Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 472: 455: Are You Calling Yourself the Gambling God?

He knew this was his chance!

Since he was a kid, his old man had told him, “A person only gets two or three chances in their life to turn it around. If you seize them, you’ll reach the top; if you don’t, you’ll be a porter for the rest of your life.”

Although his old man used this as an excuse, he lost all of their family wealth and owed a massive amount of gambling debts, causing his mother to divorce him.

But his old man was tough, and he found that turning over a new leaf was hopeless. When some people started to harass his divorced wife and son, he reported the illegal gambling and brought the police to bust it.

The organizer of the casino got three years of imprisonment.

His old man got fifteenn days of administrative detention.

— Even that didn’t interfere with his normal army recruitment.

Later, his old man returned to the right track, not feeling ashamed of working as a porter and doing physical labor in a factory to start over.

After pursuing his former wife again for a long time, they finally remarried.

Cody had an unusual experience of witnessing the break-up and rebuilding of his family during his early years.

Given his experience, he should have avoided gambling like the plague.

But he was too young to understand all these things at the time, and his old man, after reforming, had no entertainment activities and thus led an inevitably dull life.

To cheer up her husband, his mother began playing cards with him at home. Along with Cody, the whole family participated in card games as their regular home entertainment.

Thus, Cody honed his card skills.

Although his father had set a bad example, Cody never even once thought of making money through gambling.

But who would have thought that his skills would actually come in handy here!

Cody even recalled the words his father said years ago and got the strong feeling—

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

So many people were eyeing the 80 live streaming spots on Cloud Dream Live Broadcast Platform, so why did he get one?

Why did Cloud Dream happen to hold such a large-scale card game?

Why did their live streaming platform clear all the gifts while keeping the followers?

With so many indications, Cody felt it as if fate itself was yanking his ear and screaming at him. He couldn’t deny it anymore!

So Cody immediately made up his mind to do a marathon live broadcast!

He would devote all his time aside from eating and going to the bathroom, trying to rack up as many points as possible!

“Bomb!” Cody threw out the cards in his hand, “No one wants it, right? Last card, a 6! I win!”

“Ding~” The referee on the side pulled the small copper bell on the table in a timely manner.

“The game is over, the banker wins! Settle the chips, the loser changes table.”

— After someone lost all their chips, the two players with fewer chips would be rematched and switched tables.

Only the winner didn’t need to move, just sitting there waiting for new opponents to arrive – this was the privilege of the winner.

Cody clenched his fist tightly, “Good! Let’s do it again!”

Comments were filled with praises:

“He’s gone mad!”

“Awesome! Not only is he good at playing cards but also has invincible acting skills and perfect psychological warfare!”

“Looking at this guy, he’s got the makings of a gambling god!”

At the same time, players from Southeast Asian countries were flooding into Night City.

Starting on November 10th, Mirage consoles were sold in Siam, Laos, Johor, Zhenla, and other countries.

Due to different national conditions, the components of the consoles varied: Some were Mirage 1.0 upgraded and resold, some were directly taken from Cloud Dream and sold locally, and some were produced in local factories on assembly lines, allowing for large-scale sales.

However, due to logistical delays, they were only able to start logging into the virtual world en masse today.

Milkshake’s Spiritual Rhinoceros account and Cloud Dream Live Broadcast Platform’s live rooms once again received a large number of new followers.

Yes, Milkshake now had its own live streaming room, which was a spot Cheryl had specifically gone to Leander to request for it.

Once again, Cheryl was a veteran of the company, the boss of the pet employee department, and was highly regarded within the company.

Many employees’ pet dogs and cats earned their keep under Cheryl’s care – who wouldn’t give her some face?

Everyone had to work virtually, and in reality, they needed to ask Cheryl for help to take care of their pets.

At the same time, a group of netizens from Southeast Asian countries, located under Lincoln’s event post, rushed over to curse him for not being human.

Netizens from the Daxia nation came to watch the excitement and cheered, taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.

Proudly called the “Hermaphrodite Friend,” Mario Pumisat was also live streaming card games in the Paradise Casino.

After just two days of streaming, this nickname naturally fell on his head.

This was actually a very brave decision.

Because in Siam, gambling is strictly forbidden by the state, and the intensity of the ban is even stronger than in Daxia.

