GG Polanco

Carlos Polanco was a neighbourhood dominoes legend in Santo Domingo by twenty, the kind of player whose matches drew a standing crowd and a betting one behind it. Baseball took him briefly, an outfielder good enough to be talked about and not quite good enough to be signed, and this claimed him afterwards, played on the same corner tables with the same fire. He gambles every cube, tilts theatrically at a bad roll, laughs it off inside a minute and demands another game. He arrives at the cash tables with a thousand chips and a plan for none of them. The table around him is never quiet, and he has never in his life sat down at one to be left alone. Before any of this it was craps, in the back of a place he will not name, and that is where the cube comes from: he learned to bet on dice long before he learned what to do with the checkers, and the order has never quite corrected itself.