Upgrade by Blake Crouch;

Author:Blake Crouch; [Crouch, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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After a few days at the shelter, my gunshot wound was healing rapidly, and I could finally walk without wanting to collapse.

My focus turned to stopping Kara. Before I could do that, I needed freedom of movement. To have freedom of movement, I would need a bulletproof identity, and that would take time and money.

The money problem was a conundrum.

With my upgrade, I could have gotten any job in the world.

Except I couldn’t.

I was Logan Ramsay, and there were people turning this country upside down to find me.

Robbery, stealing, fraud—it all seemed destined to work against my efforts to remain invisible.

But according to my internet research at the library I’d been visiting during the day, there were six casinos in Albuquerque.

So I bought some clothes at a thrift store, cleaned myself up, and walked into my first casino one week after Kara shot me.

The cameras made me nervous. They were everywhere. My dermal fillers would last at least a year, but I would find out in short order if the alterations I’d made to my face in West Virginia were enough to fool the facial-recognition AI that was undoubtedly scraping CCTV databases all over the country.

But in light of everything, it didn’t really matter.

I needed money. I had no other options.

The slots would be a complete waste of time. When it came to blackjack, a math genius like myself could certainly count cards, but against a shoe—which contained between six and eight decks—it would simply take too long. Any success would be purely driven by luck.

Poker, however, presented an interesting opportunity. I’d played my fair share and had never been much good at it in my previous life.

But now…

Calculating pot odds was suddenly effortless. And sitting at the table, I could instantly call upon the seven poker strategy books I’d speed-read yesterday at the library, which focused on how to read an opponent’s range based on their bets, how to bet in the big blind versus the small, versus late positions.

This was a game that rewarded computing horsepower and the ability to absorb a multitude of specific sets of rules quickly. And beyond the mathematical mechanics, poker was ultimately just reading people. Their excitement, their attempt to conceal that excitement, their fear, their boredom, their deceit, their regret. And then making choices accordingly.

I sat down at a no-limit Texas Hold ’em table on a Friday evening with $432 to my name. There were eight of us at the table, and as the dealer dealt the first hand, my gunshot wound started throbbing. Compartmentalizing the pain, I began to play.

I observed—even with the better players—the negligible raise of their eyebrows when they caught a great card they weren’t expecting. An imperceptible “sinking inward” when they didn’t. I built equations for each opponent to track their emotional leaks. If Fidel, the guy across from me, saw a card and reacted by exposing greater than ten percent of the whites of his eyes, I knew he had something better than a pair.

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