"Director Walsh..."
"Director Walsh..."
"Please report to the surveillance center immediately!"
When Walsh, dressed in a sharp black suit, quickly stepped into the Bellagio's central surveillance room, several technicians and Frank, the casino manager, were already waiting for him.
"Director Walsh, you're finally here."
"We have a situation in Hall D. We need your assessment on how to handle it."
Walsh was the Director of Security for the Bellagio Casino, responsible for neutralizing any and all threats to the house's bottom line.
He knew that given the Bellagio's state-of-the-art security systems, the surveillance center rarely called him directly. When they did, it meant they had encountered a problem that couldn't be solved with standard protocols.
Usually, it meant they had either encountered a world-class professional gambler or a highly sophisticated card counter/cheat.
For a legacy casino like the Bellagio, they naturally had a comprehensive set of countermeasures for both scenarios.
However, Walsh didn't want to deal with either.
The reason was simple: his boss was Terry Benedict.
Terry Benedict was one of the most ruthless, formidable, and utterly unforgiving casino magnates in Las Vegas. He was a cold, calculating machine of a man, incredibly strict with himself and downright tyrannical with his subordinates.
Walsh knew perfectly well that if he made a single mistake on the casino floor, Benedict would ensure he'd never find a job in Las Vegas again.
"Frank, what's the situation?" Walsh asked the moment he saw the casino manager.
Frank looked grave. He led Walsh over to a bank of monitors displaying live feeds from Hall D and stopped in front of a specific screen.
"Watch him. The Asian youth sitting at the Texas Hold'em table."
"He arrived at the Bellagio around 4:40 PM. He bought in for ten thousand dollars at the main cage and immediately hit the floor."
"Initially, he played the slots for a bit. Won some, lost more. Standard tourist behavior."
"At 5:17 PM, he moved to the Sic Bo tables. Played Big/Small for a while. Again, won some, lost more."
"But at 5:33 PM, he sat down at the Texas Hold'em section."
"In the hour and a half since he sat down, he has turned his remaining seven thousand dollars into two hundred and seventy thousand dollars."
Walsh stared intensely at the live video feed. He watched the Asian man play several hands but couldn't spot a single tell, sleight of hand, or mechanical cheating device.
He frowned and turned to Frank. "What do the techs say? Is there any possibility he's cheating?"
"Highly unlikely," Frank replied, shaking his head. "We've already rotated the dealer at his table twice."
"We've also introduced fresh, sealed decks of cards."
"Look here, here, and here," Frank pointed to three different people standing near the Asian youth on the monitor. "These three are our floor spotters. I sent them over to observe him at close range."
"So far, none of them have seen him do anything suspicious. He's not marking cards, he's not capping bets, and he doesn't have an earpiece."
Walsh immediately understood. They weren't dealing with a cheat; they were dealing with a genuine, world-class poker master.
Walsh's expression darkened. Terry Benedict was currently doing a floor inspection of the casino. If a scene broke out in the main hall while the boss was present, Walsh's head would roll.
"I'll take a few men down there and have him politely escorted out," Walsh said firmly, turning to leave.
"No, no, no, wait!" Frank grabbed Walsh's arm, pulling him back. "You can't do that."
As the Casino Manager, Frank outranked Walsh.
Initially, Frank had called Security to have the incredibly skilled, yet non-cheating gambler bounced from the premises—the standard Vegas "backroom" treatment for card counters.
But just before Walsh arrived, Frank had noticed a tiny detail on the high-definition monitor that gave him a massive headache.
He tapped a technician on the shoulder. The tech instantly understood and zoomed the camera in directly on the Asian youth's left wrist.
Walsh squinted at the zoomed-in image.
Frank sighed, realizing the security director didn't know much about high fashion.
"Look at his watch," Frank explained. "That's a limited-edition Blancpain luxury timepiece. It retails for somewhere between six and seven hundred thousand dollars."
"We haven't been able to run his facial recognition against any known databases yet. We have no idea if he's a professional shark or just an incredibly bored, incredibly wealthy princeling from a major Asian conglomerate."
"And you know as well as I do, Mr. Benedict values his ultra-high-net-worth 'whales' above all else. If we throw a billionaire out on his ass because he had a lucky streak, Mr. Benedict will feed us to the desert."
Walsh, who truly didn't understand luxury watches, frowned. "So... what do you suggest? We ask him to move to the High-Roller VIP rooms?"
Frank nodded. "Exactly. Once he's in the VIP section, the table limits are higher, the competition is fiercer, and we can isolate him from the general tourist population."
"Alright, let's do that."
Down on the casino floor, Hunter sat at the Texas Hold'em table, his eyes locked on the cards, playing with intense focus.
He hadn't expected the [Gambling] skill to be this terrifyingly effective in a real-world casino.
Combining his Level 3 [Gambling] with his near-superhuman Intelligence stat (which granted him flawless memory recall, rapid probability calculation, and absolute logical deduction), the game had become trivial.
He realized very quickly that unless the dealer was actively rigging the deck, it was mathematically impossible for him to lose if he truly wanted to win.
Furthermore, every single hand he won in this high-pressure environment yielded massive amounts of system experience points.
He had only been sitting at the table for an hour and a half, and he had only won a little under three hundred thousand dollars.
But his [Gambling] skill had already skyrocketed from Level 3 to Level 4.
Although the experience required to reach Level 5 had increased exponentially, winning a single hand here still gave him ten times the experience he got from playing casual online poker or mahjong back at his ranch.
And [Gambling] wasn't the only skill getting a workout.
By constantly analyzing the bluffs and tells of the other players, his [Micro-Expression Analysis] and [Emotional Analysis] skills were also leveling up rapidly.
"This is perfect. If I stay in Vegas for a few days, I'll walk away with several max-level skills,"Hunter thought happily.
Since stepping foot inside the Bellagio, the overwhelming sensory environment had also triggered new passive abilities.
While playing Sic Bo (Big/Small) and focusing entirely on the sound of the dice rattling in the cup, the system had rewarded him with a new skill: [Echolocation].
By concentrating his hearing, he could filter out the deafening casino noise to perfectly isolate the faintest sounds within a specific radius, or stretch his hearing far beyond normal human limits. It was an incredibly powerful tactical tool.
Shortly after, while watching players talk across the noisy room, he also triggered the [Lip Reading] skill.
Watching his skill list expand filled him with genuine satisfaction.
So, when three large, burly men in tailored suits approached his table, Hunter wasn't surprised.
The leader of the group smiled politely and leaned in close. "Excuse me, sir. With card skills as exceptional as yours, you might find the stakes down here a bit... boring."
"Would you care to join us in the VIP High-Roller lounge? The games there are much more suited to your caliber."
Hunter barely glanced at him. He calmly stood up from the table, grabbed his towering stacks of chips, and nodded.
"Sure. Lead the way."
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