GoGoRummy: Ten Points against His Own Name

1. GoGoRummy — The Cup with the Loose Handle

The handle came away before the trophy reached the floor. Vikas stood in the corridor outside the disciplinary hearing with the broken piece in his fist. Through the open door, people could still see the photograph used on his exhibition poster: chin raised, three cards spread, a winner's smile he had rehearsed in a mirror.

Suhail walked past without looking at the cup. “You could have learned the game,” he said.

Vikas had helped arrange exhibition results and presented them as proof of his skill. When the evidence came out, he first blamed the organiser, then the atmosphere, then a misunderstanding. At the hearing, the other participant's account and Vikas's own messages stripped those explanations away. He admitted what he had done. The fictional Jaipur circuit imposed a two-year suspension under its published disciplinary process.

His sister Revati had printed programmes for those exhibitions after work. She put an unopened bundle on his dining table. “You let me tell people to come.”

At thirty-five, Vikas was old enough to hear exactly what she meant. He said sorry. She left the bundle where it was.

For two years the damaged cup remained behind a cupboard door. He worked at a small printing counter, trimmed other people's certificates and stopped attending the practice room. On the day his suspension ended, he took his eligibility letter there. Someone asked whether the cards had received their instructions yet. Four people laughed. Vikas nearly turned around.

2. The Seat Beside the Window

Leena was setting out a practice table by the window. She had played against him before the exhibitions and beaten him often enough to recognise how much of his new reputation had been false. She did not offer a welcoming speech.

“If you want a seat, shuffle.”

He lost the first practice deal with an expensive collection of court cards and no pure sequence. In the second, he rearranged a joker between groups until he forgot which physical cards he actually held. He announced readiness, checked again and found fourteen cards after his draw, with no discard that left a valid thirteen-card hand.

Leena stopped him before he made a false declaration. “Put down the hand as it was. We are keeping this one.”

She drew thirteen boxes on a sheet. Vikas wrote each card in its own box. Then he tried the arrangements again without borrowing the same card twice. The impressive-looking groups collapsed. He could complete one sequence, or improve a set, but the cards did not support all his claims together.

A man passing the window raised his phone. Vikas reached to cover the sheet. Leena waited.

Slowly he moved his arm. The unfinished hand stayed visible to their practice group. That evening he wrote his first page of notes without a victory at the top. Revati saw it while collecting a parcel. She read the first line, “No pure sequence, wrong assessment,” and returned it without comment.

3. Practice without a Selected Ending

For eight weeks he played full practice sessions against people who could beat him. Leena kept the rotation open. Nobody was assigned to make his return look promising. On difficult evenings, Vikas heard the familiar urge to leave after one attractive win. He remained for the next deal and frequently lost it.

They reviewed his discards before looking at later draws. That prevented him from calling a poor decision brilliant merely because a helpful card eventually appeared. When a choice depended on an opponent's earlier pickup, he recorded the pickup and what it suggested, followed by what it did not establish.

One exercise was especially uncomfortable. Leena gave him a hand with two good sequences, an awkward pair and several isolated cards. He had to state which single draws would make a declaration possible. Then she changed one card. He had to calculate again, rather than repeat an answer he liked.

They also scored unfinished hands in more than one arrangement. A joker placed inside a long sequence might later save more penalty in a set, provided the remaining cards still satisfied the sequence requirements. Vikas counted actual cards, checked the pure sequence and compared the entire hand.

He took the poorest pages home. Revati eventually sat opposite him for ten minutes while he explained one mistake. When he began describing how badly another player had behaved, she tapped the unfinished card diagram. He returned to that.

4. A Result Nobody Had to Accept on Trust

His first sanctioned return was an open qualifier, entered through the ordinary registration desk after the organiser verified his completed suspension. His name appeared without a special introduction. Two spectators left when his table was announced. Suhail stayed, although they were assigned to different tables.

Vikas lost his opening deal. On the next, he discarded a high isolated queen while retaining two low cards that could work together. The queen would have fitted a later draw. He felt the old itch to describe the discard as a terrible mistake. His notes, written at the time, showed why the choice had been reasonable without knowledge of that draw.

