In a game of luck like Bingo, there’s no way to guarantee that you’ll win. There are no tricks or skills involved—it’s random. But try telling the people at Riverside that.

In a game of luck, however, there are a couple ways you can guarantee that you won’t win. Charlie has them all figured out: this week he walked in, sat through the calling of three whole numbers and then abandoned his cards where they lay. “He’s been pouty all week,” John explained. Cecil must have figured out that the hat he wears every week is bad luck: he’s still wearing it and he’s still not getting Bingos. A few of the semi-regulars have picked up the “not-paying-attention” strategy in order to maintain their loss streaks. The confusing part is that they all still think they should be winning.

John, however, has something up his sleeve. Tonight he won three rounds in a row. I’d already run out of prizes (traffic struck and I was forced to pick up a few chocolate bars at the gas station so I was understocked) but I promised him two cold Kroger Colas for next Thursday. Campbell, whose great-grandson is doing great, won two rounds in a row and gave both his prizes away, one to a nurse who was sitting in and the other to his friend Don, who was part of the not-paying-attention crowd.

Garrett has something that I think most people probably don’t have when it comes to Bingo: a strategy. Every week, he asks me for half the stack of Bingo cards. He shuffles through it, looking at every one, narrowing them down, picking out certain ones. He compares his selections, shuffles through them again, does some counting. Eventually he puts four cards out on the table in front of him and gives the remainder back to me. I got curious today and asked him, “Garrett, how do you decide which cards to pick? What’s the method here?”

I’m dating a mathematics major. In my bedroom, I have a dry erase board that she brought to my house one day and covered with cryptic numbers: 5 6 10 15 12 3 20 4 25 12 3 30 6 35 14 5, continuing in no apparent pattern across the whole 2’x4′ board. Naturally, I asked what they meant. “Oh, it’s math,” was her explanation. “Watch. Five and ten become six.” She circled the six. “Fifteen becomes twelve, which is three. Twenty is five, twenty-five is twelve and twelve is three, remember? Thirty is six, and thirty-five is…” More circling digits, more talking, a few arrows; I was thinking to myself, “God help me I am dating a psychopath.”

I understood Garrett’s Bingo card picking ALMOST as much as I understood that math. He pointed at the corner squares. He took another card and pointed at those corner squares. He listed a few of the numbers that were in the corner squares. He asked me to hand him the stack of cards and showed me one that shared two squares in the I column with the card he had and said “so that one is out.” He did some rearranging of the cards and pointed to numbers on each of them that were, for all intents and purposes, unrelated and wrapped up with “so you can see why those are the ones I want. They’ll win!”

They didn’t. On the eighth and final round, when Campbell called Bingo again, I heard Garrett say something about how close he was. I looked at his card, one bottle cap away from a Bingo, sat down next to him and flipped over the next number just to see. “You’re not gonna like this, Mr. Garrett… but G60 was next.”