Martingale

Look at a flowerbed of geraniums set in a Monte Carlo lawn and close your eyes, you’ll see the lawn red and the geraniums green. It concerns a variant: obtain a negative of the playing surface and the numbers, liberate the numbers, sort them out, put them in order one by one, add them up in such a way that they make a slip which, passing through zero, forms a running knot and allows, caught by the nearest extremity of red, with a terrible cowboy gesture, in which success consists, the trapping of a chance at just one coup. A set of calculations so rapid that no-one, except in the form of a vertigo imputable to the anguish of the game, can perceive it.

What happened? When he made up his mind, closed his eyes and played, the man, an instantaneous victim of a broken-propeller disaster in full flight, of cutting slips, supernatural explosions, bursting keychains, fell, strangled cleanly.

Nothing save his fall on the table in the pose of a smacked child could be seen, except for me (who alone had played zero and won) the bent circle of the number resuming little by little its curve like an old tennis ball someone has pressed his finger in.

Jean Cocteau