GG Moser

Julia Moser operated a cable car above Mayrhofen, in the Tyrol, for sixty years, which meant six decades of watching other people be frightened while she was not. She is seventy-eight and runs the Friday chouette, and has done since the first one, because nobody else would take the box. Nobody in this tier turns the cube as hard or as often. She is not doing it to win; she is doing it because a game that has been decided ought to end, and the fastest way to end one is to make it expensive. She loses a great deal this way and considers the arithmetic unanswerable. She talks the entire time she is doing it, which is the part opponents find hardest: the running commentary is warm, funny and completely unrelated to the fact that she has just put the game beyond reach. She learned the habit at a craps table in a resort hotel, on winter evenings when the cable car was shut.