Kishore came up at about half past nine. He drives a share auto on the Nizamabad Junction to bus stand run and finishes early on a wet day, because nobody stands out at the stops once the water starts moving down Khaleelwadi's side lanes. The television was on in the corner with the sound off — a Telugu news bulletin looping the same footage of a flooded culvert near Bodhan road — and the whole room smelled of haldi from the godown downstairs, the way it always does in market season. He wanted to watch me play. I opened an RNG blackjack table at ₹50 and we sat with one phone between us.
Fourth hand of the night, I got the one everybody hates. Ten and a six against a dealer ten. That table had no surrender button, so I took a card, caught a seven and went to twenty-three before the dealer had done anything at all. Fifty rupees gone in four seconds. Kishore said I should have stood. I told him the dealer's ten only breaks about one time in five, so standing on sixteen is the same loss dressed up nicely, and he did not believe me until I showed him the table further down this page.
Twice that night the dealer turned up an ace and the insurance prompt slid across the screen. I refused both. The first time the hole card was a queen and Kishore made a noise like I had reversed into a wall. The second time it was a four, and he went quiet. One hand proves nothing in either direction, which is the part that is genuinely hard to sit with — the correct decision and the good outcome are two separate things, and blackjack keeps handing you evidence that they are the same.
Hand nineteen was a natural. Ace, king, and ₹75 came back on top of my ₹50 because that table paid 3 to 2. Hand twenty-three was a pair of eights against a dealer six — split, another ₹50 in, one hand made eighteen and the other twenty, and the dealer drew to twenty-three. Hand thirty-one was a hard eleven against a five, so I doubled: ₹100 on the box, one card, a ten, and the dealer broke again. For about ten minutes there I was comfortably ahead and felt clever about it.
I finished ₹250 down. Here is the honest arithmetic. Forty hands at ₹50 is ₹2,000, plus ₹50 for the split and ₹100 for the double, so ₹2,150 crossed the table in total. At half a percent — the price of playing this game properly — the theoretical cost of the whole evening was about ₹11. Eleven rupees. Less than the auto fare to the market yard. Everything else in that ₹250 was noise, and noise runs in both directions; on a different Wednesday the same forty hands hand you ₹400 and you go to bed convinced you have worked something out.
Now do the same sum on a table that pays 6 to 5 instead. My natural would have returned ₹60 rather than ₹75, and across the same ₹2,150 the rule adds roughly 1.42%, taking the evening's real cost from about ₹11 to about ₹41. Read that twice. The single choice I made before the first card was dealt — which table to sit at — was worth almost four times more than every hit, stand, split and double I made afterwards combined. That is the whole argument of this page, and the rest of it is just working out.
