Monopolisto Man has what many gamblers have. A short attention span. He is too old to have been diagnosed. He thinks diagnoses are for the birds. Schmuck studies. Asinine headlines. Predictable prose.
It was thus that our protagonist left Divonne and encamped in Boston for some weeks, haunting the public library. He found Ainslie's book on gambling and turned as if by instinct to the pages that describe Oscar's Grind.
Since my readers are not after Ellroy prose or extended narrative, but merely the meat of actual gambling, I shall jump immediately to how Oscar's Grind works. In Ainslie it was used playing the Don't in Craps.
You make a one unit bet. As long as this bet loses you bet one unit. When you win after a loss or losses you bet two units. You bet after wins in ascending amounts until you are a unit ahead and then revert to one unit. You never Martingale. You never follow a loss with a bump.
Monopolisto Man maintained an apartment at the Fairfield Buiiding almost next to the library. He felt at home in the Copley Square neighborhood. There were decent places to eat and the library was wonderful. One could not ask for more.
He took Ainslie out and carried it back to his studio apartment. It was Friday. Later Boylston Street would reverberate with the drunken cries of short haired incipient alcoholics, most in their twenties. Only in Boston could could one detect a note of such utter despair. In Boston the game of life was big. Everyone played it with addictive flair. It was completely sealed off and personal to every soul. It was a penumbra thing no doubt.
Monopolisto Man did not go to bed. He had a computer that was happily not new. Something from the early 1990s with all the old games. His a blackjack was vastly superior to anything that had since been offered. He spent the next 48 hours straight -- with minimal sleep breaks and no change of clothes -- learning the conditions under which Oscar's Grind, like all other gambling systems, would not work.
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