GG Ahmed

Ali Ahmed left Sana'a with his family at eighteen and settled with relatives in Dubai, where he cooks and waits tables in his older cousin's café in Karama, six days a week. Most of what he earns goes to his mother and two younger sisters in Aden. He learned tavla as a child, found the online game on a phone his cousin gave him, and plays it at lightning speed with an excellent bear-off and a cube he has only recently begun to understand. He talks all the way through and he goes off badly when it turns, and the dice are not really what any of that is about. Everybody at the tables he frequents has worked this out, and the ones who have been there longest wait it out without saying anything. Most nights end with the same regulars round a cash table, and the eruption when it turns is worst there, where the chips are actually moving.