GG Bernard

Marie Bernard has been a pit boss at the Deauville casino for eighteen years, running the evening shift where Parisian weekenders meet the sea air and lose their judgement. She started as a summer cashier at nineteen and never left the coast. Her husband trains racehorses, and between his dawn gallops and her midnight close they share, she says, one perfect hour a day. She plays cool and slow, thinks in ranges rather than rolls, and treats the cube as a bet with a price on it. Nobody talks her off a position, and nobody has ever watched her react to a roll. Eighteen years of watching other people give themselves away has left her with a firm preference for not doing it herself. She reads the player far better than she reads the board, which at this particular game is the wrong way round, and she is perfectly aware of it. She does not enter anything with a bracket. She plays the cash tables and only the cash tables, on the grounds that a tournament is a long evening in which nobody is putting anything up.