I awoke with a splitting headache and the sour smell of vomit in my nostrils. I hadn’t closed the curtains last night, and light was streaming painfully through the window of my room, disallowing me from going back to sleep, as badly as I might want to. Fighting against the protestations of my throbbing head, I managed to sit up and look around the room. I quickly the identified the source of the smell as a puddle of puke sitting next to the bathroom door, where I had apparently tried to go throw up in the toilet and hadn’t quite made it. Groaning, I forced myself to my feet and set about cleaning up the mess as best I could. I had been occupied with this task for about five minutes when my cell phone started ringing. The caller ID came up as “Mom”. Leaning my head against the mattress of the bed in a vain attempt to ease the pounding in my skull, I hit the button to answer the call and held the phone up to my ear.

“Hey mom,” I croaked.

“Bryson? I need to talk to you. My friend Sandy called me earlier this evening all in a panic telling me I needed to turn on the television and turn it to this alternative sports channel, and what do I see but you playing in some huge poker tournament!”

“Oh hell.” I’d known the event was being televised, but somehow it hadn’t clicked in my mind that my mother might see it,

“What are you doing galavanting off in the Mediterranean? How on earth did you get the money for this?”

I wished I had a lie ready to tell her, but with a lack of any plausible alternative explanations and with my head hurting so badly I couldn’t think straight, I went ahead and told her the truth.

“Jesus, Bryson, if your father and I had known you were going to do something like this we wouldn’t have given you that house. It’s two in the morning over here and I don’t even know what I’m going to tell him when he wakes up. You know the poor man’s health is going downhill. The last thing he needs right now is the knowledge that his son is in financial trouble.”

My mother paused briefly and waited for a response. I tried to find words to say, but I couldn’t think of anything, and so she pressed on.

“And is it true that you did all of this just to pursue some woman? I saw your interaction with the big Russian guy, and I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The broadcasters gave you a nickname after that, by the way. They’re calling you the 'King of Hearts'. They don’t mean it in a flattering way, Bryson.”

“Are they? Oh God. What am I gonna do?” I groaned, “Couldn’t they just leave me even a little bit of dignity? Just a little?”

My mother, hearing the despair in my voice, decided to take pity on me and relented. “Look, we’ll find a way through this, okay? We’ll figure something out. I don’t want you to be saddled with debt forever. If we lose that house we lose that house. You can always come live with us.

“Thanks mom, I’ll keep that in mind.” I said. In all honesty, the prospect of having to live with and face my parents every day after this debacle was almost more unpalatable than homelessness, but I knew that I really had no better options.

My mother let me go, and after hanging up the phone I sat quietly in my room for a while. What was I going to do? The ship would be stopping later today in Barcelona, but before that there was poker to be played. I imagined that today would probably be the day I would bust out of the tournament. Maybe I should go ahead and buy a plane ticket back to America. I didn’t see any reason to stay on this cruise any longer than was absolutely necessary, and more than anything I wanted to go home, at least while I still had a home to go to. I decided not to order the ticket yet, however, partially because my head was hurting too badly to deal with the tedium of booking a flight and partially because on principle it seemed wrong to be trying to leave before I was officially out of the tournament.

After a while I looked at the my phone’s clock and realized I was almost late for the start of play. Ah, well, If I was late in this crowd that was basically the same as being on time. I took a quick shower, got dressed, and wandered my way out of the room. I had to shield my eyes against the light of the rising sun as I made my way to the ballroom. With my eyes covered and turned towards the ground, I didn’t notice the mountain of flesh in front of me until I was inches away from bumping into it.

“Not feeling so good this morning, Mr. ‘King of Hearts’?” Boomed the unmistakable voice of Nikita Zakharov.

I Looked up to see the large Russian standing in front of me, arms folded. I wasn’t thrilled to know that word of my new moniker had made its way back to the other players already. That being said, I had thought Nikita was supportive of my dumb little exploits. His attitude yesterday didn’t match the tone of his voice today at all.

“Hi Nikita, what’s up?” I asked, trying not to sound as intimidated as I felt.

