It was a transparent fallacy, of course. Such systems always are; and the Seer, who was no fool at the doctrine of chances, saw through it at a glance. His lip curled lightly. “You’re a good mathematician?” he asked, with a well-suppressed sneer.
And Franz was obliged perforce to admit, in this critical moment, that he had got no further in that abstruse science than the first four rules of arithmetic.
The Seer assumed his kindliest and most didactic manner. “Now, you look here, Herr von Forstemann,” he said, leaning over towards his new friend confidentially; “you’ve allowed yourself to be duped; you’ve been grossly imposed upon. I can show you in a minute your System’s all bosh. The bank stands always its regular chance to win, no matter what you do, and it dodges you exactly where you think you’ve dodged it.”
He took out a pencil and paper, and began with great show of care and patience to make the fallacy as clear as day to his unwilling pupil. Franz leant over him and looked. Step by step the clever American unravelled before his eyes all the tangled mass of false assumptions and baseless conclusions Franz called his System. Poor Franz stood aghast; the demolition was patent, irresistible, crushing. Joaquin Holmes was in his element; he was a specialist on games of chance; he demonstrated with loving care that in this case, as in all others, the bank had exactly thirty-seven chances for itself, against thirty-six for the players. Franz saw it with his own eyes: sorely against his will he was forced to see it. He couldn’t gainsay it: it was clear as mud; he could only murmur in a feebly illogical way, “But my friend made twenty thousand pounds in these rooms right off with it.”
The Seer was remorseless. “Accident!” he answered, calmly, with a bland wave of the hand. “Pure luck! Coincidence! And if it happened once, by a mere fluke, to pull itself off so well, all the less reason to believe such a wonderful sequence of happy shots would ever manage to repeat itself. The bank stands always its fixed chance to win in a certain proportion; by good fortune you may circumvent it, by calculation, never!”
Franz was convinced against his will. But the blow was an appalling one. He had lost three hundred and fifty pounds already; he saw no hope of recovering it. And, what was far worse, he had practically lost twenty thousand into the bargain. During all those years while he had been saving and scraping, he had considered his fortune as good as made, if he could but once go to Monte Carlo with five hundred pounds of ready money in his pocket. In five short minutes the affable stranger had knocked the bottom out of his drum—demolished the whole vast superstructure of false facts and bad reasoning Franz had reared so carefully; and now, like a house of cards, it had tumbled about his ears, leaving the poor duped Tyroler blankly hopeless and miserable.
The reaction was painful and piteous to behold. From a potential millionaire, Franz descended at once to be the owner of a paltry hundred and fifty pounds in English money. The Seer did his best in these straits to console and comfort him. He pointed out that while no man can ensure a fortune at games of chance by trying to play on a system, any man may have the good luck to win large sums if he treats it frankly as a question of fortune, not of deliberate planning. “Only,” he added, with a significant glance towards the Casino, “it’s foolish to play where one backs one’s luck against a public bank which stands to win, by its very constitution, a certain regular proportion of all money staked against it.”
His words fell on stony ground. Franz was simply inconsolable. The longer he looked at those irrefragable calculations, the more clearly did he recognise now that the Seer was right, and the System on which he had staked his all was a pure delusion. But Mr Joaquin Holmes extended him still the most obtrusive sympathy. “I’m awfully sorry for you, Herr von Forstemann,” he said, over and over again, regarding his figures sideways. “This has been a hard trial to you. But you mustn’t give up because you’ve been bitten once. Sooner or later, luck must turn. You’ve lost a great deal; all the sooner, then, must it change for you. Give me the pleasure of dining with you at the restaurant round the corner. You’ll see things in a truer light, you know, when you’ve digested your dinner.”
Franz followed him mechanically. He had no heart for anything. The Seer ordered a choice repast, and plied his pigeon well with the best wines in the cellar. All the while, as they dined, he harped still on three chords—his own persistent ill-luck at all games of chance; the folly of playing where the odds are against you, no matter how little, at a public table; and the certainty of winning back, on the average, what you’ve lost, if only you play long enough at even betting.
Emotions, once well roused, tend to flow on unchecked, in spite of temporary obstacles, in an accustomed channel. As the dinner digested itself, and the Dry Monopole fired Franz’s brain once more, the thrasonic mood of the gambler came over him yet again as strong as ever. Like a born braggart that he was, a true Tyrolese Robbler, he began to boast in thick tones of how he would get the better still of those swindling tables. The Seer encouraged him to the echo in this gallant resolution, but thought ill of his chances at the unfair roulette-board, against the certain dead-weight of a mathematical calculation. “Come up with me to my room after dinner,” he put in, carelessly, “and I’ll show you a little game I learnt when I went buck-shooting in the Rockies some years ago. It’s perfectly fair and square, with no sort of advantage to one side over the other. None of your beastly zeros: all even chances. I won’t play it with you myself—or at least, only for a turn or two, just to show you how it’s done—I’m so deuced unlucky. But there are lots of fellows around who’ll be glad enough to give you a chance of your revenge; and, in my opinion, it’s just about the very evenest game a sensible man ever put his money down upon.”