After that disappointing loss, I folded the next few hands, neither having cards that were worth playing nor the will to jump back into the action until I had figured out what steps I needed to take to shore up the holes in my game. I was having to learn this on the fly, and thankfully the blinds system allowed me to pull back and take some time to think. Even though I was taking a break myself, however, the other players were very much pressing onward at full speed. Only a couple of hands after my loss to Robert, Danni and Marek squared off in a particularly heated battle.

The betting had started out simple enough. Danni was the big blind and Marek was the only player to call her. When the flop revealed the deuce of hearts, king of clubs, and nine of clubs, however, the real betting began. Danni checked to Marek, who placed a bet of nearly a hundred thousand chips. Chips were starting to accumulate as players busted out, and the stacks were getting bigger, but this was still a very significant bet. Danni thought for a second, then called. The card for the turn was the king of spades, pairing the board. Danni checked again, but this time when Marek bet she raised him. Did she have a king in the pocket by any chance? If she did this turn was phenomenal for her. Marek seemed to be considering this too. Not that his expression changed of course, he was as much of an emotionless automaton as ever, but the pause he took before finally deciding to call was quite lengthy. Nonetheless, call he did, and the dealer burned a card and went to the river.

The river card turned out to be the jack of clubs, and this complicated things immensely. With the addition of a third club to the board, it was now entirely possible that either player might have a flush with two clubs in the pocket. The possibility was significantly reduced for Danni, however, since she was already representing a king. After all, the king of clubs was already on the board, which meant that if she had a king in the pocket then it could not possibly be a club. Therefore, with a king it would be impossible to have the two clubs she would need to complete the flush. For Marek, however? Who knew what he had? He might have been trying to draw into a flush from the very beginning. Danni wisely decided to check again. She wasn’t about to run out a bet into Marek’s unknown hand without gathering at least a little information first.

Without skipping a beat, Marek slid a bet of two hundred thousand chips into the middle and continued to stare straight ahead, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses. Now it fell to Danni to determine how this silent battle between the two least talkative but most terrifying players at the table was going to end. She stared Marek down, searching for clues. I thought for sure she was wasting her time. Trying to read body language was a trick that only worked on humans, and I was starting to become convinced that Marek’s nickname of “the Polish terminator” was not an exaggeration. If I had been told that he was an actual robot from the future, that information would not have surprised me in the slightest.

Danni stared Marek down for a good minute, trying to figure out if he had the flush. I was reminded of when I had watched the video of Alva in a similar situation. She had managed to get the read then. Would Danni be able to pull of a similar feat in much more difficult circumstances? I caught myself holding my breath as the seconds dragged on. If the hands didn’t get revealed on this play I knew for sure I would have to watch back through the tournament coverage later on the internet to satiate my curiosity as to who really would have won. As luck would have it, however, that didn’t turn out to be necessary. Danni called the bet, and Marek revealed his pocket cards. They were suited all right, but not in clubs. He was holding the jack and nine of hearts which meant that he had two pair, kings over jacks. His nine may have paired the nine on the board, but in Texas Hold’Em a player only gets to take the best five cards to form their hand, no more and no less. Three pair, therefore, is not a hand that exists. Marek’s hand was mediocre at best with such a loaded board. He had clearly been bluffing the flush, but somehow, using some tell so small that I could never have hoped to see it myself, Danni Romano had managed to call him on it. The woman had to be some kind of superhuman.

Danni turned up the king of hearts and the six of diamonds, showing that she hadn’t been bluffing about the three of a kind. The large pot went straight to her pile, taking a large chunk of the second-largest stack at the table and adding it to the first. I took a brief glance around the room. Was Danni now the largest stack in the tournament? I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed likely. Danni finished adding the new chips to her impressive collection muttering to herself “Ele sempre contrai aquele músculo pequeno no pescoço quando ele não o tem” as she did so. I didn’t have the slightest clue what she was saying, but the word músculo jumped out at me. Had Marek twitched a muscle? Had that been what tipped Danni off? I certainly hadn’t seen it. This woman was an absolute juggernaut, and if she had done something like this to the impassive Marek Kalinski then Alva, who was clearly her real target, didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against her, at least not in her current state.

I glanced over to Alva to see how she was doing. She was looking over at Danni with an expression on her face that I couldn’t identify. Was it respect? Frustration? Sadness? I wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling, but whatever it was she was feeling an awful lot of it. Danni Romano was standing at the top of the hill where Alva wanted to climb, but right now, when her goal was standing before her and Alva needed to bring her “A” game she was instead stumbling at the starting gate. Might Alva’s constant smile have succeeded where Marek’s impassive neutrality could not? It was hard to say, but the further ahead the Brazilian woman pulled, the less likely it seemed that we would ever find out. If I wanted to find a way to improve Alva’s spirits it would have to be sooner rather than later.

“Hey, are you doing alright?” I asked Alva. “Something seems to be bothering you.”

“It’s nothing, I’m just having an off day.”

“Is it me? You won’t offend me if you say yes,” I coaxed.

“No, it’s not you. Like I said, It’s just one of those days.”

