Her Lucky Charm - Cassie Cole Page 0,1

lasted three seconds or three minutes—time stopped making sense while our lips moved against each other.

And when the kiss finally ended, our faces remained close. His strong nose brushed against mine, and for a few seconds the only thing in my vision were his swoony emerald eyes.

Most of the girls I knew hated their first kisses. I was lucky enough to have had the perfect one.

I majored in Statistics in college. Looking back on it, I think I was trying to find an explanation for my luck. The right mathematic formula to explain why I was the way I was. Because by then it wasn’t just a silly quirk: it was a phenomenon I couldn’t ignore. I was lucky, to the point of absurdity.

My college hosted bingo in the student center on Friday and Saturday nights. It was an attempt to keep horny students from going to parties and hooking up, but for me it was an opportunity to make some extra cash. The prize for each game was twenty dollars on your student account. Even though there were a hundred other students playing, I won every fourth or fifth game. On a good night I would walk away with a couple hundred bucks added to my account.

After three weeks, the bingo coordinator accused me of cheating. They thought I was bringing my own bingo boards and printing the winning numbers after they were called. Even though they couldn’t prove it, they banned me from bingo nights.

I switched to lotteries after that. Every afternoon on the way back from class I would stop by Vijay Mahajan’s convenience store and buy five scratchers and a Powerball ticket. I usually walked away with around twenty bucks of profit from the scratchers, but the Powerball was the real moneymaker. I never won the big prize, but I usually got a few of the numbers right. Three numbers plus the Powerball (or four numbers without it) would net me five hundred bucks on a 5X Power Play. Easy money for a broke college student.

I didn’t have any long-term relationships in college, but I did my fair share of kissing. More than kissing too, depending on my mood.

But nothing compared to that first kiss with Roman.

I started toying around with online poker. I played with two accounts on different computers, which allowed me to control two seats at the digital table instead of one. It was easier to manipulate the table wagering that way.

Of course, I didn’t need that edge because I had luck on my side. When I started off, I was playing an hour every night while watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Within a month I was spending six hours a day in front of the screen.

That fattened my bank account in a way lottery tickets couldn’t compete with. I was making a salary playing poker at night when I should have been studying.

Online poker led me to sports gambling. The problem with poker was that I had to sit and play it the entire time. It felt like a job, clocking in and out. Gambling on sports was more hands-off. Once my wager was placed, there was nothing to do but watch and wait. I kept my bets simple, but I was good at it. The best sports gamblers in the world maybe won sixty percent of their bets. I surpassed that with ease. When I did a little research, I came close to winning three out of every four bets.

Eventually I was making so much money that completing my degree seemed pointless. My parents were crestfallen when I dropped out. I paid them back for those first two years of tuition, plus seven percent interest. That softened the blow of their baby girl dropping out.

Once that was done, I did the cliché thing for a professional gambler: I moved to Las Vegas, the city of sin. I rented an apartment within walking distance of the strip and I spent my days at the casino. I treated it like a job. Eight hours a day, never taking part in the free drinks the casino gave out.

Casinos were diligent about identifying people who won too much, since they were bad for business. Because of this, I spent a lot of time entering poker tournaments. Winning money off other guests. This gave me some credibility at the casino to the point that I could focus on what earned the real money.

Sports gambling.

I spent a lot of time at the Sportsbook, which was the