Padding The Ol' Resume

I recently posted about my new favorite casino pastime, Pai Gow poker. Since I enjoy the easy-going aspect of the game, I decided to go ahead and learn to deal it. My casino has about five or six pai gow tables going at any one time--it's hugely popular--so I figured it'd be a good break from dealing dice and blackjack. And having a third game in the arsenal of mad skillz doesn't hurt either. If I went back to dealers school to learn it they'd charge me a couple hundy, but luckily I can learn it free of charge at work, if I just choose to do it on my own time. So I chose to.

First of all, on Wednesday night (ok, early Thursday morning) I went over to my friend Jen's house after we got out of work and she gave me the basic procedures and got me started on all of the 'House Ways' of setting hands. We did that for about an hour or so, then downed a 12-pack of Pacifico and watched Dazed & Confused until around 6:30 am or so. Alright alright alright....Lemme tell ya what ol' Melba Toast is packin'...

Anyhow, I rolled out of there with a better grasp of how to deal the game, which brought me to today. It was my day off, but the training room is open every Friday for game-tutoring, so I spent two hours this afternoon going over the finer points of the dealing it (heavy emphasis on the 'banking' procedures) with the training manager, then spent an hour and a half on a live game dealing to real people. And I then proceeded to just crush everyone, so they're gonna probably put me on that game a couple nights a week now. No problem, it's much less tedious than dealing blackjack (especially if I'm stuck dealing single- or double-deck games all night), and I won't have to deal with all the jackasses that hang out at the dice table, so I'm looking forward to changing it up a couple times a week. Not that blackjack is that tedious, but we don't have enough 'shoe' games--if I'm stuck dealing 'pitch' games all night, it really wears me out having to shuffle every two minutes on a table thats about 3 inches too short.

And--bonus-- if the folks in charge at Sunset don't hurry up and get off of their asses and make me full-time (I've been on the Extra board for six months now), I've just made myself more valuable on the open market.

Either way, I'm trying to learn as much as I can because I've still got a year to decide if I want to stay in the casino business or go back to the equities game. My NASD registrations expire in January of 2007, and if I let them go at that time, they're gone forever--I can never go back to that career unless I start over at rock bottom. So I've still got a year to make sure that this is right for me. Right now, I'm thinking that I prefer Vegas...

Mikey