His eyes are on me, not the cards. The last chip, a single red circle of compressed clay, sits between his thumb and forefinger. It’s worth seven dollars. For the last 44 minutes, he was a friend, a quick-witted guy from out of town telling stories about his contracting business. Now, he’s just a pair of eyes, wide and pleading, and he asks the question you’re trained to hear and forbidden to answer: ‘What should I do?’

The air conditioning hums. Somewhere, 237 people are laughing, shouting, and the sound of a jackpot being paid out-a waterfall of digital noise and clattering metal-fills the space. But here, at this small green felt table, there is only the hum and his question hanging in the air like smoke. I am to say nothing that matters. I am to become a conduit for mathematics, a human avatar for the house edge.

They tell you customer service is everything. Smile. Be engaging. Make them feel welcome. And I do. For the first few hours, I’m your best friend. But when the tide turns, when the cheerful risk becomes a grim certainty, the training flips. The real skill isn’t making people feel good when they win; a trained monkey could do that. The real skill is making them feel… nothing, from you, when they lose everything. It’s an act of profound, weaponized neutrality.

The Math Has No Conscience: A Turning Point

I used to think this was about being unfeeling. I was wrong. I once had a woman, maybe 27, playing blackjack. She was betting big, far too big for her shaking hands. She lost a hand, then another, then another. It was a statistical certainty, a regression to the mean playing out in real-time. She started crying, silently at first, then audibly. She whispered that it was her tuition money for the semester. My first instinct, the human one, was to offer some kind of comfort. My second, the badly-trained-dealer instinct, was to offer a cold dose of reality. I leaned in and said, “The math is the math. It doesn’t have a conscience.”

It was the worst thing I could have possibly said. It was true, but it was cruel. I saw a flicker of hope in her eyes die, replaced by a hollow look I’ll never forget. I wasn’t being neutral; I was being a callous automaton. I had failed, not at dealing cards, but at managing the human energy of the table.

It’s a service. You provide a calm, predictable, procedural space so the player can have their emotional reaction without it being amplified or judged by you. This isn’t something you just pick up; it’s a specific skill honed in places like a proper casino dealer school, where they teach you the psychology alongside the procedure.

The Overpass: A Metaphor for Connection and Detachment

I’ve since come to see my role differently, thanks in part to a conversation with my sister, Nova H. She’s a wildlife corridor planner, of all things. She designs those green overpasses you see on highways so bobcats and deer don’t have to play Frogger. I was complaining about my job, about the pressure, and she said something that stuck with me. She said, ‘I can’t force a mountain lion to use the bridge. I can’t put up a sign that says, ‘Hey, this is safer!’ All I can do is study its nature and build a path that feels like the most logical, least threatening continuation of the forest. The bridge can’t have strange smells, or weird lighting, or sharp angles. It has to feel like nothing. It has to be a neutral zone.’

That’s it. That’s the job. I’m not here to be your friend or your enemy. I’m not your therapist or your financial advisor. I am the overpass. The game is the wilderness on both sides-the thrill of the hunt, the danger of the highway. My role is to facilitate your passage through it according to a strict set of rules, without influencing your journey. When you ask me, ‘What should I do?’, what you’re really asking is for me to step off the bridge and into the woods with you. I can’t. My job is to be the bridge. The cards will fall where they may. The probabilities will play out. Whether you make it to the other side is entirely up to you and the raw, unfeeling math that governs the game.

This is a strange kind of emotional labor, one shared by people in very different uniforms. I imagine it’s what an ER nurse feels when they have to tell a family the worst news of their lives, and then immediately walk into the next room to treat a sprained ankle with a calm demeanor. They can’t carry the grief with them. It would make them ineffective, a liability. They have to contain it, process it later. Or the 911 dispatcher who listens to unadulterated terror, provides clear, life-saving instructions, and then takes the next call 7 seconds later. They are conduits for a process, not sponges for emotion.

The Art of Stillness: A Point of Certainty

I used to resent it. I used to go home feeling grimy, like I had been paid to watch souls get scraped out. I’d try to scrub the memory of their faces off in the shower. And some nights, I still do. But reframing it helped.

You can be angry, you can be ecstatic, you can be devastated, and I will be the same. I will shuffle the same way. I will deal the same way. I will announce the totals in the same cadence. In a world of pure chaos, I am your one point of certainty. The house may have the edge, but I provide the stability. It’s a strange, difficult, and demanding art.

So back to the man with the seven-dollar chip. He’s still looking at me. The silence has stretched for 17 seconds now. I don’t offer a platitude. I don’t offer a cold fact. I simply meet his gaze, give a tiny, almost imperceptible nod that acknowledges his question without answering it, and wait. It’s his decision. It has to be. I am just the infrastructure. He finally breaks eye contact, looks down at the felt, and pushes the chip forward. He doesn’t say a word. I deal the next card.