I’ve recently got back from an operational consultancy job in South Africa, during which I had a chance to watch a lot of table games, both roulette and the card games. There were some sensational dealers, fighting hard to keep up with the pace of the players.
The roulette games out there – bearing in mind a lively roulette game is the real test of a dealer – were “UK style”, by which I mean lots of chips at relatively low value. If you play Roulette in Vegas, for example, you’ll tend to get maybe a quarter as many chips on the table, but at four times the value per chip as you’d see in the UK. They’re nowhere near as tough to deal as a proper eight-hundred chips per spin Chinese customer game like you’ll sometimes see on a Sunday night in a UK provincial casino – the type I faced as a young trainee dealer decades ago in Stanleys, Southampton.
It reminded me just how good experienced casino staff are at what they do. Staff turnover being what it is, the average length of service in the UK isn’t as long as it used to be, so you don’t see quite as many dealers with ten years in the business, and many of the people who have stuck around that long spend more time supervising than dealing. However, when you do see an absolute gun dealer, it’s something to behold.
The last time I saw a real show was in Blackpool, of all places, with Coral Island’s casino having two roulette tables with the dealers back-to-back. I’m sure a lot of you, reading this, will feel the same as me about two perfectly dealt roulette games running next to each other – man, it was like watching an elite sportsperson perform. When you think about it, if you’re ten years in, you’ve spent as many hours on your craft as a top end athlete, so you’d expect world class skills, but when you see two at once it’s electrifying.
Those games absolutely sang. It’s not just the technical precision, with every cut chip landing exactly where it’s supposed to, it’s the totally effortless way both dealers knew every players’ preferred payout mix, without ever asking – they’d just picked it up over the prior thirty or so minutes of dealing. When they span the ball they would, at some subconscious level, know where to expect placed bets from, and be ready for late call bets, which would land on that racetrack without the dealer appearing to need to look down.
Perfect game pacing is a joy to behold too – without ever needing to tell players what to do, they’d have it down to the second, with the last bets going down right before they called “no more bets”. I could have watched them for hours – I was never close to that good as a dealer – but eventually they both had a well-deserved break and were replaced by a couple of (relatively speaking) carthorses. The gap between genuinely elite dealers and regular two-or-three years’ experience guys might not have been obvious to the average person, but a lot of you reading this would have seen it instantly.
The same principle applies to Blackjack dealers too – when you get someone who’s an absolute master, the cards come out at unbelievable speed while it looks like the dealer is moving in slow motion. When I trained, I was always told that anyone can deal with speed, but the aim is to look sharp. I had no idea what they meant at the time, but now I get it – when it looks like the dealer is half asleep but every card lands, at speed, within a hair of where it’s supposed to be – that’s sharp.
I really must get to the Dealer Championships that are held for each country (and the European final) but I’m not sure it’d be the same in a competitive environment. I prefer wandering around casinos as I do in my professional life, and every now and again just finding a quiet spot to watch a genuine expert play their trade. Just now and again you’ll stumble across someone who’s among the best in the world at what they do, and when you find one that’s running a busy game and making it look laughably easy, an hour goes by in a minute, and you realise just how amazing some of these dealers can be.