Kaiji S02E04 Review: The Cheating Game

Kaiji, Season 2, Episode 4: Strike Clues

So after Kaiji's big loss in the previous episode, we get a bit of an unexpected timeskip to one month later, which I suppose ties into the whole bit about how the system of this place revolves all around monthly paydays. Kaiji finds himself as part of the "Forty-Fivers", people who are so in debt that they only get 45k of the currency there due to having half of their payday paid towards the foreman.

And this episode makes some really great usage of the narrator, who says in his usual bombast and describes how Kaiji's mental state at this point is basically "fuck it", as he thinks about how getting out of this place is an unachievable dream and trying to think up of justifications about how trying to get the one-day pass is kind of pointless in the first place. Great narration there! We also learn about the sick bay, where everyone who gets sick tended to get so sick that they die  because medicine is also something they need money to pay for -- a bit of a neat bit of worldbuilding and just how fucked-up this little quasi-Illuminati organization is.

Meanwhile, Kaiji reads up on Miyoshi's little dice statistics, and realizes one thing -- Otsuki always hits it big on specific points in the game where it's the most tense, and always when he's in-between two of his cronies. Kaiji quickly figures that Otsuki is cheating in one way or another, but also notes that the cheating is just 'hit big', and not always the triple or the 4/5/6 combo that he used to beat Kaiji. Now Kaiji knows that Otsuki is cheating, but it's not just enough for Kaiji to expose Otsuki. He wants to utterly destroy him (and profit, preferably -- still a gambling anime, after all), and to this end he makes up a team out of the Forty-Fivers. I don't think this is going to be quite as tense as the Espoir group, since we don't even really get the names of anyone other than Miyoshi. Great speech to rile up these losers by Kaiji -- something that's similar to what we've seen in the first season, but a neat little scene nonetheless.

And the episode basically just closes with Kaiji, having his allies, gathering what meager funds they have and planning to eventually take down their enemy, the Foreman Otsuki. Overall, again, definitely a well-executed episode and one that really makes great usage of Kaiji's speeches and the narrator to really build up the anticipation. That's what makes Kaiji really fun to watch, honestly -- the story is unbelievably simple, and this particular dice game arc is even formulaic. But the way it's executed hypes the simple story up so much that it transcends what it otherwise would've been.