US Casino Dealers
One of the Atlantic City dealers, Sonny Merlette tries to tutor a player on how to play craps. He is stationed where the stickman stands, across from the dealer, beginning an explanation of the “pass” and “don’t pass” lines and how the “come” and “don’t come” bets work. He teaches the player the payouts rated for each roll of the dice, a little about snake eyes theory and if you were being taught the game by now the lessons will easily blend in your mind like a heap of multi-colored chips.
Merlette tries to examine the learning curve. In the late 1970s, at the initiation of Atlantic City’s gambling history, Merlette administered some of the resort’s first casino craps tables. Now he works as the Director of new casino development at Casino Gaming Institute (CGI), assisting to tutor a new generation of casino employees.
The talented dealer explains that there is a lot of activity going on at a craps table, and it takes more than a year of dealing at the game of craps to actually help someone really understand the game.
Each game takes different amounts of time to study, and the most of the complexities to the game is reflected in CGI’s course offerings. At the institute, the classes for dealers are scheduled for two to eight weeks in length and cost about $200 to $800. Slot technician courses are more expensive, it consists of a sixteen week course priced at $2,578. Dealer Merlette suggests that varied game knowledge makes dealers more marketable and hireable.
He further recommends that students take classes in three different casino games because if they learn less than three games they have a lot more difficulty in finding a job.
Another future dealer taking advantage of the opportunity is Angela Samuel. She is a Pleasantville native, who enrolled at a local dealing school in the early 1990s because she wanted to improve her situation.
Samuel stated that she was on welfare during the 1990s, and did not want to be on welfare anymore.
Samuel managed to get off welfare, and finally began dealing blackjack at blackjack casino games tables in Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort and Claridge Casino Hotel. But you can only go up that far on dealing experience; hence Samuel is currently training to become a slot machine technician. She is studying about programmable read-only memory chips and transistors and other aspects that would make a high school tech student’s head burst – along with social lessons that can’t be found in the course program.
She stated that many of the slot technician jobs are handled by men, and that she was the only female in the class, so this was preparing her for what she will experience on the job. She is not a lover of sports or any other guy’s stuff, and these classes are helping her get used to the fact, to shape her character and become less judgmental.