In order to avoid guaranteed failure Kaiji is forced to join Funai’s group and have his 69 card shuffled and redistributed. This sets Kaiji and his two pals back a few places since now they won’t have an advantage with their cards.

Everyone shuffles the deck, starting and ending with Funai. Then, Funai deals out the cards to each of the players in the amounts that they had put in. This leads to everyone getting their cards and immediately starting to play, except for Kaiji and his team, as Funai gives them a slight handicap with the following gesture.

Once Kaiji’s team has collected all of their cards and recounted, he notices something. They possess all 34 of the remaining papers in the game. Which leaves only rocks and five scissors left out in the open. Kaiji also notices something odd. The players who had only one card are not playing. After a brief struggle between Kaiji and Funai over who gets to play a person with only one card, Funai lets something slip that confirms Kaiji’s suspicions: prey.

Funai had rigged it from the start. Other than the papers which only Kaiji had, there were only scissors and rocks left on the floor. Three of the scissors were possessed by a Mr. X one of the non-playing players in the “graveyard” with all of the others with no cards and less than three stars. Not counting Kaiji’s, that left only three scissors on the floor. The reason why the one-carded players weren’t playing is that they likely only had a scissor, and since they knew that Kaiji had all of the papers (due to Funai’s kind gesture above), they knew they couldn’t win.

Kaiji confronted Funai and essentially destroyed any chances he had with the following revelations:

1) Funai wanted all of the cards to be reshuffled so he could see what everyone had, and what he could work with. This way he would find out his would-be prey.

2) While Funai did let everyone else shuffle the cards, it was irrelevant, as he was the first and last person to shuffle. Additionally, when redistributing the the cards, he did it in a “random” order, which was actually not random at all.

3) Funai marked the scissors with a scratch, so he could give them to the people with one card. He then insured that he recieved rocks, while Kaiji received all of the papers. That way, he could pick off those with only scissors.

Now that Funai was out of the way temporarily, Kaiji had to come up with a way to get stars in the remaining few minutes. He devised a do-or-die way where the other player would pick which card Kaiji would play, in order to make it random. Kaiji would take one of each type, place them on the table and shuffle them.

However, it turns out that the reason for this was not just to get more stars. In fact, Kaiji lost them. However, it was gain leverage against Funai in order to make an even greater wager.

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