TThe Gambit

• MLP: FiM
• Slice of Life
• Tragedy

Welcome to the world of chances, percentages, the luck of the draw. Name’s Card Counter, kid. Yours?

• Death
• Profanity
• OC
• Other

PearlescenT · 2.9k words  ·  26  2 · 553 views

Overview
Hi there everyone, today's review is PearlescenT's story The Gambit, an interesting and gripping one sided conversation about luck, probability, and the choices we make.

Now obviously this is gonna contain spoilers for the story, so don't look at this until you've read it! (Or do, if you like spoilers). Now then, onto the review!

The story starts with a stallion, a mister 'Card Counter', talking about a little filly walking out of a casino with her father. He explains his hatred of gamblers and how he 'messed with' the stallions slot machine to make him stop gambling. He talks a bit about probability and chances and its our first glimpse into how this strange talking stallion works.

The next couple sections goes into some technical magical explanations that I found very interesting, spell matrixes and how to change probability with magic, manipulating the fundamental power of luck with another fundamental. The two ways to change probability as described was fascinating; either think of what exactly you want to happen, or everything you don't want to. It's a relatively simple concept that ends up with the same result, but in the context of the universe established, it is powerful.

Card Counter tells a story about the worst luck he's ever seen, about a filly who loved to shoot arrows and forgot that what goes up, must come down. He was able to save her, but she was left scarred. He uses it as an important lesson about doing what you can to help, but knowing that you can't change everything. That lesson was a hard learned one by Card when we later hear the story of his wife, how they went casino from casino, twisting the machines and fixing the dice to make fortunes, and how when she was pregnant, she got cancer. He tried everything he could do to save her, tried to fix every probability in her favor, but it didn't work out.

"Lady Luck hates it when we tinker with her toys."

He knew it was punishment for pushing their luck too far, meddling too much, and paid the price.

The last sections of the story take on a lighter tone, with Card being proud and thankful to the mysterious student. In the last sentence however, we get her name. Luster Dawn, Princess Twilight's personal student in the epilogue of the series. Knowing that it was Luster re-contextualized the entire story for me, as what little we know of Luster is that she is much like Twilight was in season 1. It makes the lessons more impactful and increased my enjoyment of the story tenfold.

Who else might like this
People looking for a bit of a 'thinking' story, one that makes them look at their life a little differently perhaps. Fans of unusual narrative style and an interesting story that makes you go 'huh' would probably enjoy this too.

Note to the author
I loved this story during the contest and I was honored to lose to it, this was a really good one that made me think.