”

“Okay,” Hope said, letting go. “What’s the plan?”

“We gotta be careful about it,” Marty said, and Hope felt her dreams fade.

“Nothing illegal,” she said.

“Oh.” Marty looked thoughtful. “Well, it’s not illegal.”

“If it’s not illegal, what is it, then?” It would have to be something.

Marty glanced at her, cleared his throat. “Well. Ah. It’s, ah, disliked. Probably. Yeah. Disliked.”

“Disliked?”

“Here’s the plan.” Marty took Hope aside. “You know about them kids from MIT.”

Hope nodded. Who didn’t? In the eighties and nineties, a bunch of really smart kids at MIT had figured out how to win at cards by beating the odds. They watched tables and counted which cards had been played. When tables had a disproportionately large number of high-value cards left to play, they placed big bets, knowing that although they would lose sometimes, they had a higher proportionate chance of winning big, too. The students won possibly millions of dollars before they were discovered. But when the casinos finally figured out the scam, the students were banished for life from all the gaming establishments in the country.

“Jeez, Marty. We can’t do that.” Once she won the ranch back, Hope didn’t much care if she herself was banned from the casinos and never saw another card room again. But she couldn’t let the uncles jeopardize their careers for her.

“It’s nothing like that. Don’t worry.”

“What is it like, then? You’re scaring me. What exactly is the plan?”

“First off, you’re gonna move back to the twenty dollar tables until you build up your stake.”

Hope nodded. “That was my plan, too.”

“Okay, then we’re on the same page. We’ll split up. All of us. We’ll watch the tables. Here at the Desert Dunes, across the street at the Golden Palace. At the Casbah. Six casinos, one guy each. We’ll be looking for a full table with a couple of lousy players. When we see a setup like that, we’ll give you a call, and that’s the table you play. You got your cell?”

Hope nodded.

“Okay. You play the table until you get too much competition or you beat their socks off and they walk away, whatever. When the table’s done, you walk away. Then you call me, and we’ll pick you a new table. You gotta be ready to move around.”

“You think that’ll work?”

“Worked for the MIT kids,” Marty said. “Two worse-than-average players in a standard hold’em table of nine means that the guy who wins takes home twenty times the income than he would if everybody was evenly matched.”

“Really?” Hope said.

“Yeah,” Marty the Sneak said. “You wanna win these days, you gotta study. Statistics. Probability theory. Regression analysis.”

“Regression analysis?” Hope said, amazed at Marty the Sneak’s apparent intellectual bent. “Really?”

“No,” Marty agreed. “I’m just kidding about that. But that other stuff—that’s part of the game now. You gotta know what your odds are to win a pot, what you have to win to make the bet worthwhile, like that.”

“Won’t the casinos notice you guys staking out their tables?”

“We have Little Hope they’ll discover us,” Marty said with ponderous humor.

Hope grinned at him. The jokes on her name were silly, but she liked them anyway. If her father had to have been a card player, why couldn’t he have been Marty the Sneak? Marty probably was too involved with organized crime and he probably broke some laws, too, and he might have made a bad father, but here he was, helping her.

“You be careful,” she said. “All of you. I don’t want to spend my stake bailing you out of jail.”

“When did I get in trouble for something like this?” Marty asked, justifiably miffed. “You just pay attention to your cards. Concentrate. Remember what Weary told you last night.”

“So where do I start?” Hope said.

“Eddie said a couple minutes ago he had a good table for you in here. Lemme check with him it’s still going.” Marty punched a number on his cell phone.

“Eddie? What’s happening?” He listened. Then he nodded.

“She’s on her way,” he said into the phone. “These things are great,” he said, closing the phone and putting it into his pocket. “How did we get by before we had cells? Them and ATMs. They’re a bonanza for card players. Okay. Over by the north door, about two tables in. You’re looking for the table with the guy in the red check shirt, a second guy with a Dodgers baseball cap. They both play too loose, Eddie says.”

They bet on bad hands, Hope thought. “That should help rebuild my stake,” she said.

“That’s the plan,” Marty said.



By three o’clock Hope had won seven thousand dollars at the twenty dollar tables. She beamed at the uncles while she banked her winnings.

“I love this plan! Are you sure no one spotted you?”

“We’re good, Hope,” Pete Wysniewski said.

“Well, they spotted me,” Weary Blastell said. “But no one suspected me.”

At six-foot-five, with his former-football-player’s build, a person would have to be blind not to spot Weary, Hope realized

“You be careful, Weary,” she said. “You don’t exactly blend.”

“I blend better than Cuisinart,” Weary said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Plus, now we know every card player in Vegas who’s sitting at the twenty- and thirty-dollar tables,” Isaiah Rush said. “And we know how to beat them.”

“Speaking for my colleagues here, I feel confident in saying that we plan to increase our own earnings by substantial margins,” Jim Thickpenny said. “We anticipate major breakthroughs in profitability.”

“Bing-bing-bing!” Sharp Eddie concurred.

“You’re doing good,” Marty said to Hope. “Tonight you go back to the thirty-dollar tables. What time you coming in?”

“Seven o’clock?” she asked. “Does that work? At the flower arrangement again?”

“Someplace different,” Marty said. “The little coffee shop. We gotta talk strategy anyway, before you go out there.”

Hope nodded. “Maybe I can teach you about regression analysis,” she said.

“If that works for seven card stud, eight or better, high-low split, count me in.”