It's Friday night, 3am, and even though the chips are stacked up on the roulette table like the Manhattan skyline, I can't take my eyes off Chadda, who has entered the sixth minute of his strop-out on the opposite table. Everyone at the casino knows him, mainly because he's a cheating little shitbag.

At last, the manager comes over and has a word. Chadda's on his best behaviour. He shakes his hand, apologises to everyone, and walks away to have a fag. But while I'm going through the military routine all dealers do when the ball drops (place glass dolly on winning number, clear all losing chips down the hole, work out who gets paid first, how much they've won, display to them their winning chips and push them out in the precise manner, repeat procedure for the next winner, etc), I can't help noticing Chadda fingering a large cut-glass ashtray with a malevolent glint in his eye.

The next thing I know, the mountain of chips on the opposite table has exploded. Chadda has only gone and flung the ashtray at the dealer, and recreated the opening scene of Independence Day a full half-decade before it was filmed. The inspector and pit boss drag him away. The punters are going berserk. And all of them, to a man, claim that all of their chips were on the winning number, and they all demand to be paid out...

I hadn't thought about Chadda for years, not until the Government thought it'd be a good wheeze to open whacking great casinos in every town. Because let's be honest, one of them is bound to come to Notts, even though there's already four of them a stone's throw from Slab Square. Boost to the night-time economy...sophisticated alternative to clubbing...chance to win shitloads of cash...what's wrong with that?

I'll tell you what's wrong with it; it'll be in Nottingham. And if a sizeable percentage of people from Nottingham are perfectly happy to beat the shit out of each other over things like looking at girlfriends or spilling pints, you can imagine what they're like when they've lost fifty quid on the turn of a card.

You would not believe the abuse us dealers got. I could walk into Yates on a Saturday night, naked from the waist down in a Derby shirt, and would never cop as much grief as I did on an average night in the casino. Many of the clientele worked at or owned Chinese restaurants (or Triads, depending on who you talked to in the staffroom), and somehow forgot that they weren't in a noisy kitchen any more. Everything they said was bellowed in Cantonese, and even the act of asking for a card sounded like the Russian roulette scene in The Deerhunter.

But it wasn't just the Chinese, oh no. You get a proper multi-cultural coating when you're a dealer. I was sworn at in Urdu, Polish, Lebanese, Patois, Greek, Punjabi, Gujarati, and plain old Nottingham. A Benetton poster of spite and disgust, if you will.

Even worse, some of them would think nothing of leaning over and sticking one on a dealer. The first night I was there, I went on me break to discover a workmate dabbing at his bloody nose. When I asked if he was going to report it to the police, he laughed so hard he covered the toilet mirror with blood and snot. "You should have been here when we had the riot. They overturned three of the roulette tables, we had to barricade ourselves in here, and it took 24 riot police and a dozen dogs to calm them down".

"How many arrests?"

More laughter. "The casino doesn't want them in the nick - they want them back here wasting their money. All the charges were dropped, but they all boycotted us for a fortnight. We had to do free buffets every night to gerrem back in".

He was right. I don't know what you'd have had to have done to get barred from that casino. There was nothing more galling than to see the bastard who smacked the shit out of your mate the night before roll up to your table and start throwing his weight about again.

Actually, there was something more galling - having to stand there and watch obscene amounts of money being spunked away. I'll give you one example; one night, an enormous bloke who was pointed out to me as the boss of the Nottingham Triads came over to my roulette table, wearing the kind of furry waistcoat not seen since Giant Haystacks died. He threw down a fistful of fifty pound notes, asked to have them changed into £25 chips, and dumped them all over the table, covering all the numbers bar two. One of the two numbers came up. I shovelled £2,500 of his money down the hole where all the lost bets go, trying not to shit myself.

He shrugged, delved back into his pocket, threw another £2,500 on the table. Same thing happened. He looked at me, laughed, winked, and went on another table. I found out later he'd lost another two grand on one spin, and went home. In five minutes, he had spent my entire yearly salary. Still, with all that money flying about, the tips must have been good, right? Well, they would have been, except that a) British croupiers weren't allowed tips, and b) the punters wouldn't have given you the steam off their piss.

In any case, the management treated us worse than the punters did. Not only were the pockets in our trousers sewn up, but fraternisation with anyone at the casino was forbidden. You even had to inform management if you were knocking off anyone at work. I once thought about drafting a memo that read "Dear Sir, I can't stop looking at the jubblies on that new female dealer and am thinking about having a go at her after work". Even worse, if you lost a hefty amount on the tables, you'd be taken into the office and bollocked, which was as pointless as the boss of Ladbrokes getting Red Rum into the offices of Ladbrokes and shouting at him for winning the Grand National.

By the end of six months, I'd had enough of it. I was sick of having to work double shifts from 1pm to 4 am, and having to come in at 1 the next morning. I got pissed off with meeting my mates in town for a drink and then have to go to work while they went to Rock City to twirl tongues with Goth birds. I was narked when me Christmas `bonus' was a couple of bottles of wine that not even Kwik-Save would put on their shelves, and then informed I was working on Christmas Night and New Years Eve, and felt guilty when I saw blokes with no money for the taxi home kipping on benches as I left the building.

Oh, and the fact that one of the bouncers who regularly threw chairs about and threw screaming fits when he lost a quid on the Blackjack had threatened to stab me in the street and followed me about town one night rather clinched it for me. So if you ask me, a whopping great casino in Nottingham would be about as clever an idea as The Works doing an Uzi promotion night. Bet you it happens, though...

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