It was 4 p.m. and the bubble was approaching. Of the nine hundred players who had bought into or otherwise qualified for the tournament, only the top hundred and seventy-six would win any money, with the payouts jumping radically the closer you got to the final eight.

The rest would go home with nothing.

The bubble was the last player, the hundred and seventy-seventh, to be knocked out of The Big Drop before everybody remaining was guaranteed at least minimum cash. Eram clocked the giant LED leader board for the fifth time in as many minutes. He wasn’t the only one. All of the hundred and eighty players packed into the main deck were keeping an anxious eye on the number that signified how many people remained in the field.

Four more to go before the bubble bursts. Nobody wants to risk their stack by getting involved in too many pots. It’s a good time to steal a few.

Eram had had a frustrating Day 2. He had been card dead for the most part, and even the couple of times he had picked up a decent hand he hadn’t connected with the board and been forced to fold. If he had been button clicking at home in front of his iMac on a day like today, he would have cut the session short, gone for a run or a movie, tried again later. But he couldn’t press pause on a tournament so he limped along, bleeding chips, until he was no longer sitting on a top-ten stack. Or even a top-fifty stack.

He peeked at his hole cards. A pair of fours. He put in a reasonably large bet, hoping that everybody would fold and he could steal the blind antes. And everybody did fold—except the only girl left in the tournament, the one Eram had pointed out to Gehna earlier, who was playing the big blind a few seats to his left.

‘Y’know how it is,’ she smiled apologetically at Eram while matching his raise. ‘I really hate leaving my soldiers to die out there.’

Most people defended their big blinds pretty wide and loose, so Eram wasn’t too worried that he was up against a premium hand. Maybe a weak ace? Or any two picture cards?

The flop came down a rainbow ace, king and three. Eram’s opponent checked to him, knocking over a tower of chips and giggling attractively in the process. Eram wasn’t as easily taken in by the act as the rest of the men at his table; they saw a babe, especially a ditzy babe, and fired triple-barrelled bluffs at her, which she had picked off easily all day long. He knew that most aces and kings were in her range, so he checked behind.

The turn card was a miracle four, making Eram’s set. It was time to take the only poker-playing girl on the ship down to Value Town. When she checked a second time, Eram bet a hundred thousand chips, about a quarter of his remaining stack.