The Melaveh Room

This is a room of this house. It belongs to no one else, carries no separate address, and is reached without opening the street door. The casino is the souterrain, directly under the hall, under a vault that is older than the house standing on it.

From the desk you walk behind it, take the stair, and go down six steps. Twenty-five paces, none of them outside, which matters on the two or three winter nights a year when the quay is under water. One of the staff holds that door through every hour it is open, and there is no second way in.

The room

Three tables is what the souterrain holds and three is what it will hold. On a Wednesday in November one is open. In May all three are, and on those evenings the casino door counts heads, because the vault takes twenty-six and the vault does not stretch.

It was a wool store, so it is a vault: brick, four bays, springing at shoulder height and about 2.6 metres at the crown. The lining stands 90 millimetres clear of the brick all round, which was the condition of the consent, so the vault is visible and is not being touched by anything. There is no music. The loudest thing in the room is the air handling, and after ten minutes nobody hears it. The casino keeps a clock on the end bay, and the staff are instructed to say the time the moment they are asked, which is the opposite of what such rooms are famous for.

The dress line is about shoes. The quay outside is cobbled, it is frequently wet, and the souterrain floor is a limestone that marks. Nobody has ever been refused for anything else they were wearing.

Age and proof of it

Dutch law puts the casino age at 18, and the door here excuses nobody, not even a guest two floors up.

Proof is checked on every visit, not once per stay. That includes the guest who ate in the back room an hour earlier and spoke to the person now on the door. A passport, a Dutch identity card, a residence permit or an EU driving licence is accepted. An image of any of them on a phone is not proof and is refused, and the refusal is not a matter of opinion.

No one under 18 goes down into the casino at any hour, the closed hours and the cleaning hours among them, and that includes coming to see the vault. People do ask to look at the vault. The answer is the drawing on this page.

Limits and how to stop

The staff on the casino floor set the limits, not a manager and not a system. Name your figure before you sit down and it is written on the sheet and held to. Ask them to name one for you and they will, and it will be lower than yours.

An evening is ended at the desk in the hall, in person, face to face. Never in the souterrain, never by telephone, never by email. A self-exclusion is put in writing at that desk, applies from that evening, and is reversed only in person at the same desk. The person on the door cannot lift it and will not discuss it.

Credit is not extended on the casino floor at all, and no cash dispenser stands anywhere beneath this roof: not the souterrain, not the hall, not the court. The nearest is on the Voorstraat, four minutes away, and the walk there and back in February is its own argument.

The website runs no games

What exists is a gaming room in the souterrain of a hotel on the Wolwevershaven. There is nothing further to it. The site describes a building and one room of it. Nothing is dealt here, nothing is wagered here, no account exists and no money moves.

To play, come to Wolwevershaven 12, show proof of age at the door at the foot of the stair, and sit down. There is no other way in, and none of it takes place on this page.