In John Updike's A Month of Sundays, there is a parable about how the Christian faith is, indeed, an improbable wager on the impossible possibility. In one episode, a group of men are playing a variation of poker. In this game, each person is dealt several cards, some of them on the table face up and the others concealed in the hand.

In one round, the main character, a man named Thomas, has been dealt a very strong hand, and he decides to bet heavily. As Thomas keeps sweetening the pot and raising the stakes, all of the other players drop out one by one, intimidated by Thomas' hand, that is, all except one player, a stutterer named Fred.

Curiously, Fred appears to have a poor hand; his cards showing on the table are "nondescript garbage." Astonishingly, though, he keeps up the betting pace, calling and raising Thomas at every opportunity. Thomas is puzzled since his own hand is a poker player's dream. It isn't absolutely perfect he is holding one poor card but other than this single little flaw his hand is virtually unbeatable. Why does Fred keep on betting against such odds? Why doesn't he fold?

When the time comes to lay down the cards, though, Thomas is shocked to discover that Fred has the winning hand. When he compares Fred's hand with his, Thomas realizes that there was only one card in the whole deck that could have made Thomas the loser, and that was the one bad card that Thomas had hidden in his hand. If Thomas had held any other card, he would have won, and won big. In other words, Fred was betting everything everything on the tiny chance that Thomas held this one losing card. Dumbfounded, Thomas thinks to himself: Fred had stayed, then, against me when only one card in the deck ... could have made my hand a loser to his. Two truths dawned upon me:

He was crazy. He had won. He had raised not on a reasonable faith but on a virtual impossibility; and he had been right. "Y-y-y-you didn't feel to me like you had it," he told me, raking it in.