[Beauty Farmers] BEAUTY WORLD DUBAI 2023

It all started because of my terrible sleep schedule and a documentary about deep-sea creatures. I was up at 2 AM, my brain buzzing with facts about anglerfish, and I just couldn't switch off. Scrolling through my phone felt pointless, and that’s when I saw an ad, tucked away in the corner of a sports news site. It was for sky247 cricket. Now, I’m not a gambler. The thought of putting real money on a virtual spin of a wheel or a card hand always seemed a bit silly to me. But that night, out of sheer, unadulterated boredom, I clicked. I think I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. The website was surprisingly… normal. Not all flashy lights and loud noises like I’d imagined. It was clean, easy to navigate. I found the live dealer section, and that’s where I got stuck.

It was a blackjack table. The dealer was a woman named Anya, sitting in a studio that looked like a minimalist apartment in somewhere like Romania. She had a kind, patient smile. There were two other players already there, their usernames showing at the table. I fumbled around, found the registration, and deposited what I considered my “entertainment budget” for the week – the fifty bucks I might have spent on a couple of takeout pizzas and a movie. I bought in for the minimum, my heart doing a little nervous flutter as the cards were dealt. My first hand was a nineteen. Anya had a five showing. I stood, my cursor hovering over the button as if my virtual stare could influence her hole card. It was a king. She drew a ten. Bust. Just like that, my twenty-dollar bet became forty. A little jolt, like a static shock, went through me. It wasn’t about the money; it was the sheer, unexpected success.

For the next hour, I was in this weird, focused bubble. The only sounds were the soft shuffle of the digital cards, Anya’s calm voice saying, “Place your bets, please,” and the hum of my refrigerator from the kitchen. I wasn’t thinking about work, or bills, or the weird existential dread that sometimes creeps in at 3 AM. I was just thinking about hitting or standing. I went on a little run. My fifty dollars became a hundred and twenty. I felt like a genius. This was easy! Why didn’t everyone do this? Then, of course, reality, or rather, probability, reasserted itself. I lost three hands in a row. Then a fourth. My digital chip stack started to shrink, and that cool, calculated feeling evaporated, replaced by a stubborn itch. I started doubling down on bad hands, trying to win it all back at once. It was stupid, and I knew it was stupid even as I was clicking the buttons. Within twenty minutes, I was down to my last ten dollars.

I leaned back in my chair, the glow of the monitor the only light in the room. I felt like an idiot. I’d just blown forty bucks in a fit of impulsiveness. I was about to close the tab, write the whole thing off as a lesson learned, when I decided to just play the last ten. No overthinking. I got a pair of eights. The basic strategy chart I’d glanced at earlier said to split them. So I did. It felt like a Hail Mary. On the first eight, I got a three. Eleven. I doubled down. An ace. Blackjack. On the second eight, I got a two. Ten. I stood. Anya had a six showing. She drew a card… a ten. Sixteen. She drew again. A five. Twenty-one. She beat my second hand, but the first one, the blackjack, paid out three to two. That last, desperate ten-dollar bet had just brought me back to almost even.

I cashed out right then and there. My balance was forty-eight dollars. I’d essentially lost two dollars for two hours of what was, in hindsight, pretty intense entertainment. I closed the laptop and finally felt tired. The whole experience was a rollercoaster contained within my small apartment. The initial thrill, the false confidence, the crushing stupidity of the losing streak, and the sheer, dumb luck of the final hand. It wasn’t a life-changing win, but it taught me more about myself than I expected. I learned that I have a competitive streak, and a pretty bad one when it’s triggered. I learned that luck is a fickle thing, and that the house always has the edge, but sometimes, just sometimes, you can sneak away with your dignity and almost all your pizza money intact. I never went back to that site, or any other. But sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think about Anya the dealer, and that pair of eights, and I smile. It was a weird, expensive, and ultimately cheap lesson, all at the same time.