Two things live here, and they answer each other.
The fiction. Flash pieces and longer stories set in the places Montreal keeps open after midnight — dépanneurs, laundromats, emergency rooms, the last metro, the smoking section outside a church basement. They are love stories in the sense that they are about the distance between two people and what closes it, which is usually not a speech.
The reference. Everything a reader might want to check. How a blackjack shoe is actually dealt. What a pit boss watches. Whether counting cards is illegal, and what "illegal" is doing in that sentence. What Bonjour-Hi means to the person saying it and to the person hearing it. The stories assume this world is real; the reference is where you can confirm it.
The gambling material is written from the operations side rather than the strategy side — how the floor works, who watches whom, where the money moves. The Montreal material is written from inside the language, not about it.