Henry stacked the chips in front of him, and as he did so, he glanced at the top card in the shoe. He switched on his concentration and in four seconds he read it as a ten. He pushed out eight of his chips, £200. This was the maximum stake allowed for blackjack at Lord’s House.
He was dealt the ten, and for his second card he got a nine, nineteen altogether.
Everyone sticks on nineteen. You sit tight and hope the dealer won’t get twenty or twenty-one.
So when the dealer came round again to Henry, he said, ‘Nineteen,’ and passed on to the next player.
‘Wait,’ Henry said.
The dealer paused and came back to Henry. He raised his brows and looked at him with those cool black eyes. ‘You wish to draw to nineteen?’ he asked somewhat sarcastically. He spoke with an Italian accent and there was scorn as well as sarcasm in his voice. There were only two cards in the pack that would not bust a nineteen, the ace (counting as a one) and the two. Only an idiot would risk drawing to nineteen, especially with £200 on the table.
The next card to be dealt lay clearly visible in the front of the shoe. At least, the reverse side of it was clearly visible. The dealer hadn’t yet touched it.
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘I think I’ll have another card.’
The dealer shrugged and flipped the card out of the shoe. The two of clubs landed neatly in front of Henry, alongside the ten and the nine.
‘Thank you,’ Henry said. ‘That will do nicely.’
‘Twenty-one,’ the dealer said. His black eyes glanced up again into Henry’s face, and they rested there, silent, watchful, puzzled. Henry had unbalanced him. He had never in his life seen anyone draw on nineteen. This fellow had drawn on nineteen with a calmness and a certainty that was quite staggering. And he had won.
Henry caught the look in the dealer’s eyes, and he realized at once that he had made a silly mistake. He had been too clever. He had drawn attention to himself. He must never do that again. He must be very careful in future how he used his powers. He must even make himself lose occasionally, and every now and again he must do something a bit stupid.
The game went on. Henry’s advantage was so enormous, he had difficulty keeping his winnings down to a reasonable sum. Every now and again, he would ask for a third card when he already knew it was going to bust him. And once, when he saw that his first card was going to be an ace, he put out his smallest stake, then made a great show of cursing himself aloud for not having made a bigger bet in the first place.
In an hour, he had won exactly three thousand pounds, and there he stopped. He pocketed his chips and made his way back to the cashier’s office to turn them in for real money.
He had made £3,000 from blackjack and £3,600 from roulette, £6,600 in all. It could just as easily have been £660,000. As a matter of fact, he told himself he was now almost certainly able to make money faster than any other man in the entire world.
The cashier received Henry’s pile of chips and plaques without twitching a muscle. He wore steel spectacles, and the pale eyes behind the spectacles were not interested in Henry. They looked only at the chips on the counter. This man also had arithmetic in his fingers. But he had more than that. He had arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus and algebra and Euclidean geometry in every nerve of his body. He was a human calculating-machine with a hundred thousand electric wires in his brain. It took him five seconds to count Henry’s one hundred and twenty chips.
‘Would you like a cheque for this, Mr Sugar?’ he asked. The cashier, like the man at the desk downstairs, knew every member by name.
‘No, thank you,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll take it in cash.’
‘As you wish,’ said the voice behind the spectacles, and he turned away and went to a safe at the back of the office that must have contained millions.
By Lord’s House standards, Henry’s win was fairly small potatoes. The Arab oil boys were in London now and they liked to gamble. So did the shady diplomats from the Far East and the Japanese businessmen and the British tax-dodging real-estate operators. Staggering sums of money were being won and lost, mostly lost, in the large London casinos every day.