The anti-chess. The concept was fascinating. That evening, with the chess pieces staring at me like silent judges, I opened my laptop. I searched for Vavada. The site was clean, almost minimalist. To get the full experience, a prompt suggested a vavada casino download. A dedicated application. It felt like installing a new opponent, one that played by entirely different rules. I did it.

I created an account. "Grandmaster_Chaos." A joke for myself. I deposited seventy-five dollars—the fee for a private lesson I no longer gave. This was my tuition for a new, illogical subject.

I went straight to the live roulette, as Anya had. I chose a table with a dealer named Cosima. She had a serene, unreadable face. I placed a two-dollar bet on black, the side of the board with no king, no queen, just a color. The wheel spun. The ball danced. It landed on red zero. I lost. And I felt... nothing. No regret for a miscalculation. It was just an outcome. A random event. The liberation was instant.

I began to visit nightly. I explored other "anti-chess" games. Blackjack, where the only calculation was the simple sum of cards—a toddler's math compared to positional evaluation. I played it with a dealer named Leo, who had a dry wit. The other players in the chat were my new, unpredictable opponents. We weren't trying to outthink each other for twenty moves; we were all facing the same dealer, the same deck. It was a shared experience, not a duel. My balance floated around seventy dollars. I was paying for a lesson in letting go.