A female dice dealer faces many trials from both players and co-workers, but the toughest trial is always delivering her first Super Bowl. In Las Vegas, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest weekend of the year. It is a lot of money and there is no nonsense. New Years Eve is for revelers and the Super Bowl is for gamers. They come. They all come, and every dice dealer knows his business best.

It was 1996 when my first Super Bowl Sunday went into overtime. He was working at the Flamingo Hilton on the Strip and the craps tables were full. A dice game normally has eight people on one side, but nine to ten people stormed both walls until dawn.

Craps is traditionally a men’s game, played by men and supervised by men. And tonight I walked into the boys club and closed the door behind me. When I wasn’t at the stick, I was handing out first base on my table, which is the right side from a pit crew perspective, and I was looking out over a rocky male shore of horseshoe rings, heavy gold watches, polo shirts, and cigars. At eight pounds, I felt small, but that was the least of my worries. Keeping all these players’ bets correct and paid correctly was my way of staying on their good side.

Typically, a game of dice only gets stuck like a thirty-car crash on the foggy Los Angeles freeway when the players are winning. But when a casino is full of seasoned craps players with bulging wallets, the game of craps will be full of stakes as they all put their personal style of play into action.
He had a lot of line bets with odds and of course one player who didn’t check. Half a dozen players were placing and pressing six and eight, while two others were betting the numbers. Cross bettors also played come bets and used the winnings from their placed bets to fund their odds on their come bets. And then a guy had to come in and start buying layman’s bets against nine and six, so he had to calculate the commissions.

And just when I felt like I was going to enter the zone and be on top of things, a man in a black shirt walks up to the table and throws three thousand dollars on the blue felt of the Flamingo table, challenging the casino to a duel. I don’t remember much after that, except that I wasn’t fired.

Trying that game on Super Bowl Sunday in Las Vegas in my rookie year as a dice dealer moved my game up a notch. I was a better dealer by experience, and I had shown my co-workers and players that a dealer could handle the boys’ game well.