When you hear the game described, mheibes doesn’t sound difficult. It sounds impossible. Assembled on the court in front of al-Sheikhli were his opponents: 45 men from the city of Najaf, arranged in three neat rows. One of these players held a silver ring. It was al-Sheikhli’s job to determine which one—and in which fist he held the ring—judging only by his facial cues and other tells.

Al-Sheikhli had already made significant progress toward this goal: He and his fellow captain had narrowed the field of suspects to four. A referee in a red vest hovered nearby with a stopwatch. Each team started with just five minutes to find the ring, per that year’s tournament rules; if that time elapsed, their opponents got the point.

Now al-Sheikhli bore down on one of the remaining defenders, a middle-aged man in a light-blue robe. “Fists and face!” he barked in Baghdadi-accented Arabic. The Najaf player stretched out his arms, fists still clenched, and lifted his head to look into the captain’s eyes. He held this pose for three seconds, as required by the tournament’s rules, while al-Sheikhli scanned his face. “Taliq! ” the captain cried, while slapping at the man’s two hands in quick succession. He thought the fists were empty, and he was right. When the man exposed his palms, al-Sa’doun fans in the bleachers rose to their feet, roaring in approval.

By narrowing the field to three men, al-Sheikhli had earned his team a bit of bonus time—two extra minutes on the clock. He huddled with his fellow captain. In several earlier rounds, they’d managed to identify Najaf’s ring bearer, but had picked the wrong hand and lost the point. “It was the Najaf fists,” al-Sheikhli told me later. “They were difficult.” When the captains broke their huddle, al-Sheikhli called to the crowd, his arms outstretched. The al-Sa’doun fans answered with another cheer. Now he turned on one of the three remaining suspects, a young man with shaggy hair and his jacket pulled up around his neck—a common move to hide the pulsing of the carotid artery. Al-Sheikhli called for “fists and face” again, and the referee pulled back the man’s hair so that his face was fully visible. For the full three seconds, the captain stared him down. Finally, he gestured to the man’s right hand. “Ji ib,” he said. Give it to me. The man opened his hand, and the stadium lights reflected, at last, on a glint of silver.