Dealers prepare for Mohegan Sun's return to poker

Mohegan, Conn. — Maria Echevarria sat in the dealer’s chair at a Mohegan Sun poker table Wednesday morning and tried to figure out where to put the side pot of chips generated by a player going all in during a hand of Texas Hold ’em.

After debating whether to push the pile to the left or the right, Echevarria, who hopes to move from cage supervisor to poker dealer, looked up at Mary Dorantes.

“Which side should I put the side pot?” she asked her instructor.

“Whatever is comfortable for you,” Dorantes said.

With the opening of its Casino of the Wind expansion less than two months away, Mohegan Sun is preparing for the return of poker by training potential dealers in a series of six-week courses this summer. The casino will hire about 240 dealers to staff the smoke-free room, but instructors said they probably will teach about 300 students in the weeks before the late-August opening.

“We didn’t have to go any farther than locally,” Rob Staehle, a poker instructor, said about looking for employees.

Even then, Dorantes said, the dealer school drew more than anticipated.

“I believe there is a waiting list,” she said.

Mohegan Sun closed its poker operations in September 2003, replacing its 39 poker tables with slot machines. Jeff Hartmann, the casino’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, said the casino was catering to the demand for slots.

“If you looked at Mohegan Sun and its profitability,” he said of the switch and the possibility of having kept poker, “it probably could have enhanced, but I don’t think it hurt us.”

Terry Chiaradio, director of poker operations at Foxwoods Resort Casino, which has offered poker since it opened in 1992, said Mohegan’s 2003 decision was surprising.

“That is when everything was starting to grow,” she said. “Those people that would play over there came to us.”

That poker is returning to Mohegan Sun, Chiaradio said, shouldn’t affect the now-103-table room at Foxwoods.

“We have our customers that we’ve been loyal to,” she said. “They’re happy here.”

During that time, poker exploded. Tournaments became must-see TV, and online poker sites boomed. Clyde Barrow, head of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, said poker, while popular, isn’t a huge revenue generator for casinos, because players bet against each other, not the house.

“I know it’s big on cable TV, but it’s not a money maker,” he said. “There’s much more lucrative ways to use that space.”

Poker dealers at Mohegan Sun will keep their own tips, also known as tokes, rather than pool them as table game dealers do. That means instead of adding about $15 to their base hourly wage of slightly more than $5, dealers could earn upwards of $30 an hour if players tip well. And that’s enough incentive for Kate McIntyre, a college student who has dealt blackjack and other games at Mohegan Sun for the past four years, to try to make the switch.

“I can’t stand when I put my tokes in that box,” the 27-year-old Norwich woman said. “I smile and I’ve got personality, and I know dealers who don’t.”

An anthropology student, McIntyre said she always greets the players at her table and asks about what kind of family they have or work they do. She said she’s also not afraid to tell a player she thinks needs a break to go take a walk to decompress.

Graduating from the school Friday, McIntyre expects to learn shortly afterward whether she’s got a coveted spot in the room dealing a game she loves.

“It’s like the chess of the casino,” she said. “There’s a lot more thinking involved.”

Norwich Bulletin

News Added: 10 July, 2008

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