Gaming sensibly

What this house is aiming at

An evening at a table and then three flights up is a better result for this house than somebody who stayed until the room closed. That is not a slogan, it is the brief the souterrain was fitted out to. Three tables, not eight. Closing at half past eleven, not at two. No credit. No cash dispenser beneath this roof. The counter in the hall stops serving at half past ten, an hour before the tables, and guests notice that within a night or two.

Age, checked every time

Eighteen in the Netherlands, photographic proof every visit, including for the guest who was eating in the back room an hour before. An image of a passport on a phone screen will not be read as a passport.

What the staff do on the spot, downstairs

• Hold a limit you have set. Name the figure before sitting and it is entered on the sheet.
• Give the hour straight away, the first time. The clock hangs in the end bay.
• Keep the seat for you for twenty minutes while you go up, eat, or stand on the quay.
• Keep you out for a stretch of days if you ask, and write it where the next person on the door will read it.
• Take a self-exclusion at the desk in the hall, in person, effective the same evening.

None of that exists on this website, and that is deliberate. Each of those is said face to face with somebody who is listening, twenty-five paces away. A screen with fields on it would be tidier for the house and emptier for the guest.

Five signals worth taking seriously

• You are thinking about the souterrain while standing in front of the Grote Kerk, which is the thing you came to this town to see.
• You went back down the stair after saying, out loud, that you were done.
• You have worked out which cash machine on the Voorstraat is open latest.
• The stake you are at is one you have decided not to mention upstairs.
• You wish the person on the door did not know what you are called. They do, because the house has eight rooms.

Training

Whoever works the door is taken through it before a first shift and once each year after: the law, how to read proof of age, how to refuse somebody without making a scene of it, and handling the guest whose drinking has outrun the play. The duty manager looks in at least twice an evening. Both have shut a table early and neither was afterwards asked why.

How to ask

Mention it to the person on the door or to the desk in the hall. It does not have to be well put.