He won two deals later in the session, then survived a difficult last hand by reducing his penalty. The complete standings put him in the championship final. The organiser posted every deal's result, including the losses.

Near the exit, Naren, who had helped organise the old exhibitions, congratulated him with an arm across his shoulders. “One good photograph. We can make people forget.”

Vikas stepped out from under the arm. “The score sheet is on the board.”

He did not supply a smiling photograph. Naren called him ungrateful. Outside, Vikas sat on the low wall until his breathing settled, then went back to copy the last hand. He had overlooked a safer arrangement before the opponent's declaration. Qualification did not make that calculation unnecessary.

5. Three Chairs, Eight Deals

The final used a published eight-deal, three-player points format. Each deal's winner received zero penalty; the others were assessed on their unfinished hands under the announced rules. Lowest cumulative penalty after eight deals would take the championship. Vikas faced Suhail and Charu, a patient player who rarely let an untidy hand become an expensive one.

No partner sat beside him. Leena watched from beyond the playing barrier. The scorer displayed the running totals between deals, and the director handled questions before play resumed.

Vikas paid eighteen points in the first deal, then declared correctly in the second. Suhail checked the exposed groups with the same attention he gave Charu's hands. He neither accused Vikas without cause nor hurried past the verification.

In the third, Vikas kept a speculative connection one turn too long and took twenty-two points. He could hear somebody behind him whisper the word “exhibition”. He asked the director to address the disturbance, waited for the room to settle and continued.

The fourth deal was his best so far. He preserved a natural sequence, abandoned a pair that was costing him flexibility and rebuilt around an available suited connection. When he declared, all thirteen cards belonged to valid groups. Charu nodded at the arrangement before gathering her own cards for assessment.

Vikas wrote zero in the fourth row. This time the little circle on the page referred to a hand everyone at the table had seen.

6. The Price of Staying at the Table

The next two deals gave him no smooth ascent. He took thirty-one points in the fifth after keeping too much unfinished value. In the sixth, Suhail's declaration stopped him with twenty-seven. Vikas had to place the cards face up and hear the assessment while the room watched.

He did not argue that one more turn would have made him brilliant. He asked to see the arithmetic, confirmed it and signed the row. During the break he studied the fifth hand, where he had protected an attractive pair at the expense of reducing four disconnected cards.

Charu passed him on the way to the water table. “You were ready to release that pair. Then you looked at the audience.”

He remembered. Someone had moved closer. He had wanted an elegant finish they could admire.

In the seventh deal he returned his attention to the cards much earlier. It still did not produce a win. When play ended, his best valid grouping left Q♣, 8♦ and 2♣ unmatched: ten, eight and two points. The scorer recorded twenty for that deal.

His seven results were now 18, 0, 22, 0, 31, 27 and 20. Suhail's cumulative penalty stood at 112, Charu's at 121. Vikas added his own column while the officials prepared the last deal. The total announced beside his name was 108.

His pencil stopped. He added the seven figures again. They made 118.

7. Ten Points against Himself

“Please check my total,” Vikas said.

The scorer leaned over the sheet. “The last hand was twenty.”

“Yes. The hand is right. The addition is ten short.”

For a moment the room seemed to lean towards him. On the displayed figures he was leading. On the actual figures he was six points behind Suhail and three ahead of Charu. The director checked each signed row and corrected the cumulative total to 118 before the next shuffle.

Someone at the rear said that a man could perform honesty too. Vikas heard it. His hands grew cold around the pencil. He wanted to turn and describe every miserable practice evening, every door that had closed. Instead he placed the corrected sheet flat and signed beside the adjustment.

Suhail inspected the seven rows. “One hundred and eighteen,” he confirmed. Then he cut the shuffled pack when the dealer offered it.

The director announced the corrected standings to the room. There was no applause. Vikas preferred the ordinary sound of the cards being dealt. He separated suits, counted thirteen and checked the wild rank for the hand: aces, with printed jokers also available under the event rules.

