Horse racing lives in a perpetual state of decline. Half a century ago, the Sport of Kings had a firm place in mainstream American culture; today, that place is a window of approximately five weeks, from the opening bell of the Kentucky Derby in May to the final stretch of the Belmont Stakes in June. These are first and last legs of the Triple Crown—the Preakness, which is run at Pimlico, outside Baltimore, falls halfway between them. The trifecta of races for three-year-old thoroughbreds is horse racing’s annual moment: its Super Bowl, with big floppy hats. Winning the Triple Crown means winning all three races, something no horse has done since the mid-’70s, when Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977), and then Affirmed (1978) swept the field.

For racing enthusiasts and those who work in the industry, there are plenty of other important stakes races—the big contests, where horses owners pay fees to enter the race, and the resulting purse is much higher than average. The Breeder’s Cup, two days of racing that move from track to track each October, is arguably the biggest. But for the general public, horse racing starts and ends at the Triple Crown, especially its first leg. This year’s Derby pulled in the highest ratings in two decades, with close to 18 million viewers tuning in to two minutes of racing (and hours of NBC’s goofy filler coverage). And since this year’s Derby winner, American Pharoah (yes, that’s how his name is spelled), went on to pull off a Preakness victory, all eyes now turn to Belmont.

I’ve worked in the horse racing industry as a pari-mutuel clerk—a person who takes and cashes bets—since 2003. My home track is the Saratoga Race Course, in upstate New York, but I’ve also worked every Belmont Stakes for the past decade, and this Saturday will be my eleventh trip out to Jamaica, Queens. (The track is on Long Island, just over the Nassau County line.) Our name comes from the pari-mutuel wagering system, in which the track sets odds and bettors put their money up against the collective pool, rather than against individual bookmakers.

It’s a job that’s part cashier, part casino dealer, part bank teller, part bartender—the species of sympathetic bartender, anyway, who lets you unload your problems while you try to figure out what to order. (In this case, how much to put on the double, or which horse to box with the seven and the three.) There’s that lingo, too—dollar amount, type of bet, and horse number, made complex by combinations and shorthand. It doesn’t have to be complicated: If you don’t need human touch when you place your bets, the process is so straightforward that a machine can do it—which, increasingly, they are.

The perspective from the other side of the betting windows can be a strange one. I’ve written before that at Saratoga, I’ve gone days without seeing a horse in person. The same could probably be said for a lot of my regular customers. Taking bets gives you a view of racing that has very little to do with horses and a lot to do with the people who like to bet on them. And in my decade taking bets, I’ve seen the crowds shift in ways that are backed by the numbers: I read about plummeting attendance figures and corresponding track handles (the amount of money bet in a given day), but I can actually see the crowds thinning, and I punch out fewer tickets each year. In some bays—our term for a block of betting windows—an average weekday can feel like a ghost town.