Chapter 022: Cheat, and You Lose a Hand!

Chapter 022: Cheat, and You Lose a Hand!

Everyone in the room understood the odds: never checking a hole card, then calling an all-in and raising, when only one single card in the deck could win the hand—leaving it purely to chance was next to impossible.

But what Wu Chen said as he rose made something click into place.

A card you already knew you held, and a card you gambled blind on—those were two entirely different things.

Take zhajinhua, for example. Playing blind, throwing money in recklessly, and having it turn out to be three of a kind at the reveal—that was one thing. Looking at your cards first, seeing three of a kind, then throwing money in—that was something else entirely.

The first was luck defying all reason.

The second was good fortune too, but nothing about the play itself was wrong. It wasn’t a gamble on chance at all—it was simply knowing you held a winning hand and pushing hard to maximize it. Perfectly ordinary.

“You… you looked? That’s impossible! When did you even—” Yao Bin’s voice cracked into a shrill shout. The composed, scholarly man had come completely unraveled, eyes bloodshot, stunned senseless by the loss.

“Why do you think I did it—every single hand, from the first to the thirty-eighth, straightening my hole card before deciding whether to look?” Wu Chen said, pushing his chair aside and stepping out from behind the table.

“You old hands at the tables—sure, you’ve got experience. Nothing wrong with relying on it. Where you went wrong was arrogance. Did you really think you could read my whole style off a handful of hands?”

“What if I was putting on a show for you the entire time?”

Yao Bin’s eyes went wide. Wu Chen hadn’t spelled it out fully, but he understood well enough.

That seemingly compulsive habit—straightening his hole card, turning it to face himself—had been deliberate all along.

In the instant his hand turned the card, Wu Chen had already seen what it was.

When it came to gambling, Wu Chen placed no faith in luck whatsoever. Luck existed, sure, but against a true master, its role shrank to almost nothing.

From the very first hand, he’d been reading his hole card the entire time. Sometimes, when he appeared to check it only at the very end, that too was theater—he’d already known long before.

But his technique was too refined. Too fast.

No one could catch it—not even Yao Bin, a top expert from Macau. From where they sat, Wu Chen had simply been straightening a crooked card lying on the table.

Thirty-eight hands running, and he’d done it every single time.

“I figured, if I wasn’t going to cheat outright, and wasn’t going to manufacture my own opening, I’d have to wait for a real chance to finish you off—probably fifty hands, at least. Turns out my luck really was decent today. Took me only thirty-eight.”

As he spoke, Wu Chen had already circled the table and come to stand in front of Yao Bin, Li Ruobing following close behind.

Yao Bin’s eyes were still stretched wide, red-rimmed, his whole body trembling. For a gambler, one big loss wasn’t the terrifying part. How he’d lost it—that was the terrifying part.

“You really thought I believed in luck?” Wu Chen tilted his head, smiling faintly. “You really thought the flaws in my play, the cracks in my composure, were real flaws? That my little habitual movements were genuine habits? Or maybe, since I bluffed you once before, you figured I just liked taking risks, and this was another bluff?”

“And you wanted to take me on as a student? Teach me? Are you even qualified for that? You thought because I’m young, I had to be beneath you?” Wu Chen spared him nothing—every ounce of mockery, every barb.

It had been a trap.

Yao Bin understood now. From the very first hand Wu Chen sat down, he’d been laying it.

Never checking his hole card—fake.

Faith in luck—fake.

Every little habitual tell—fake.

Every reckless, aggressive bluff—fake, all of it groundwork for this one final hand.

Every piece of it, fake.

Yao Bin couldn’t…