Eram dodged a small crowd of people smoking their last cigarettes outside on the main deck and went to collect his chips. A girl in her early twenties was manning the cashier’s cage. She was pretty in a generic sort of way, with a plastic smile that looked as if someone had ordered it on to her mouth.

‘Name,’ she said brightly when he reached the front of the queue.

He told her.

‘Full name?’

‘Uh . . . it’s just Eram, thanks.’

The girl’s smile faltered and then flashed on again. ‘Well, okay, Just Eram. Here are your chips and a set of tournament rules in case you didn’t get them with your registration kit. Sign here, and here. Good luck. Next, please.’

Tournament rules differed from normal cash games in one crucial aspect. In cash games, you could afford to fold most hands, be patient and wait for the premium cards to be dealt to you. But in the tournament format, the mandatory blinds doubled every forty minutes, which meant that it became more and more expensive to play a round of hands. The only viable way to stay in the game was to play more hands with the cards that you would ordinarily have folded. As the pressure increased, so did the aggression, the bluffing and the mind games.

Eram sat at his designated table and arranged his chips in towers. He then introduced himself politely to the dealer but ignored the rest of the players—it didn’t pay to get too friendly with people you would need to intimidate later. Because Eram’s hunting ground was mostly Internet poker rooms, it was possible that his opponents might have known him by his online handle Terra, but they wouldn’t recognize him in person.

While the MC made some garbled announcement about the rules of engagement, Eram checked his phone for the fiftieth time that morning. No text, no missed calls. Against all reason, he also scanned the floor from under his hoodie, but not a single person he saw came within a dozen miles of even resembling Gehna.

Shit like that only happens in the movies, he thought. At train stations or airports. People are forever making up with each other at airports in the movies.

‘Time to get the cards in the air!’ the MC yelled into his mic, making it squeal in an unprofessional manner.

The dealer, an unsmiling dark-skinned man in shirtsleeves and a burgundy vest, broke the seal on a new deck of cards. He spread it out in a smooth arc and washed the cards before strip shuffling them together thoroughly.

One of the things Eram missed about playing live games was seeing a real pro shuffle a deck. In the right hands it was hypnotic to watch. He pushed away his regrets and focused on the few feet of green-baize real estate around him. For the next six hours, this would be the totality of his world. It was time to play.

The dealer cut for high card to decide who got the ‘dealer’ button. The button was valuable because having it meant you were the last to act on each betting street. You could wait to see what the others around the table did before you made your move.