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Steve Agan smiles as he recounts the time he nearly had to toss one of his blackjack customers out of Durty Nelly’s in the basement of the Historic Franklin Hotel in Deadwood.

It’s not that he wanted to, necessarily, Agan said. It was more that he would have had to if the belligerent drunk would have continued to verbally abuse the dealers.

“That was my job as casino manager. It might be the closest I came to getting in a fight,” the soft-spoken Agan said. But a short conversation with the customer about being responsible to himself, the dealers and his own friends and family — along with Agan’s threat to physically remove him from the business — brought the brief standoff to an end.

That — and the fact that the man learned that in addition to casino manager, Agan was an ordained minister — helped turn the tide.

“I saw him again a few days later, and he was very apologetic; and after that; we got along great,” Agan  said. “It seems that whenever I’m about to get to disliking somebody, God somehow brings us together, and we end up praying together.”

Agan is not your ordinary pastor. Though he has since left the casino business, “Poker Steve” — as he is known — can still be found playing cards in any number of the Deadwood casinos where he feels at home.

And he would spend more time there if he weren’t serving as a pastor at two churches in two  communities, coaching the local debate team and frequently officiating at weddings and funerals.

“I would never recommend that other preachers try this,” Agan said with a smile.

It wasn’t something he planned to try, either. When he first came Deadwood more than 15 years ago, Agan was a burned-out pastor-turned-stockbroker whose primary goal in moving to the Hills was simply getting away from it all.

“I was just looking for somewhere where I could play cards if I wanted to; where, if I wanted to fish, I could. It was a change in lifestyle,” he said.

But old ways die hard, and although the lifestyle change did bring more time for poker and fishing, he found himself putting his degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to good use. Working as a poker dealer and a casino manager, Agan wasn’t one to flaunt or impose his lifestyle. Usually, a cross on a necklace was the only indication he was something more than your average card player or dealer, but he found that his fellow card players and gamblers would turn to him for a bit of consultation, divine or otherwise. 

Before long, it wasn’t only customers who were turning to Agan for advice. Service workers looked to Agan as someone in whom to confide and from whom to seek guidance. They came to Agan with their problems, concerns, triumphs and defeats.

“I don’t know any other place in the world where you can minister in bars, in casinos,” Agan said. “But here, it just seems to work for me. I can do more good for so many more people in their place of work than mine.”

Through that personal ministry, Agan rapidly became identified as a sort of chaplain for the gambling community.

His personal schedule soon began to fill up with funerals and weddings. As part of his outreach, Agan began Preacher Smith Ministries, a nondenominational, nonprofit organization designed to lend a helping hand through simple gifts and programs to those in need. 

His popularity among those he served stemmed from two main factors, he said.

“I think just letting people know they have someone here who they can talk to, someone who will listen, goes a long way,” he said. “They know I’m not there to change them. I’m there to listen and offer advice, if they want it.”

Second, Agan said, he believes people are hungry to feed their spiritual lives but that too often — especially in an industry that has been frowned upon by organized religion — they are scared off by the idea of “church.”

Like Preacher Smith a century before, Agan says, he relishes the role of sharing a hopeful and loving message without having to adhere to the physical confines of an institution.

That isn’t to say he has anything against being in church. His time as a casino manager has since passed, and in its stead, he now works as a pastor at Presbyterian churches in Whitewood and Lead.

The only drawback, he says, is that it has limited his poker playing time.

“The neat thing about poker is it’s a great parallel of life. You have no control over what you are dealt, but you have complete control of how you are to deal with it.

“Besides,” he said, “I’ve always written my best sermons at the poker table.”