Page 38 of Niccolo

He kept his precious undefeated record…

And I was made an international laughingstock.

Not only that, I was drummed out of the International Chess Federation the next day.

My career – the main way I made my living – was gone overnight.

I was devastated.

I cried for hours that night in my shitty hostel room –

But they were tears of rage.

I decided that, unlike last time with my father, I wasn’t going to hit ‘Delete’ on the email.

18

As soon as I returned to Bologna, I found a lawyer to take my case and sue everyone involved.

However, he warned me that it would be a difficult case.

I would be a female David going up against the Goliath of the male-dominated chess world.

It would be a long, hard,expensivebattle, and the lawyer wouldn’t take my case on commission.

He demanded a large retainer upfront…

Money I didn’t have.

And having been drummed out of the chess world, I sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to earn it playing tournaments.

Out of desperation, I looked for other quick ways to fund the lawsuit.

Counting cards in blackjack was a possibility –

But I’d heard too many stories about people being escorted out of casinos by thugs, taken into deserted areas, and threatened with a gun to their heads.

Poker seemed like a much safer alternative.

There were hundreds of tournaments across the globe where you could earn hundreds of thousands – evenmillions– of dollars.

The downside was there were tons of probability charts to memorize: how likely it was for certain cards to be dealt… the odds of players having certain hands… that sort of thing.

However, since I had memorized thousands of chess openings and gambits, I didn’t anticipate much difficulty in memorizing a bunch of statistics.

I figured my biggest problem would be determining whether players were bluffing.

There’s a saying in poker:play the man, not the hand.

Meaning that poker was at least 50% psychology. Atleast.

You had to get inside your opponent’s mind to figure out if they were bluffing or not –

Which I had no experience with.

Chess was pure intellect.

There was no element of chance about it…

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