Ryan looked at the two kings in his hand and thought about patience.
Not comfortable patience, the kind that costs something. He'd been at this table for forty minutes now. He'd won one hand, lost two small ones deliberately to keep the temperature in the room comfortable, and folded everything else.
His chip stack sat at roughly thirty-four thousand, slightly up from where he'd started, and the table had spent the last thirty minutes recalibrating what they thought they knew about him.
That was the point.
He knew enough about poker now — from watching, from the hands that had already played out — to understand that the cards were almost secondary. The real game was information. What people thought you had. What you let them think. How long you could sit with a strong hand and look like a man with nothing.
He had two kings.