“You try to break into my room last night.” Nikita told me, his frigid gaze seeming to peer into my very soul.

“Did I? Oh God Nikita I’m sorry, I was drunk and I-”

“Yes, this I figure out immediately. When I say that you drink Vodka like American and not Russian I did not mean to make challenge.”

“I don’t know what to say. I was in kind of a bad place last night and-”

“You drink sorrows away because you realize Alva is off limits.” Nikita cut me off again.

“How did you know that it was Alva?”

“Well, let’s see. I take numbers two and two and when I put them together, look! they make four.” Nikita demonstrated by holding up two fingers on each hand and then bringing his hands together, “You run away when Vincente make proposal to Alva, and then you show up at night drunk out of mind. I do not imagine mystery girl will be mystery to anybody by end of day, Mr. King of Hearts.”

“Please don’t call me that.” Was my only weak reply.

“Alva is sweet girl. Deserves better than to have idiot loser come along trying to play homewrecker.”

“I didn’t even know she was dating Vincente!”

“Whatever. You need to get shit together,” Nikita stated bluntly. “You come to tournament for get girl, but now you see this is not possible. What you going to do now?”

“I guess I’ll have to see how today goes at the tables,” I said.

“No! Not ‘see how today goes’. Way I look at it you get out of mess only one way: by cashing tournament. You cash tournament and money problems go away. You cash tournament and name ‘King of Hearts’ becomes point of pride, not butt of joke. You not win Alva’s heart maybe, but all other problems you fix. However, is not possible to win tournament just by ‘seeing how it goes’.”

“I don’t know how I could have any chance of making it far enough to cash,” I protested, “I’m a short stack as is and I’m the least experienced player here!”

“Well stop being pansy and figure it out. Maybe try making real effort for once.” Nikita turned on his heels and stalked away, his long legs carrying him as fast at a walk as some people might go at a jog. As he left, he looked over his shoulder and gave one parting message: “Next time we play I attempt to crush you. Try not to make it easy.”

I stood there for a moment, watching as Nikita moved away in the direction of the ballroom, his words echoing in my ears. He was right, of course, the easiest way for me to solve the lion’s share of my problems was to get myself into the money. Still, I thought that was asking an awful lot. If I had ever thought I could use luck to make my way through the tournament, my experience yesterday had completely disabused me of that notion. Despite the obvious luck element, this wasn’t a game that could be won just by hoping to get the right cards to fall. What tools did I have at my disposal that could possibly give me a chance against a monster like Nikita Zakharov?

I resumed walking towards the venue, trailing in Nikita’s wake. True to my prediction, despite being late I arrived around the same time as most of the rest of the players. At least that put me one step closer to being like a pro. When I walked up to the crowd of people, I heard some scattered snickering, and I was pretty sure I heard one person whisper something to somebody else about the “King of Hearts”. I ignored this as best I could and looked for my seating assignment on the board where they were posted. To my surprise I realized that I was at the feature table. I moved my eyes from the list which displayed table one next to my name, and towards a diagram of the tables with they players names marked on their seats. I began looking at those names, and the farther I got the more dire my situation seemed.

At the first seat to the left of the dealer was the Polish Terminator, Marek Kalinski. Next to him was Robert Terrence, an American from the midwest who was known for being completely unpredictable as a player, partially due to his habit of consuming a good bit of alcohol while he played. The third seat was some Estonian player I didn’t recognize but the fourth seat belonged to the terrifying Danni Romano. A formidable player from Brazil, Danni was the highest-earning woman in the world, and she still maintained a sizeable lead on Alva despite Alva being one of the most promising rising stars. Next to her was even more bad news, although for a totally different reason. Lucas Carlier, back with his second bullet, would be sitting in the fifth seat. It was certainly not a prospect I was looking forward to. The sixth seat went to a French player I wasn’t familiar with. The seventh seat was myself, but it was the final eighth seat that terrified me most of all. I read the name, then reread it, hoping that my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was no good. No matter how much I didn’t want it to be true, the name remained there in front of me in unchanging black and white.

I was assigned to sit next to Alva Lorensen.