Interactive FUTURE OF CASINO DEALING
large scale changes to those arrangements. I think there is the potential to tie more closely together the online and retail side. It would be great to have a studio in London that allowed players to get to know dealing staff from a casino such as the Grosvenor Victoria London casino.
What do you look for when you hire dealers for Grosvenor’s retail sites?
Our emphasis when we hire dealers for our clubs leans much more towards an entertainment- focused personality, rather than concentrating on technical skills from the outset. We can teach the numbers, so we recruit the personality. We have to hire this way as we operate in a person-orien- tated business. 100,000 people walk through the door at a Grosvenor Casino and they want to see other people. Of course, we review all the techni- cal requirements and have the candidate under- take progressive service driven modular training programmes. We put a lot of emphasis on the technical side, which is a big difference between online and land-based. Our years working with a particular Italian training school has seen the quality of candidates improve as they realised the destination opportunities for their trainees. They are very appreciative of what we want and have worked closely with us to meet this standard. We
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still do the finishing school ourselves; the training officer taking the ‘almost’ finished articles, before turning them into a Grosvenor dealer.
Until equipped with technical skills the online dealer couldn’t deal in a retail environment. In the online space all the technical skills are comput- erised, with the online dealer focused solely on the service - they spin the ball, deal the cards, and that’s it. Having said that, coming from a back- ground of online dealing, you’re actually in a very small elite. If you have both retail and online experience, you’re employability is tremendous. In terms of a career path - I would employ in retail any of our online dealers, as they’ve shown they can thrive in that vacuum and I think they would be amazing in a live environment. As we look for players both in offline and online, a deal- er that can shine in both environments is very valuable indeed.
Grosvenor celebrates its dealer skills with an annual competition - what motivates dealers to enter and why stage the tournament, what does Grosvenor get from the event?
Dealers by nature are competitive - it’s a job that makes you want to be the best. Dealing is a cul- ture that believes both recognising skill and iden-
tifying weakness is a positive. People are nervous about being judged, but that competitive streak is something that makes sure that every year we see more and more entering the Dealer Skills Competition.
I also don’t believe that you can’t do either job (online or in land-based) if you don’t want to share your personality with others - you’ve got to be confident with people to be able to deal at a table. I actually think this is even more important online, as it’s less of a challenge to engage with a player in retail. I could never imagine in retail that we could get through the games so quickly as online. Online dialogue tends to be formulaic and there’s not more than a couple of indications to bet. In the retail environment it’s much more con- versational. Online you can only talk when bets are placed and and the ball is spun. It’s very a self-controlled environment, which means that engaging with the customer is much, much hard- er.
Our plans are to see the dealer competition expanding to include an element of the best deal- ing recognised in our online site as well as across our clubs. We want to celebrate great dealing wherever it touches our customers, both land- based and online.
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