GG Richard

Vincent Richard was a gardian in the Camargue, one of the horsemen who move the region's wild black bulls across the salt marshes, and he did it for fifty years among half-ton animals that get a vote in the matter. His interest is entirely in the exotic rules. Jacoby, beavers, raccoons, automatic doubles: he wants every one of them switched on before he will sit down, and he is happier with a game that can get out of hand than one that cannot. He is seventy-four and plays at lightning speed. He is not doing it to win, and he knows the arithmetic is unkind. He is doing it because a game in which the stake can quadruple twice before anybody has moved a checker is his idea of a good evening, and he has yet to meet a variant he refused.