Luke, around the world.

I am standing in front of the Banco Casino in Bratislava and the blood is rushing to my head. There was a time, not so long ago, when I believed my destiny was in the cards. It’s not that my future could be deduced from reading them, I was not the despondent Robert Ford trying to predict his fate in every king or jack… but still, all the full houses and flushes and top pairs top kickers were supposed to send me off on a stochastic walk that one day, one night, might make me a reasonably wealthy person. I invested many years and hundreds of thousands of hands both live and online to gain a small edge, to try to establish my identity as a shark and not a low-buy-in fish with a dream, to move up the stakes and perhaps one day play with the greats, with Holz or Astedt or Rolle…

All for nought.

I think I understood the game well, I was a solid if a bit passive player. I had a few live deep runs, countless more online, but at some point my interest in the game all but petered out, my head hurt, my back hurt, I became jaded. The realization that I might have taken up no-limit Texas hold ’em too late to have any shot at becoming the next whizz-kid in a long succession of formidable names, it hit me hard. And then there was the inability to juggle my moderately successful career in the casino industry with my insane dream of living on the other side of the fence, not as a corporate worker, but as a player. Last but not least, there’s a very thin line between skill-based genius and degenerate gambling, and it’s sometimes hard to know which is which, am I spewing or am I a victim of variance? A single coin flip can decide whether you get doomed to oblivion or become a celebrated card sharp.

It’s interesting to observe how a dream decays. Here I am, enchanted by the casino name I have heard so many times. Perhaps there is a series happening soon, maybe even the Polish Cup, exiled south by inexplicable decisions of my country’s lawmakers. If nothing big is happening, there is always the regular schedule, twenty or thirty euros is all it takes, and I could be right back at the tables, taking a shy peek at my hole cards to see the rockets or, quite the contrary, a deuce seven offsuit. Life could be simple once more, constrained by the setup of the current hand, and as long as I had a chip and a chair, I could start anew once the deck was shuffled and dealt again.

That’s not why I came to Bratislava, though. A Balatro run is as close to poker as I want to get these days. Cards had to give way to something else, something that was actually possible to reach. Right now, the trip matters more, and so does the rest of Bratislava.

“It’s the most boring city I went to”, M reminisces about her hitchhiking trip, and she’s probably right. The city is the smallest capital of the European Union, and it only gained its status after the country of Czechoslovakia split at the beginning of 1993. A bit slow but undeniably charming, the city lives in the shadow of its Austrian neighbour Vienna. I start wondering how deep the rivalry goes (if at all!), maybe the entire world with its city-versus-city competition is fuelled by one and the same joke, the best thing you can buy in Bratislava is a bus ticket to Vienna, same old story, all the time.

It’s much hotter than two days earlier in Brno, but they are forecasting thunderstorms for the evening. In search of a sight to see, I stroll through the narrow streets of the historic centre, but I eventually escape its crowds and join a much sparser group at the the Blue Church of Saint Elizabeth. Some would say it’s an outrageous idea to cover a Christian temple in cerulean. But it looks so fresh in comparison to hundreds of other churches in limestone, beige, or brick-red. It’s a shame it’s closed, so the only way to take some pictures of the inside is to elbow my way to the front of the gate and hope I get a good angle, my upper limbs stretched to the maximum, almost praying to St. Elizabeth to help me avoid dropping the phone while I am awkwardly trying to take a picture of the azure pews.

On my way back to the Old Town I amble along the riverfront, seeing the so-called UFO tower marking the southern end of the SNP bridge. I have heard about the tower but I am never planning too far ahead, so I start squinting my eyes, wondering if there is any way to get up top. Is that a human? No, it can’t be, it’s probably a piece of fabric that got tangled in the wire mesh and is now fluttering in the wind… is it, though? I was wrong; it’s definitely a human being, so unless they parachuted precisely on top of the tower, there must be a way up.

There is an entrance, and in one of the pylons I find an elevator that soon takes me to the very peak of the tower. There’s a cafe inside a spaceship, and on top of it there’s a viewing terrace. The tower is 95 metres high; the neighboring pylon hosts a yearly stair-climbing competition. I look in the direction of Austria. While the experience is enjoyable, I already feel like Klimt and a walk in the Schonbrunn park.

Heading back to the hotel, somehow feeling the approaching thunderstorm in my bones, I realize that I have seen unusually many sculptures today. Many of them were nude figurines of goddesses or nymphs, but there was also the Posmievacik statue hiding in a wall recess along the Panska street, pointing his threateningly disproportionate erection at the passersby. The story of the figurine is unknown to me, but it looks like nobody wants to remove him; maybe they’re afraid, maybe he casts a safety spell on the city, a little mischievous satyr. Maybe he is at fault for making Bratislava a little boring; maybe, to keep the capital safe, that has been his plan all along.