Perhaps she didn't get enough sleep, then. She'll refrain from thinking of the young miss as a lazy good-for-nothing for the time being.

The sole outfit in the wardrobe is a cerulean dress with horizontal stripes of black lace. Stephanie has helpfully included a pair of closed-back slippers and a spiral hairpin with a cabochon ornament on the end, which will hopefully keep Shiro from wandering about the castle barefoot with her hair flying in the breeze.

"Let's not waste any more— my goodness."

Shiro is out of bed and already eating the last of her stashed cereal bars. If she overslept she's going straight to the casino, no detour to the kitchens.

Lazy and unmannerly. Well, at least she isn't getting crumbs on the ball gown. Fayette waits for Shiro to finish eating before dressing her, a job which she quickly learns requires two people because of who Shiro is as a person rather than the complexity of the garment in question.

Ooh, she's having her hair done up! Shiro does this approximately never, although she's not averse to it. Once it's styled, the maid threads an unusual metal implement in the shape of a double helix into her bun to hold it in place.

"Do you not have… hairpins made of elastic metal that hold themselves closed?" she asks, fumbling for the right words.

"That sounds clever. Can't say I've seen one."

They're going to have to delegate a lot of things if they want to get any of them done, but one of the things Shiro will be delegating is the invention of the bobby pin.

"Thank you," she says, once she's presentable. "Let's go steal some blinds."

The tournament is well underway. The sounds of it drift up from the great hall, where hundreds of humans are playing hold 'em and many more are spectating.

Tables are limited to six players at a time, although half of the tables only have five players as people get up to switch seats, visit the garderobe, or simply take a break from losing chips. Men and women in four-colored livery wander the aisles between the tables with plates of hors d'oeuvres and drinks, offering them to players.

At one end of the great hall is a dais with two unoccupied thrones, and upon one of those thrones rests a golden crown. The specter of the former king looms over the great hall, reminding everyone of the stakes involved.

Emerging from the staircase, the first thing Shiro notices is that the floor doesn't have any dealers. The players in the dealer position are personally shuffling and dealing the cards, rotating clockwise with each hand.

There is a reason that professional tournaments use dealer buttons and have employees handle the cards! Shiro doesn't know whether this is customary for Disboardian poker tournaments or simply a quirk of this one, but either way it's disappointing.

The second thing Shiro notices is Sora.

Sora is not playing poker. He's standing on the raised landing where the castellan accepted their signature, surrounded by a gaggle of people who are laughing uproariously at something he's just said. He's wearing white and gold today, a red boutonnière pinned to his breast, and overall he looks remarkably dashing for someone who is still technically a NEET.

Juno is there too, one hand laid casually on Sora's forearm and the other holding a glass. Stephanie is presumably already at work. None of the others looks familiar.

"There you are!" Sora calls out once he's spotted his sister.

Yep, here she is. She waves with the hand that isn't holding her chip stack.

"My sister is playing," he says excitedly, directing his comment at one of the people surrounding him. "Just arrived yesterday for the event, met the princess on the way in! There's plenty to see in this city, but that'll have to wait for later, eh?"

He gestures at the crowd, and the people around him nod.

"Good luck, kid!" Juno shouts.

That's enough information. Shiro picks one of the tables that Sora thinks is soft and approaches it.

Poker is a game of variance. As Sora so astutely mentioned the day before, it's eminently possible to win hands where the odds are against you, and that makes it challenging to achieve a win rate consistent with your skill level. The way to resolve this is to beat down unskilled opponents early in the tournament, take their chips, and use the cushion of resources to survive luck going against you now and then. Las Vegas would've arranged for all the strong players to start at different tables, but Shiro will have to make do with Sora's assessment.

Not that she's worried.

There's action at the table. The man in the cutoff makes an enormous 3-bet and everyone else folds. He rakes in the blinds and the initial bet from the hijack, then flips over the two and three of spades to the dismay of everyone else.

All right.

The deal passes. The new dealer has twice as many green chips as anyone else at the table but roughly the same amount of the other ones. The green chips are worth 25, the kind you'd use to pay the blinds. He's opening with a wider range and getting folds.

All right.

The first player to act picks his cards up, incidentally flashing them to anyone who cares to look. He has the queen and ten of diamonds. He waffles for moment, then folds.

All right.

The hand folds around to the dealer, who raises by 250 and gets no callers.

Shiro sits down in the empty seat to the left of the big blind, just in time to start. She racks up her chips on the side of the table and tosses two green ones into the pot.

"Deal me in."

How old is this girl, seven? Sure, whatever. There's no rule that says a kid can't play poker. The table is now full – place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

The first thing to consider, even before you look at your cards, is positioning. As Stephanie learned yesterday afternoon, acting later in the round is more advantageous than acting earlier. The later you can bet in the round, the more information you have about your opponents. As the big blind, Shiro goes last and will therefore have an idea of what everyone else is thinking before she bets.

So it's unfortunate that the player directly to her left, who is the first to play once again by virtue of someone else joining the table, looks at his cards and immediately open raises to 400. The player with the tall stack of green chips calls, and Shiro (nine-five offsuit) makes an easy fold.

The flop comes ace-king-seven, the first player makes an even bigger raise to 1450, and the other man folds.

Later positions can profitably bet with a wider variety of hands. Early players are wise to only play with strong cards that are statistically likely to win against any caller, while late players can see when the early players are weak and get into the action with cards that need more luck to succeed but are progressively less likely to get called.

The small blind is still a relatively late position, so when Shiro wakes up with the queen and jack of clubs on her second hand she has more than enough ammunition to start winning chips.

The cutoff raises by 75, bringing the pot to 150. The dealer folds.

Shiro calls, bringing it to 200.

If the first lesson is position, the second lesson is range. Like the ratio of kings to jacks in Stephanie's game, skilled players use a mix of hands in different situations to avoid being completely transparent to their opponents. Only betting strong cards and always folding weak cards is a good way to telegraph your thought process to anyone paying attention.

Shiro does not think this guy is paying attention. Furthermore, the opposite of a bad strategy is not automatically a good strategy. From the shape of his chip stack, he hasn't figured out how to fold bad cards before the flop yet. That's all right – she's happy to teach him.

The big blind folds. The flop is the seven of diamonds, two of clubs, and nine of clubs.