As I reported in my article last month, I started out in the casino business in the late seventies at Harrah's Lake Tahoe. Much of the blackjack games there, as well as in Reno, were single deck, and the 6:5 payout was not even heard of. Today the 6:5 payouts can be found in abundance. On the Las Vegas Strip, you will not find any 3:2 blackjack games unless your minimum bet is $25, and on weekends the minimum can be substantially higher. Most single-deck games in Vegas are 6:5, with only a few casinos offering the 3:2 payouts. As you can see, a lot has changed since I first started working in the gaming industry.

My first gig in Vegas was as an extra board poker dealer in a small local's joint. We had four tables, and spread a $2-4 limit Texas Hold'em game. At one point, we tried a $2-6 spread limit game, but that did not last long. Our clientele complained that the spread on the game was too expensive so management went back to the $2-4 game.

When I first started dealing, tips were ok; some days I would go home with over eighty bucks in quarters. A good day in our room was anything over one hundred bucks. We also had nightly tournaments and dealers split monies from the entry fees, and usually a three dollar add on also went to the dealers.

In the beginning, tips from the tournaments would range from ten to fifteen dollars a down (a "down" being 30 minutes). As time went on, our tips went down, averaging about seven bucks a down. When I left the poker room, my tips had gone from over four hundred to around two hundred dollars a week. In the beginning, I made more money as an extra board poker dealer then what I earned as a full time table games dealer. However, with full time employment, I have health insurance, paid time off, vacation, and a $25,000 life insurance policy.

Poker dealers keep their own tips; table game dealers split their tips. Another positive about dealing poker is that most poker rooms do not allow smoking. If you cannot tolerate cigarette smoke, you will most likely hate dealing table games because, unfortunately, you get a lot of chain-smokers in the casino.

I liked the money and the smoke free environment in the poker room but that was about it. I found most poker players to be rude, and a lot went out of their way to be jerk-off's. Now, I am not saying you don't get those types on table games; believe me, you do. But, as a table-games dealer you do forty minutes to, at most, an hour and twenty minute downs. A lot of times as a poker dealer, if I was the closing dealer, you could be locked in until the morning if the game went that long. That usually happened Fridays and Saturdays when we had out of town players instead of the local nits. The longest down I have done as a table-games dealer was two hours; usually our downs are forty minutes, with a twenty-minute break. I have worked numerous times over twelve hours dealing poker. The floor supervisor would give you breaks if you asked, but in a cash game every minute you are not dealing costs you money.

Your most important function as a table-games dealer is game protection. I won't go into details because you will get that training at a dealer's school. Once, I caught a female player past posting a five-dollar bet on the Lucky Ladies side bet. Her effort to make fifty bucks got her hand-cuffed and taken to the security office, where she was given a free ride by metro to the city's Holiday Inn for three hots' and a cot. By the way, the casino will prosecute even if you take five bucks. If they have you on camera, you will be arrested and charged. Believe me, when I say that if you pick your nose anywhere on the casino floor, they probably have footage.

Past posting seems to be the biggest con gamblers try to pull. Past posting is basically adding chips to your bet once you know you have a winning hand. Some players will try to take a glimpse of the cards as the dealer deals them. I don't believe that is cheating because you are taking advantage of a sloppy dealer (or at least a novice dealer that is right out of gaming school). The casino, however, looks at it as cheating; you may not get a ride with metro, but you will be tossed by security.

I must admit that we have some terrible dealers. One guy has a problem keeping his rack straight, basically all the chips, with exception of dollars, are kept in stacks of twenty. The stacks are separated by plastic lammers. Tough job, right? One night I was working the floor and this dealer was at a table, and I was closing. I looked at the rack and asked him to check his stack of red chips because they looked short. As I suspected, it was off by three chips, which meant every stack was off by three. The rack was off $405 dollars; three black chips ($100), three green ($25) and six red ($5). Had I not caught that error, I probably would have lost my duel-rate position.

The dealer school that I attended would not send you to a casino audition unless you passed two auditions at the school. You had to take a test with the instructor, and if you passed, you had an audition with the owner of the school. The new dealers that we have been getting, in my opinion, would not pass the auditions at the school that I attended. (Nick Karros Casino Gaming School, located at Rainbow and Sahara.)

Check cutting, shuffling, pitching, and game procedure are the basics that you need to be proficient before going out in the real world as a casino dealer. I hate to say this but a lot of the dealers that get hired these days based on their looks. If I had to do it over ... Asian female would be the ticket.

Party pit girls are hired because of their looks, period! At the dealer's school, the party pit girls came to learn certain games since they already had jobs. Many of them had a hard time adding ten plus ten. In Las Vegas sex sells. (Fortunately, we do not have a party pit where I work, thank God.)

Next month I will finish up with some of the crazier things I have seen as a duel-rate dealer.