Have you ever wondered about the possibility of becoming a Las Vegas Dealer? It looks easy enough and they get to handle all those chips! It might even be a job that feels like you’re on a vacation. After all, that’s what tourists do when they vacation in Vegas. They play the tables and hope to win. Locals do it, too. High stakes, adrenalin rush, lots of gorgeous women around…sound like its right up your alley? SLV recently sat down with a pro dealer here in Las Vegas to get a truer picture of what it’s like. Here are some basic ABC’s of learning the trade. Starting dealers, fresh out of school, usually get the graveyard shift. You have a floor person (Pit Boss) watching your every move until they’re confident that you know what you’re doing. In addition, you always have the eye in the sky looking down on you. You work the weekends and can’t party with your friends or catch any of the shows, but as with any job, hopefully you’ll enjoy dealing as much as this pro dealer we interviewed.

SCHOOL AND TRAINING
“There are probably 20 to 30 schools in Vegas. Some are better than others. I was lucky; I went to one of the top ones. The advice I have is to look online and ask around. Word of mouth is really telling. The one I went to had a lot of press blurbs on the site that were positive reviews. The owner of the school had been on a number of TV shows on the Travel Channel talking about gaming in Las Vegas. When I came to town, I checked out the school and the staff was nice and the guy who ran the school talked to me about what to expect. They let me sit there and watch to see how things worked. The people who were training there said positive things, so I ended up enrolling there. There are different prices at the different schools. Some will have packages that let you learn two games for the price of one. Some games can be more expensive than others. Poker is generally more expensive, as is Pai Gow Tiles, an Asian game played with dominos.

Black Jack is usually the first game you start learning. It might cost you from $300 to $400 to learn that game. I got Black Jack and Dice together for $500. They usually start out by teaching you how to shuffle, and how to handle the chips correctly. Then comes dealing out the hands. You must learn how to pay bets the correct way and, of course, Black Jacks. The math is different on those. You have to be quick with math in your head. Most of the math is pretty elementary, with basic multiplication, adding and subtraction, but it helps to be quick. They have tables set up at the school and you go and practice with the other students acting as your players and you practice a couple of weeks until you become proficient. You pass when one of the instructors, a working dealer in town, sits at your table and quizzes you on stuff. You deal some hands to them and if they pass you, you get your certificate and you’re ready to start at a beginning position at a casino.”

BLACK JACK
“My first job was for Black Jack. My second job was where I learned Roulette, Baccarat and Pai Gow Poker. The local casinos encourage you to train under their experienced dealers. During your breaks you can watch or assist the dealer. There are some rare occasions when I’ve seen a person who didn’t go to school because they knew a dealer that taught them at home. There is a lot of protocol that needs to be learned; like where to put your hands, and where not to put them. It took me about four weeks to learn Black Jack to the point where I was comfortable and didn’t have to think about it.

In the old days, there was more specialization. If you were a Black Jack dealer, you dealt Black Jack every day for your whole career. The same was true with Craps and Roulette. Nowadays, they encourage you to be multi-game, so they can move you around. If someone is sick, you can be put here or there and they put you basically anywhere they want to. So the more games you know and are proficient at, the more valuable you are. A lot of the dealers will have one game that they’re stronger at than others, but if they can move you around, that’s better for them and you.”

ROULETTE
“Roulette is probably one of my favorite games to deal because it keeps you thinking a lot. The first time I watched Roulette as a dealer, the Roulette dealer gave me a payout card to become familiar with for the different numbers or the split numbers. A split number in Roulette is where you put your chip between two numbers; say a 2 and a 5, that pays seventeen to one. When they then put you on the table, they have someone watching over you. If you get a really busy Roulette game, you’ve got seven or eight colored chips, and you’ve got stacks so high that they look like a city skyline. You know only one number is going to win, but you might have five or six different payoffs on that one number. You have to be aware and know what’s going on, because that busy a table can be a very easy game to cheat on. Past posting means that players are putting bets on the table after the number is resolved. The dealer has to keep his eyes on the players and the wheel. You have to learn how to deal with a person that cheats. If the dealer or floor person doesn’t catch them past posting, the guys upstairs usually will. The player caught cheating is invariably kicked out of the casino.”

BACCARAT
“Baccarat is actually a pretty easy game from the math perspective. There is a certain set of draw rules for the Banker hand. Those are typically the most difficult to learn, but it’s not exceptionally hard and most people can pick it up in a week or so. There is a 5% commission that has to be paid by the player on the banker’s hand. So you have to have some knowledge of percentages. But there are tricks to that too. For every five dollars, it’s a quarter. For every twenty-five dollar chip, it’s $1.25. For every hundred dollar chip, it’s five dollars. Most people bet in even units, so it’s not too difficult. Baccarat itself isn’t a hard game.”

