Page 18 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

A s soon as I returned to Bologna, I found a lawyer to take my case and sue everyone involved.

However, he warned me that it would be a difficult case.

I would be a female David going up against the Goliath of the male-dominated chess world.

It would be a long, hard, expensive battle, and the lawyer wouldn’t take my case on commission.

He demanded a large retainer upfront…

Money I didn’t have.

And having been drummed out of the chess world, I sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to earn it playing tournaments.

Out of desperation, I looked for other quick ways to fund the lawsuit.

Counting cards in blackjack was a possibility –

But I’d heard too many stories about people being escorted out of casinos by thugs, taken into deserted areas, and threatened with a gun to their heads.

Poker seemed like a much safer alternative.

There were hundreds of tournaments across the globe where you could earn hundreds of thousands – even millions – of dollars.

The downside was there were tons of probability charts to memorize: how likely it was for certain cards to be dealt… the odds of players having certain hands… that sort of thing.

However, since I had memorized thousands of chess openings and gambits, I didn’t anticipate much difficulty in memorizing a bunch of statistics.

I figured my biggest problem would be determining whether players were bluffing.

There’s a saying in poker: play the man, not the hand.

Meaning that poker was at least 50% psychology. At least.

You had to get inside your opponent’s mind to figure out if they were bluffing or not –

Which I had no experience with.

Chess was pure intellect.

There was no element of chance about it…

And you certainly couldn’t bluff another player.

Every knight, rook, and bishop were plainly visible.

The pieces never lied – but in poker, your opponents frequently did.

However, I was desperate for money to fund my lawsuit…

So I embarked on a crash course in how to play poker.

I read dozens of books…

Memorized hundreds of charts…

And played countless hours of online poker.

I skipped the free games. People who played with worthless chips played very differently from those betting real money. If you could just get another million chips for nothing, why not go all-in every time? It would be poor training for my ultimate goal of playing in tournaments.

No – I went straight to using cash.

Online poker for real money had been banned in most of the US for years, but it was still legal throughout Europe.

For a while, I stuck to the tables with the smallest stakes to conserve my bankroll. Once I got the hang of it, I moved up to tables where larger bets were required.

Though I had losing sessions, I began making 200-300 a day on average.

That was the equivalent of working three or four shifts in the restaurant.

Once I started pulling in real cash, I quit my day job and devoted myself entirely to poker.

I missed the camaraderie of going out with other people, but I was focused on revenge.

However, it would’ve taken me forever to build up enough cash through online poker to fund the lawsuit.

That wasn’t where the big money was. The big money was in tournaments.

Plus, playing online wasn’t real. You couldn’t see people’s faces or body language – and thus no real way to tell if they might be bluffing.

So I quickly moved on to casinos.

Bologna had only small casinos with limited opportunities to play poker. It was mostly slot machines, craps, roulette, and blackjack.

So I started taking the train to bigger cities with casinos that offered poker:

Venice.

San Remo.

Rome.

Of course, it was a long trip from Bologna, so I would have to spend at least one night. I usually chose weekends, since those nights had the most people looking to get drunk and gamble.

Now that I had more money, I opted for hotel rooms and better restaurants…

Which was wonderful. Much better than hostels or my terrible little studio apartment.

And I was exposed to a completely different class of players.

Lots of sharks looking to fleece the tourists.

It was the sharks who actually taught me to be a poker player.

At first, I lost all my money to them.

After the fourth time returning home completely broke, I wondered if it was worth it to go on…

But I refused to give up.

Finally I had my first winning weekend: 800 euros in profits.

The next weekend, it was 1200.

The next, 2800.

Eventually it got to the point where I would show up on a Friday, play through the weekend, and walk away on Monday morning with as much as 5000 euros after expenses.

Of course, there were still times I wiped out completely.

On average, though, I was making three times as much money in real life as I did online –

And I was getting much better practice.

After three months of casino trips, I was ready for my first tournament.

The poker tournament scene was completely different.

For one, the professionals in tournaments made the casino sharks I’d encountered look like chumps.

Yes, there were plenty of amateurs who wanted to try their hand at the big time –

But they generally busted out in the first couple rounds of the tournament.

By the end, you were left playing the best of the best.

I went through the same process I’d gone through in the casinos:

I lost everything the first seven times I played.

But on the eighth, I came in 12 th place…

Which earned me 15,000 euros.

I was overjoyed.

After that, I doubled down and began going to every tournament in Europe I could find.

I should mention one other thing about poker tournaments:

There was a lot of hooking up going on.

Not that I was interested, because the options weren’t much better than at chess tournaments. Just different.

You had your poker math nerds, who were the most similar to chess nerds…

Celebrity types, flashy guys who were closer to the Danish grandmaster who had framed me…

And a bunch of gym bros who cared more about their biceps than memorizing poker tables. They tended to be the biggest bluffers and the ones who saw winning as a direct correlation to their masculinity.

I wasn’t attracted to any of them.

I got hit on a lot, though. Even the poker math nerds were more socially adept than the average chess tournament player – and the gym bros were a lot more forward.

I turned them all down. I was too focused on the money.

I never felt even a whisper of a desire for a man…

Until I met one in particular.

And then the attraction was so overpowering it nearly destroyed me.

But another man tried to destroy me first. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

He wasn’t a gambler, though.

He was a mafia don.