The Spotted Ball – Chapter 6

The Spotted Ball, a True Story by Larry Cohen c 2025
“Heads I win, tails you lose”

Despite the smoke and the arrogant staff, I managed to visit the Embajador Casino on the weekends. Although, as I mentioned earlier, I learned that it was possible to play craps and take your winnings with you, I wasn’t going back to the States anytime soon, so I thought it best to avoid the craps table. As to the game of 21, a card game also known as Black Jack, I avoided that as well since I didn’t like cards…any cards. Even as a kid, I never liked cards. I thought the images of a King and a Queen were actually scary looking.

However, just as my biochem professor was observing the roulette wheel, I started to do the same. There were all levels of odds on the table. The most obvious ones were odd or even numbers and red or black numbers. The odds on those were pretty close to 50-50, but not quite. And, it was unusual if the numbers would swing back and forth from odd to even or red to black in a regular manner. . Allow me to explain:

I seldom observed that the numbers would switch odd to even in any orderly manner. That is, they would not change from an odd to an even to an odd and back to and even in any predictable way. Further, the numbers would not stay even nor odd very long either. As an example, remembering my “Probability and Statistics” from my high school class, it would be very rare to have a penny come up heads and tails each time the penny was flipped in a regular odds/even manner. Think of it this way. If a penny were to come up heads time after time after time and never land on tails, one would want to take a closer look at that coin to see if there actually was a tail on the coin or was it a “rigged” coin, that is heads on both sides. Or, on the other hand, if the outcome were heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails. This too would be just as suspicious. Thus, there was some regularity within the irregularity.

This is what I think Professor Hazbun was noticing, too. While the good professor never took a chance, I decided to wade into the waters. In a cloud of smoke, I placed bets on the colors. What I was really looking for was a long string of one color before placing a bet. Supposedly, even though, as in the penny, the previous toss could not influence the next toss, it made no sense that an odd (or even) number would come up an infinite number of times.

to be continued….