Ryan played six more hands through the rest of the night.
He lost two of them — one to Christian, who'd recovered from the bluff and come back sharper, and one to a man who'd joined the table late and turned out to be considerably better than he looked. The losses were small, controlled, they didn't change the shape of the evening.
The wins were better.
Not as dramatic as the three kings hand, nothing that stopped the room again, just steady and quiet — Ryan reading the table, reading the people, folding when the math was wrong and staying when it wasn't. He'd found a rhythm somewhere in the second hour that felt like remembering something he hadn't known he knew.
When Marvin finally called the game around midnight, Ryan stacked his chips and had them counted.
Ninety-four thousand, two hundred dollars.
A sixty-four thousand dollar profit on a thirty thousand buy-in.