I didn’t see this line of questioning going anywhere, so I tried a different approach. “I hope you start to feel better,” I told her. “I’ve seen videos of you at your best. I’m sure you could really do a number on Danni once you’re back to your usual self.”

“I don’t know about that, but I’m happy you think so.” there was the smile again, so beautiful yet so brief, popping its head out just for one moment before returning to cover. “Danni is a force to be reckoned with. She’s not just the highest-earning female in the world, but she’s fourth overall. No woman has ever climbed that high before, and frankly I’d imagine she’d be even higher still if the top three weren’t such absolute forces of nature.”

“Maybe that’s true,” I conceded, “but you’re something of a force of nature yourself. Some of the hands I’ve seen you play were downright inspirational. The way you always face stressful situations with a smile is incredible! I’ve never seen a player who can be so unreadable and still have so much emotion on their face!”

“What you’re not seeing behind all that is just how anxious I usually feel,” she pointed out.

“Well, you’ve never let that show before. What’s changed?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always managed to feel happy about what I’m doing even when I’m anxious. I guess… maybe there’s an upper limit to that? Facing Danni is a whole different level. Yeah, maybe that’s it.”

I wasn’t quite sure I was convinced by that. I was pretty sure Danni and Alva had been seated at a table before. It was hard to be such high-profile players and avoid each other, so their paths must have occasionally crossed in the past. Still, I decided to take Alva at her word. If she didn’t want me to pry any further I wouldn’t. I owed her that much. Still, I couldn’t just leave things where they were.

“I think you can take her,” I said, “The Alva Lorensen I know can’t be stopped just by having a bad day!”

“Maybe you’re right. She’s just another player, just like everyone else.” Some amount of Alva’s smile returned. It wasn’t the full-on radiant smile that she usually wore, but it was heading in the right direction. It made me happier to see her happier. I didn’t know if it would be enough to beat Danni, but one could only hope.

On the very next hand, Alva looked at her cards and decided to get in on the action. While we had been talking, the button had been making its way around so that Robert was now the big blind. He seemed to have reached a plateau of inebriation and was maintaining a holding pattern. Danni called him, and Alva followed up with a call of her own. The flop came down, and the dealer spread the ace of hearts, the nine of spades, and the ten of clubs out on the table. Robert placed a fairly small bet of thirty thousand. He probably should have checked, but he was well and truly under the influence now. Danni called, but Alva raised all in. With a stack as small as hers it wasn’t so much that it was outside the boundaries of reason for either of the other players to just go ahead and call her. Robert, however, folded after about fifteen seconds of what might either have been going into the tank or trying to get his stomach to settle. Maybe both.

Danni looked at Alva’s weakened smile. It may not have been the full effort, but at the very least I couldn’t glean anything from it. I had no idea if Alva actually had anything or not. For all I knew she might be attempting a similar kind of bluff to what I had pulled off at the start of the day. It was more than me that Alva was going to have to face, however. She would have to overcome Danni’s searching gaze. Of course, Danni did have the option to take risks here. She could call all-ins from Alva several times over at this point, so Alva needed every little edge she could get over the formidable woman. Finally, after going into the tank for a good thirty seconds, Danni decided to call.

The hands went to the dealer who turned them face up. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the news was good. While Danni was holding the ace of spades and the eight of clubs, giving her a pair of aces, Alva had an ace of her own in the ace of diamonds, as well as a nine of hearts giving her two pair. The turn was the seven of spades, which meant that Danni’s only hope was to draw into either a six or a jack to give her the straight. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was enough that I was gripping the side of the table and sitting at the edge of my seat.

“Come on, Alva, you’ve got this!” I whispered under my breath.

The dealer burned the final card, then got ready to pull the river off the top of the deck. I held my breath, waiting to see what the final card would be. The dealer turned it face up on the board, and there I saw it: The six of hearts. Danni had won with a six-through-ten straight.

I was shocked. My brain tried to process this. Had Alva just been… busted? And all without being able to defeat Danni in even a single hand? I looked at Alva, and to my amazement I saw the one thing I had never expected to see in this situation: Her smile had returned. Not the partial smile she’d had before, but the perfect smile that I knew and loved, the same one she had turned on me in the pub on that night which now seemed like an eternity ago.

“Well, this has been fun. Goodbye everyone,” she said as she gathered her things and stood up from the table. “Thanks for the pep talk, Bryson,” she whispered to me as she walked away and out the door of the ballroom.

I watched after her as she left, and I found myself wondering just what was happening here. What had caused the sudden change in expression? That had been Alva’s genuine smile for sure. If there was one thing I had learned today it was that Alva didn’t and quite possibly couldn’t fake emotions, so she wasn’t just putting on a brave face after losing. She seemed relieved to have been busted from the table. Was it because she didn’t have to sit next to me anymore? Just because she couldn’t lie with her emotions didn’t mean she couldn’t lie with her words. Maybe she hadn’t really forgiven me after all. Had she really still been angry with me? Was it something else? I wasn’t sure, but whatever it was didn’t sit right with me. One thing I was fairly certain of, however. I didn’t believe it had quite so much to do with her rivalry with Danni Romano as Alva was letting on.