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It was early spring 2024, and at an overlit food court in an Atlantic City casino called Resorts, a group of poker dealers was holed up at a table cluttered with baskets of chicken fingers and fries. Tim McCormack was both a trusted New York City dealer and a gambler; he’d worked in backroom games since he was a teenager in Brooklyn. He’d come down earlier that day with fellow dealers Ammar Awawdeh and Long Phi “Bruce” Pham. Like McCormack, Pham gambled, but Awawdeh was on another level, “the most degenerate gambler of our day,”…

