Students hope a casino career is in the cards

I’ve yet to shuffle a card, and already my poker-dealing sensei is giving me the third degree. “Wrong!” he barks, rearranging my fingers over the cards. “You can’t let anybody get a peek of what you got in there.”

We move on to cutting technique. Same result.

“Wrong.”

And pitching. And chip wrangling. And side bets.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

A cold wave of self-realization washes over me: I’m a dreadful poker dealer. My meager home-game skills would never pass muster in a casino. The ballet of concealment and economy that looks so effortless when one is laying bets instead of collecting them is, in fact, effort-intensive. Card dealing-wise, I’m a hippo in a tutu.

THE SETUP

Cosmo Raymond was like me once. Two years ago, the retired food-services CEO enrolled at the ABC Bartending & Dealing School in Tempe to launch a second career as a poker dealer. Then he took an unexpected detour.

“I found that I really enjoyed the process of learning and teaching,” he recalls, with hearty East Coast amiability. “So I made the owners an offer and bought the school.”

Now he makes a living as a sort of card-college dean, educating the professional dealers who could be raking in your chips in an Indian casino or Mississippi blackjack barge someday.

THE PLAY

Tucked away in a nondescript Tempe business park, the school betrays no outward hint of the vice-enabling pedagogy taking place inside.

Proceeding past the lobby, visitors are greeted by a pair of incongruous sights: A fully stocked bar in one room, complete with neon beer ads and coasters, and a row of card tables and gamblers in the other. It’s like a speakeasy for the call-center set.

It’s an academic illusion, of course. The booze bottles are filled colored water and the gamblers are students, wagering worthless chips under life-dampening fluorescent light.

On a sleepy weekday morning, the card-dealing half of the operation is surprisingly spry, with roughly a dozen students playing dummy games of poker and blackjack. Aspiring card dealers from as far as Russia and Sweden have attended Raymond’s school, but on this day, all of the students are local — mostly middle-aged, mostly looking for a second career.

One of them, a thickly muscled, densely tattooed Italian-American named Jimmy DellaCioppa, smooth-calls an out-of-position raise and admits that the petal has fallen on his career as a nightclub bouncer.

“I’m just getting too old to fight,” he laments. “And gentlemen’s clubs aren’t doing well these days. The industry is dying. I’m thinking that the casino industry is more stable.”

THE STING

A quick census of the table reveals a varied lot. One of the students is a waitress at Sky Harbor. Another sells insurance. Another stocks the kitchen at Gila Bend Casino, but wants to move onto the gaming side.

Raymond says the typical student requires 80 to 100 hours of instruction before he or she is proficient in poker, blackjack or the so-called “carnival” games, including Let It Ride and that favorite of Asian grandmothers, pai gow.

Once students have graduated from the school, they must audition at a casino or card room for employment, much like an actor or dancer.

Raymond estimates their yearly earnings in the $60,000 to low-six-figures range.

“Almost all the states have casinos,” the school’s poker instructor, Rodney Palmer, insists. “Hawaii and Utah don’t have them. Maybe a couple of others. So the jobs are out there.”

At least one student isn’t so sure. “The casinos aren’t hiring right now — people don’t gamble as much when the economy is bad,” he says, somewhat morosely.

Intrinsic ability is also a factor. Prospective dealers must have sure, nimble hands and a good head for numbers. One student, Eddie Banuelos, the Gila Bend employee, says that he’s been coming to ABC off and on for a year. He didn’t get a passing grade on poker, so now he’s trying blackjack.

That’s fine with Raymond. Once students pays their tuition fee, $699, the school will stick with them to the end. And then some.

“Even after they get a job, they’re free to come back anytime,” he says. “We like to think of them as family.”

Get Started
Contact the ABC Bartending & Dealing School at (480) 654-9336 or www.abcbartending.com.