Playing carefully

What this house wants the evening to be

An evening of play and then the stair is a better night for this house than somebody the door shuts behind. That is not a slogan. It is why the counting room is set up the way it is. Three tables, not nine. Half past twelve, not three. No credit. No machine in this house gives out money. The counter in the hall stops at eleven, an hour and a half before the tables, and people notice that by the second night.

Age, every visit

Nineteen in Nova Scotia, photo identification every single time, including for the guest who was eating in the galley an hour before. A screenshot of a licence is not a licence.

What the staff do while you stand there

• Hold a limit you set. Give the figure before you sit down and it is put on the sheet.
• Say the time out loud as soon as it is asked for. The clock hangs over the counter. Nobody waits for it.
• Keep your seat open for twenty minutes while you go up, eat something, or stand on the step.
• Shut you out for a run of days at your request, written where the next shift reads it.
• Take a self-exclusion at the desk under the stair, in person, in force that same evening.

None of that appears on this website, and the absence is deliberate. Each one is said out loud to a person who is looking at you, thirty-five paces away. A page with a form on it would be simpler to run and worth less to the person filling it in.

Five things that are worth a second thought

• You are thinking about the counting room while standing on the wharf looking at a schooner, which is what you came to this town for.
• You went back down the passage after saying out loud that you had finished for the night.
• You have worked out that the machine on Lincoln Street is the nearest, and you worked it out this week.
• The number you are playing at is one you would keep to yourself at breakfast.
• You wish the staff did not know you by name. They do; seven rooms, eight of them.

How the staff are trained

Whoever works that door is trained ahead of the first shift and once in each year after: the law, how to read identification, how to refuse somebody without making a scene of it, and the guest whose drinking has outpaced the playing. The duty manager walks the passage twice an evening. Each of them has shut a table before time and neither was afterwards asked why.

How to ask

Raise it with whoever is at the door, or with the desk under the stair. However you say it is the right way. Nobody will make it awkward and nobody will mention it to anybody who does not need to know.