A woman craps dealer faces many trials from both players and co-workers, but the toughest test is always dealing your first Super Bowl. In Las Vegas, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest weekend of the year. It’s big money and no nonsense. New Year’s Eve is for revelers and Super Bowl is for the gamblers. They come. They all come, and every craps dealer better know his or her business.
It was 1996 when my first Super Bowl Sunday went into overtime. I was working at the Flamingo Hilton on the Strip and the dice tables were packed. A craps game normally holds eight people to a side, but nine to ten people were storming both walls until dawn.
Craps is traditionally a men’s game, dealt by men and supervised by men. And this night I had entered the boys’ club and locked the door behind me. When not on stick, I was dealing first base on my table, which is the right side from the perspective of the pit crew, and I looked out onto a rocky masculine shore of horseshoe rings, heavy gold watches, polo shirts and cigars. At five three and one hundred twenty pounds, I felt small but that was the least of my worries. Keeping all these players’ bets straight and properly paid was my way to stay on their good sides.
Normally a craps game is only jammed up like a thirty-car wreck on foggy Los Angeles freeway when the players are winning. But when a casino is full of experienced craps players with bulging wallets, the craps game will be pounded with bets as everyone puts their personal style of play into action.
I had plenty of line bets with odds and of course a don’t pass player. A half dozen players were placing and pressing the six and eight while a couple other guys were betting the numbers across. The across bettors were playing come bets as well and using the winnings from their place bets to fund their odds on their come bets. And then a guy had to get in there and start buying lay bets against the nine and the six, so I had commissions to figure out.
And just when I felt like I was going to get in the zone and stay on top of things, a man in a black shirt bellies up to the table and tosses three thousands dollars onto the blue felt of the Flamingo’s table, challenging the casino to a duel. I don’t remember much after that, except not getting fired.
Dealing that Super Bowl Sunday game in Las Vegas in my rookie year as a craps dealer moved my game up a notch. I was a better dealer for the experience, and I had proved to my co-workers and my players that a lady dealer could handle the boys’ game just fine.
By: Tracy Falbe
About the Author:
A free how to play craps guide that covers the basics of craps is available from Falbe Publishing.
Tracy Falbe is the author of Get Dicey: Play Craps and Have Fun published under the pen name Tracy Michigan. Falbe worked as a craps dealer in Las Vegas in the mid 1990s and based her how to play craps book on thousands of hours of live game experience.
