A young woman adjusts her cuff, turns toward a camera mounted on a ceiling-rig the colour of champagne, and, in a voice that has been trained out of its native Romanian and into something closer to a hotel concierge's English, welcomes a table full of players who are not in the room with her. They are in Valletta. In Hamburg. In a villa outside Phuket, where the man nursing a whisky has just tripled his previous bet because he has been losing for an hour and has decided, the way these gentlemen often decide, that the tide has turned. The tide has not turned. The young woman, whose name I will not share, because the studios do not encourage it, deals another shoe.
She is in Bucharest.
It is worth knowing, I have always thought, where the dealer actually is. Not for any sentimental reason. The cards fall where they fall regardless. But there is something instructive, even for a seasoned player, in understanding the geography of what looks, on a phone screen in the dark of a taxi, like an unmoored piece of theatre. The theatre has a postcode. It often has a very specific one.
Evolution, the Swedish firm that has done more than anyone to shape what live-dealer gaming now means, built its flagship studio in Riga in 2006 and has since multiplied. There is the New Jersey studio, tucked into an unremarkable industrial park not far from Atlantic City, where a Pennsylvania regulator's eye on the tape is the reason the chandelier looks slightly less ornate than it does in Eastern Europe. There is the Malta operation, which services most of the European union under Maltese licence, and which runs on the cadence of Mediterranean lunches. The Georgia studio in Tbilisi, where labour is patient and English is a second language delivered with a dignity that certain of our guests, who are themselves strangers to dignity, could study. There is the Buenos Aires studio, where the dealers speak with the soft Argentine s, and which serves the Spanish-language tables that run through the late Latin American evenings.
I think often of the one in Yerevan. Armenia is not where most players imagine the dealer to be, and that is, I suspect, part of the point.
There is a particular kind of discretion in not being found on a map a guest would recognise. The dealer is nowhere the guest expects, which is to say, the dealer is nowhere at all, which is to say, the dealer is everywhere he is needed to be.
Playtech, Evolution's old rival, runs out of Riga also, and Manila, and more recently Bucharest, where the competition between the two large houses has driven up the hourly wage for a good presenter to a figure that now rivals what a junior trader makes in Warsaw. It is one of the more interesting side-effects of the trade. A generation of young women and men in Eastern Europe, and a smaller cohort in the Philippines, have been trained to an exacting standard of deportment and vocal projection because players in London and Stockholm and Seoul want the dealer to look a certain way and sound a certain way, and the Riga studios have learned, by now, exactly what that way is.
The Asian tables come from somewhere else, usually. SA Gaming, the house that specialises in baccarat for the Chinese and Korean markets, runs studios in Cambodia and the Philippines, the latter of which handles an astonishing volume of squeeze baccarat hands across a 24-hour cycle. A player in Macau, or a gentleman I once watched across a table at a certain hotel in Kowloon who has since been asked not to return, is most often, when he plays online, being dealt to from Manila. The dealers are Mandarin-speaking, Cantonese-speaking, Thai. The studio has no windows. None of the studios have windows. That, too, is deliberate. A window would break the frame.
There is a studio in Latvia I was told about, but have never seen, that specialises in high-roller baccarat for a small number of private rooms. It is known among a few people as the cabinet room, and the rules of engagement there are simpler than anywhere else in the industry. If a guest wishes to play 100,000 a hand, the studio sends a pit boss to the camera to confirm the table in person. If the pit boss is not in the building, the guest is asked to wait fifteen minutes while the pit boss arrives. The studio is not in the business of losing a 100,000-a-hand client to impatience, but it is also not in the business of letting such a player go unwitnessed. That equilibrium is, in its small way, the whole business.
In the United Kingdom, Evolution runs a small studio, and Authentic Gaming runs dual streams from the Casino di Venezia and from the Casino de Spa in Belgium, so that British players can, in theory, play on the same shoe as the patrons in the pit. I have watched this a few times. It is beautiful. It is also, I should say, the exception. The vast majority of what the player in Manchester sees on his phone at two in the morning is not coming from a casino at all. It is coming from a windowless studio in a business park forty kilometres outside Riga, where a young woman, who has not been paid to have feelings about him, is smiling at a camera that is smiling back.
The card falls. The gentleman at the villa in Phuket wins. He does not know that the dealer's shift is ending in seven minutes, and that she has a cold coming on, and that the bus that takes her home runs every twenty minutes from the front of the building. He does not need to know. That is the design.
Still, I have found, over the years, that the players who understand where their dealer actually is are the players who treat the exchange with a touch more grace. Which is to say, they tip. Not that the tip reaches her. But the gesture is not nothing. The gesture is almost the whole thing.
