Feature: Richard Marcus
Here To Protect The Ups and Downs of Being a Casino Game Protection Trainer
D
on’t get me wrong about the downs! There’s nothing I love more than getting a call from a casino asking me to come to their property and train their Tables Games or Surveillance Staff. The pay is excellent and if I didn’t get those calls, I wouldn’t have much to do with my professional life anymore. After all, spending the first 25 years of adulthood as a casino cheat doesn’t exactly put together an eye-catching resume for most of the world’s job markets. The job itself is not easy, especially if you’re in the latter stages of middle age or beyond! In my case, there’s lots of international travel involved, and that alone takes a lot out of you. And then there’s the scheduling. Virtually all training takes place during the week, so when you’re on the road, you find yourself killing lots of non-profitable time in hotel rooms. The actual training sessions pass quite quickly because they are never boring. However, at the end of the day you feel it because you’ve been on your feet talking for eight hours straight, even during lunch because attendees are always coming up to you asking questions and making comments, which is all good. And in cases where I train at one property for an entire week, the voice can go AWOL by the end of day 3 or beginning of day 4. And I rarely use visuals! But I am not complaining. Overall, my training sessions, both to individual casinos at their properties and to open multi-group casino seminars in major gaming areas, are quite rewarding experiences for me, and I would think as well for the grand majority of the attendees who participate. However, there are some frustrations, the biggest one being attendees who don’t come to a seminar with an open mind. The first thing game protection training attendees need to have to come away with something valuable from a training session is an open mind and a willingness to believe the possibility of something seemingly impossible, even Volume 16: Issue 139
Richard Marcus
when it happens to them. I like to say to an audience, “If I were some guy you met in a bar and I told you the moves I pulled off in casinos, you would tell me to take a hike with some expletive at the end. That is understandable, but, unfortunately, some attendees take that same attitude at a training session. Then I say, “But if what I am going to tell and show you over the next several hours are not reality, then I wouldn’t be here standing in front of you, would I?” The point simply being that I would not have received 39