CRAPS
“The more you know, the better. Learning more games ups your chances of getting hired. Some of the games are hard to be proficient at right out of school. Black Jack you can technically be okay because the game from a technical standpoint isn’t as difficult as Dice, Craps or Roulette. A busy Roulette game requires a lot of math. You have to be good with multiplication and addition. You have to take big numbers and multiply them together. There’s shortcuts for the math, of course, but it takes six months to a year to become really good at it. They say Craps takes a good two years dealing everyday to be really proficient at it, because of the payouts and the way they move the chips on the game. You have to get your hands in motion. If you’ve ever watched a Craps dealer working, they move the chips around; they know the payoffs and what that equates to in chips. The guy in the middle works the stick, calls the dice, and deals with the bets in the center. There is one guy on each end that are called the base dealers and they’re each responsible for their end of the table. You can have up to sixteen people on a Craps table. So if you get a really busy game, you need to know what each bet pays and how to cut that out with the different chips. With big numbers and a lot of players, it takes a lot of practice. Basically, the dealer in the middle with the stick doesn’t handle the money. Typically, this is the first position you start out on the Craps table. This position also needs to know the correct calls for whatever the dice roll is. The dice crew usually works on a rotation. Twenty minutes at the left spot, then twenty on stick and twenty at the right spot.”

TIPPING
“When you talk about tipping, Black Jack and Craps dealers usually make more money than dealers of the other games do. In both of these games it’s typical for players to bet for the dealer. For example if a Black Jack player gets a little run going, he may put another chip in front of his bet for the dealer. So if he wins, the dealer wins. Dealers don’t cheat, but it certainly puts the dealer psychologically on your side. You can’t tell who is going to be a good tipper. It helps to be pleasant with the people and chat with them a little bit, but some players don’t want as much conversation as others.”

CHEATING
“The guys upstairs that work on surveillance keep you honest. The Nevada Gaming Board doesn’t mess around. If a dealer were caught cheating, he’d be led off in handcuffs from the table until they decide what to do with him or her, and it’s usually jail time. Somebody should definitely not get into this job if they’re thinking of beating the system.”

PROMOTIONS
“A lot of times, if you’re proficient at your games, or if a new casino opens, you might be asked to step up and become a floor person to watch the games. A floor person can open a marker for someone, issue comps, player’s cards, and refill the rack with chips if someone won big. He makes sure the dealer is doing their job and the players are all happy and everybody’s got what they need. It also helps to be promoted if you are multi-lingual, or can speak Mandarin or Cantonese, since we have a large amount of Asian tourists. They seem to be the group with the biggest growth of visitors. Comps vary from casino to casino. A lot of the local casinos are more generous with their comps than they are on the Strip. The local casinos really like to have the locals come back often. So, if you give them a meal after they’ve played for a couple of hours, that helps keep them happy. Most of the time a player will ask for a comp. When the mob owned the casinos, as long as the casino was making a profit, they didn’t care about the rest of the hotel. Everyone else could be running deficits or running in the red, but as long as the casino was winning, they’d think that was okay. Now, with corporate ownership, they want all departments to show a profit. That’s led to some of the comps being downsized a little.”

WINNING STREAKS
“In days past, if a player was on a winning streak, the house might switch dealers, even though it wasn’t time for that dealer’s break. This was to slow down the streak. In the old days, pit bosses used to get bonuses for the amount of money held in the dealer’s rack. So, at the end of the day, if a dealer’s rack was up thousands and thousands of dollars and he did consistently, he’d get a quarterly bonus. The pit bosses had an interest in stopping any winning player from streaking. Nowadays, they don’t do that as much. They don’t sweat the money or give the dealers a hard time if they’re losing. Some of the older pit bosses or floor persons will still have that mentality because they started working with it. Obviously, the floor person still wants to make money, but if someone’s winning, they just let it go. Chances are they’ll be back in a couple hours or days and give some of the money back.”

PERKS OF THE JOB
“One of the perks of being a dealer is that you can eat in the employee dining room. They use the same food as they use on the buffet. At some of the high-end casinos, the employee dining room is better than a lot of restaurants around town—fresh sandwiches made for you, shrimp on ice…just about anything you want. It really saves on groceries! You can have small snacks during the day and then a big meal later on. The Chinese New Year is always a very busy time for casinos. Halloween is a very interesting time of year. Some of the costumes this year were out of control. Girls were wearing next to nothing. They have enough on by the legal definition, but then I’ve never seen anyone asked to leave because of dress or undress. We’re often asked about the city and people will ask where to go to eat, what’s a good club, or show recommendations. Sometimes a tourist just wants a break from the casino. I’ll recommend hiking at Red Rock or if they haven’t seen Hoover Dam, I’ll suggest they do that, for sure.” SLV

Issue 44 featuring: Carmen Hart, Kayden Kross & Samantha Ryan