By playing cards so openly in a casino, he was risking quite a bit.

But in reality, was there no one gambling in Siam just because it’s illegal?

Absolutely not!

Siamese people love gambling, and they also love reporting gambling.

So the question is: does playing cards in the virtual world count as gambling?

Anyway, Mario doesn’t think so.

—The law doesn’t say so, and I didn’t bet money.

Strictly speaking, I didn’t even go out; I just lay in my bedroom alone, not moving, how could you say I was gambling?

But the environment around him also determined that his card-playing skills were awful.

For the past two days, he had been live streaming [Stepping into Red Artists], so he didn’t have any time to practice cards.

Of course, he didn’t regret it.

In these two days, he has gained over 1 million fans—the peak number of people watching his live stream reached over 8 million. However, most of them didn’t follow him but just watched the excitement.

But for him, this was already an incredible achievement.

Although it was [trial operation], and he couldn’t make any income temporarily, with so many fans, why worry about money?

But the price still had to be paid: throughout the day, he was constantly losing, and now his score had dropped to -22.

Constantly losing—this was almost the fate of most Siamese players today.

But almost nobody was unhappy to leave.

Just like Mario, the more they were frustrated, the more enthusiastic they became! The more they played, the more addicted they got!

There is no such opportunity to play cards delightfully in reality.

And—lose all the chips, the system automatically replenishes them, and if you win, it’s yours.

If you win enough chips, you can exchange them for virtual currency, trade directly with those who collect gold, and get cash!

Who can resist a business with no cost!

Although they kept losing, although they were using the smallest denomination chips for the competition, and although they were very short of virtual currency themselves, but…

You must have dreams, friend!

This also led to the operation team of “Speed Chase” being puzzled for a while.

They saw early on that a large number of players from Siam were logging into the game, but after more than three hours, not even one percent of them had reached the first main storyline node—Milkshake’s death.

This made them very confused, and they once thought the game was not to the taste of Siamese players.

But soon, they discovered: the online rate of players from this country was astonishingly high!

Upon digging deeper into the data, they found that all of them were playing cards at [Paradise Casino]…

Fan Rui’s deputy Tang Mao immediately realized that this competition, or more accurately the card game content, might become the key to further conquer the Siamese market.

He immediately began thinking: Is there any way to speed up this segment?

A day passed in intense competition.

Lincoln’s stuff hadn’t been fully assembled yet, but the small airplane needed for the live broadcast had already been successfully completed and even tested.

Henry personally came and watched Lincoln tightly so that he wouldn’t get on. He waited until it had been checked over ten times and the test pilot had flown three rounds before allowing an experienced pilot to fly with him.

Only then did he agree to let Lincoln fly the plane—under the condition that another pilot was always standby to take over the controls at any time.

The subsequent armored tanks assembled were more casual since there was no danger, and he could play with them at will.

The future gambling god, Cody, quickly ate after logging off and seized every moment to go back online.

Throughout the day, he couldn’t maintain a 100% winning rate and even lost several rounds in small games.

But in the big picture—he was still undefeated! He hadn’t changed tables even once due to losing all 20 chips!

By now, the audience in the live broadcast room really started to believe he was a gambling god.

Finding his table, Cody took off his suit, draped it over the chair, stretched his shoulders and wrists, and then sat down comfortably.

—The series of actions carried a clear message: I’m not going anywhere! I won’t change tables tonight unless I go offline!

Seeing such low-key, yet meaningful showing off, the audience couldn’t help but admire:

“As expected of a gambling god. You only show off inadvertently!”

“This showing off is so smooth!”

“Gambling god is gambling god. We still have a lot to learn!”

Cody looked at the unanimous praises in the live broadcast room, feeling ecstatic. Fearing that he couldn’t help laughing, he quickly shifted his gaze to his opponent.

A young girl who looked like a middle school student came over, confirmed her position, and carefully pulled out the chair to sit down.

The girl who had just come home from school, Shuihua, politely nodded to Cody: “Hello.”

“Hello.” Cody also replied politely.

—Can’t bully little girls, must be polite, otherwise it’s easy to attract the audience’s dislike.

Also, the girl won’t cry if she loses too much, right?

How about deliberately losing a round to her later?

As Cody picked up his cards, he thought of this.