His first useful group was four hearts, 8♥, 9♥, 10♥ and J♥. He stopped looking at the scoreboard. Six points behind was a problem for the whole deal, not a reason to invent a card.

8. The Discard Suhail Took

Alongside the hearts, Vikas held 5♣, 6♣, 7♣, a printed joker and 9♣. The joker could stand for 8♣. His other cards were K♣, K♦, 2♦ and 4♠. He had a pure sequence and another sequence already, but the remaining cards were not a valid group. Arranging them neatly did not change that.

A closed draw brought Q♥. He extended the hearts to five and discarded the isolated 4♠. Now a suitable king could finish the set; an 8♣ could make the clubs natural and release the joker for the kings. He kept both possibilities in mind. Nothing about either possibility told him what the closed pile would supply.

Suhail picked up 9♦ from an exposed discard during the next passage of play. Vikas noted it. When his own next closed draw was 10♦, the card felt dangerous to release. It could help Suhail's diamond connection. Keeping it, however, would mean damaging his own useful structure or retaining extra unfinished value.

He compared the cards actually in his hand. He discarded 10♦.

Suhail took it immediately. A chair scraped behind the barrier. Vikas's stomach tightened, but Suhail still had work to do; he discarded rather than declared. Charu took her turn, studying her own cards without giving either man reassurance.

Vikas's exposed discard had helped his opponent. The next turn was still his to play. He reached for the closed pile with the same hand that had once covered his practice mistakes.

9. Thirteen Cards in the Open

The card was K♠.

Vikas did not move straight to the declaration. He counted the hand after the draw, found fourteen, and separated the 2♦ that could be discarded. His remaining groups contained five hearts, five clubs and three kings. He counted again without moving any card from one group into another.

Then he discarded 2♦ and made the declaration through the announced procedure.

The hearts lay in a single natural line: 8♥, 9♥, 10♥, J♥, Q♥. The clubs read 5♣, 6♣, 7♣, printed joker, 9♣, with the joker representing 8♣. The last group was K♣, K♦, K♠, three kings of different suits. Thirteen cards, two sequences including a pure one, and a valid set.

The director checked the groups. Charu leaned forward, then sat back. Suhail studied the joker's place and the three king suits before he exposed his own unfinished hand.

The 10♦ he had picked up had helped him complete a diamond run. It had not finished everything. His best permitted grouping still left 6♠ and 10♠ unmatched, worth sixteen points. Charu's remaining 3♦ and 5♦ cost eight.

The final figures appeared one at a time: Vikas 118, Suhail 128, Charu 129.

Vikas looked first at the corrected seven-deal total, then at the new zero beside it. The ten-point championship margin remained after the earlier ten-point error had been removed. Across the table, Suhail pushed the score sheet towards him. “Sign your result.”

10. A Different Object on the Shelf

Vikas signed. The applause began near Charu's side of the room and spread. He could see Leena standing behind the barrier with both hands raised, clapping. Revati was beside her, still wearing the lanyard from her afternoon shift.

At the presentation, Vikas answered the question about his return without blaming Naren or inventing an innocent past. “I served the suspension. I practised. These are today's complete results.” He held up the sheet, including the rows marked thirty-one and twenty-seven.

Suhail accepted his offered hand. “Bring the fifth deal on Sunday,” he said. “There was a point where you made it worse.”

Vikas laughed, unexpectedly and hard enough that his eyes stung. “I know the point.”

“Then bring the cards as well.”

At home, Revati opened the cupboard while he cleared the dining table. She set the old broken cup beside him. He wrapped it, put the exhibition programmes with it and closed the carton. Nothing from that bundle went back on display.

The championship score sheet fitted inside an ordinary frame from the printing counter. Vikas placed it on the shelf, the corrected 118 clearly visible. His new trophy stood beside it with both handles intact.

On Sunday he reached the practice room early. Suhail had already taken the window seat. Vikas set out the fifth deal, including all four disconnected cards he had wanted to forget, and pulled up the chair opposite him.