20-February-2010

And yet, there was one thing our pal the croupier hadn’t thought of: Table limits. I asked him what the most we could bet was and he cheerfully responded, “Yuh play as much as yuh want one time, ah good.” – meaning “You can bet as much as you want at the same time, it’s all right with me.

It was obvious the croupier wasn’t quite seeing our point, but Ferdinand was incredulous.

“So we can bet 500, 1000, even 2000 TT?” he asked.

“Now yuh talkin’!” the croupier said scratching the palm of his left hand.

The wheel worked exactly like your standard casino wheel of fortune: Pegs lined its outer edge and a pliant yellow indicator provided friction and a selection mechanism. Ferdinand and I started small with $1 TT bets, about the equivalent of 12 Euro cents. We placed the cherry-red bills beneath the fishbowl stones—which had no other purpose except to keep the breeze blowing off Buccoo Bay from dragging our wagers into the sea. Then, we waited for the next spin.

Our strategy was pretty simple: We were playing a classic Martingale, me on blue, Ferdinand on white, Susanne on green. Every time we lost, we’d double our bets, and because the exchange rate was so favorable I got to well over $1000 TT before I even felt the slightest sting. As for our croupier, he became increasingly anxious as our winnings began piling up. Eventually, he called a tall, paunchy man over to watch us.

“Ah never see dat!” the large man burst out after a few minutes. “Why yuh let dem play so much one time?”*

“Ah chut, man! How ah supposed to know ah fus dey win?” †

“Oh, who sen’ mih?!” the large man said. Then, smacking the croupier with his ball cap, “Ah go do fuh yuh today today!”‡

“I think we should go,” Susanne whispered, and Ferdinand and I quickly gathered our winnings and followed her.

With so many bills on us, it was hard getting them all into our pockets and plenty fell to the ground causing the crowd around us to press forward. There were far more people than there had been when we first came to the table, many of them probably come to see the fight. It took a lot of effort to snake through with so many bodies squeezed together, but eventually we managed to push our way out and found ourselves in front of the second table.

“Wow, what a commotion!” Susanne said to the dealer and players as she fixed her frazzled hair.

“What go on deh?” asked the dealer.

“It seems some foreigners won more than they should have, so the Big Man came over.”

“Ah, dey is fightin’?”

“Yes, something like that.”

The dealer nodded his head wearily and set five colored dice in a basket at the top of the game’s tower.

“What game is this?” I asked as he finished arranging them and the players began setting their bets on the table.

“Dis? Oh, dis don’t have no name. It go by ‘Battle Blocks,’ or sometime ‘Boxing Blocks.’ It all de same.”

Continue to Part III...