One of the more unusual Monte Carlo gambling legends concerns a game that supposedly required nothing more sophisticated than a box of matches…
The hustler at the centre of the story was a con artist known as Marco Bellini who spent his evenings around Port Hercule looking for potential victims of his hustles.
Bellini’s supposed speciality was proposition betting.
One night, according to legend, he found himself opposite Monégasque Christophe Girdham, a humble local enjoying a drink by the sea.
Bellini approached Girdham and threw down on the table in front of him an apparently random number of matches and offered Girdham a friendly wager.
“A simple game,” Bellini allegedly said…
“Each player takes turns removing between 1 and 6 matches. We alternate turns, and whoever removes the last match or matches wins the game. You can even go first.”
Girdham accepted the challenge.
What Girdham didn’t know was that this normally fair game was, in fact, this time a con.
Bellini was setting a trap. His plan was not to lay out a random number of matches at the start, as he suggested he would, but in fact to lay out 35 matches — a multiple of seven. If Bellini did this and allowed Girdham to go first, then, by following a simple system, Bellini could guarantee himself victory.
The crucial mathematical fact is that the game has winning positions. If you can leave your opponent with a multiple of seven, you can respond to almost any move by taking enough matches to bring the total removed on the two turns back to seven.
If your opponent takes one, you take six.
If he takes two, you take five.
If he takes three, you take four.
And so on.
That means positions such as 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35 are extremely important.
Bellini smiled, confident in his rigged game.
But he had been sipping cocktails along the Riviera all day. His focus was blurred, and he miscounted. Instead of 35, he set 38 matches down upon the table.
Legend has it that Bellini was completely oblivious to his own counting error.
Girdham went first.
He removed three.
Thirty-five remained.
Bellini carried on, unaware that his drunken miscount had handed his carefully constructed winning position to his opponent.
Girdham played on innocently.
Bellini was oblivious to his mistake until it was too late.
Eventually there were seven matches left.
Bellini faced the pile. It was his turn. This is not how he planned it.
He could take no more than six, so whatever he did, Girdham would take the remainder and walk away the victor.
Legend has it that Bellini wasn’t seen again in Monaco. The skilled hustler’s carefully laid scheme collapsed before the first bet was properly underway, undone by too many daytime cocktails.
Even a clever con can fail when you drink on the job.
And the moral of the story is don’t play with matchsticks or strangers.
Reference:
There’s no real reference to the above story as it’s folklore. As for the game, well it has a long history and there are many variants and it has many names. The most common name seems to be ‘Nim’. It’s also known in China as jiǎn-shízǐ 捡石子 which roughly translates as ‘gathering stones’.