So, cut a long story short, the pro poker player thing went fine for a few years until it didn’t, and I needed a job quickish with no references…so off to the local generic national chain casino for a dealer test, please, and they were like you’re fine, you start on Monday.
I’ve got this, I thought.
Whoa, there: steady, tiger. It’s really not just as easy as it looks.
The pay is awful and the hours are brutal. Minimum wage, pretty much, and say goodbye to all your social life because you are now working all weekend, every weekend, and chuck in a several weekday evenings while you’re at it too. But it is what it is, made-bed-must-lie-in-it and all that, and I really don’t want to slag off my employer (because a lot of local players obviously know who they are) because they didn’t have to take me on and to be fair the people there are all lovely – really! – with a good strong team ethic and lots of mutual support. And they do pay me some actual money for sitting down in the warm.
The problem is the players. Now don’t get me wrong, by and large they are pretty nice people, it’s just that money does a funny thing to a man (and it is the men) and when someone is doing their bollocks they become a different person. Take one incident just last night for example, and by the way I’ve changed a few details to protect confidentiality. I’m dealing the £1/£1 pot limit Omaha game, which is the hardest game to deal that we offer. So, deal 42 cards accurately to seven players, keep an exact running total of the pot, be able to tell someone what a pot-sized raise is pretty much instantly, and still referee the table fairly. And it’s 3 in the morning. Hard. So, we get to the river, the board reads K3Q98 rainbow, seat one checks, seat 3 bets a decent chunk – a hundred quid or so – and seat one calls. Seat 3 somewhat triumphantly throws down KKQ with one hand and three other rag cards with the other, and seat one starts sorting through his cards in his hand. Because he’s in seat one I can see his cards. Now it may look like seat 3 has a full house, but he doesn’t, it’s the best 2 cards in his hand and only the best 2 cards, so what he actually has is trip kings. I can see that seat one has Jack 10 in his hand for the king high straight, which is the stone nuts on this board, but he hasn’t tabled his hand so I can’t say anything yet – and eventually he tosses his hand forward, face up, toward me, ish, but not directly into the muck. As it’s in the air, I announce ‘straight, ten-jack’.
Seat 3 just loses his shit right there. He says seat 1 was mucking his hand. I say he wasn’t, it was face up, he was tabling it. The guy just goes off on one. The floor is called over and I have to admit that yes, the cards weren’t actually flat on the felt when I announced the hand. They were about to be, but weren’t. Seat 3 starts asking for compensation from the casino. The supervisor has to go and talk to her manager. The whole table is shouting and I’m still sat there in the middle of this. Seat one says that he hadn’t seen the straight – seat 3 goes even madder – but that he was tabling his hand. Seat 3 goes madder still.
I am taken off the table for a bit. I’m fine, thick skin and all that, but we have to do it sometimes because the dealer’s presence is just aggravating some of the players and they are going to start arguing with every decision. There’s another Omaha table anyway and I’m put on that instead. I’m now feeling that I’m under even more pressure not to mess this up, but there’s no choice because we’ve only got one hold-em table running and the dealer on that doesn’t have the experience to deal Omaha yet.
He didn’t get any compensation, by the way, and I did deal to him later on without any problem. But it’s like the dealer isn’t there, a lot of the time. The players will talk about how the dealer training has gone downhill and how the quality is worse than it used to be and I’m thinking “dude, I’m sat right here“. Now I know that everyone who reads this is always lovely to the dealers, always. But if you were ever tempted to not be quite as nice, remember that we are doing maybe 50 hours of nights some weeks while you are having an evening out enjoying yourselves, and that it’s constant concentration and we are not machines, huh? Ta.
And also, later on, I did get to sit around with the supervisor and a couple of other dealers playing a mock-up Omaha game to give the new dealer some training in dealing it, and they paid me to do that, so it’s not all bad.
