Easier to perfect is the “chemmy” shuffle, an institutionalised version of the old bully’s favourite, the 52-card-pick-up. But, unlike both Colleen and Kirsty, my 35, 17 and 11 times tables are a little rusty. Even when I can calculate the answers – 17 chips for a split, 8 for a corner – it takes at least 10 seconds to give the final, correct answer. A real croupier would have handed over the chips, spun the next ball, and written an Elizabethan sonnet in that time.Still, maybe blackjack is where my talents lie. I’ve certainly displayed an uncommon talent, in my rare previous visits to casinos, in handing over chips on blackjack tables. As the afternoon’s “introduction to blackjack” session gets underway, the course tutor and casino veteran Wendy Bradley leads my table through the basics.You start with cards. Every dealer needs to be able to shuffle quickly and discreetly, and, to that end, everyone knows the riffle shuffle.
How Kirsty, who is on the small side of tiny, even manages to fit 20 in her hand is anyone’s guess.”Just practice and time, isn’t it?” says Kirsty, picking the two commodities I’m a little short on.Colleen, who, after 17 years in the gaming industry, knows a frustrated punter when she sees one, moves me on to something requiring mental, rather than physical diligence: how to calculate winnings on the roulette table. I think I’ve got the hang of what 20 feels like in my hand – just about as much as I can hold without getting cramp or dropping the lot – but I’m frequently wrong. Then, having established that there are 20 in your stack, you should be able, by gripping firmly with two fingers, and “cutting” with another, be able to separate the chips into equal stacks of five.It’s really difficult. She explains how all croupiers need a basic facility with handling and counting chips by feel.
Every croupier should be able to pick up a stack of chips and know, by how it feels in the hand, whether there are 19, or 20, or 21. She is one of 15 students that the academy takes on each three months, and looks like a pro.”But I’m weak with my left hand,” she says, furiously collecting chips from the roulette table in front of her as Bob Marley hums on the stereo.Colleen McLaughlin, the academy director, shows me what Kirsty is practising. Behind the security doors one discovers eager boys, students on the slot machine module, putting a one-armed bandit back together.In the academy’s main hall, where four roulette and four blackjack tables take pride of place, one eager beaver, Kirsty, has arrived two hours before class starts to practise her “chipping up” skills. The challenge, mildly put, seems huge.
Just arriving at the academy is an otherwordly experience. Lodged high in the knotty entrails of Blackpool and the Fylde College’s concrete structure, the centre lies behind stout security doors, two flights away from the hollering tracksuit-toters who loiter by the college entrance. Despite these natural disadvantages, The Independent has dispatched me to Britain’s first and only gaming academy, in Blackpool, to learn the dark arts of the casino employee. And, this being the age of “faking it”, my skills will then be tested the following day in a chic Piccadilly casino before a ruthless industry professional I will spend a day at the gaming academy Most students spend at least 12 weeks.
When God was designing the perfect croupier, he did not have me in mind. The great pit boss in the sky was, one imagines, thinking more along the lines of a Bond extra – a sleek, feline citizen with pneumatic fingers and an inclement heart. Not a second-row forward with poor arithmetic and hands like gammon. German police said 28 people were hurt, four seriously.
The accident happened early on Saturday on the A4 autobahn near Cologne after a coach carrying 55 pupils plus staff from Thomas Mills High School in Framlingham suffered a puncture and pulled on to the hard shoulder. The stationary coach was then hit from behind by a lorry carrying sheet metal.The lorry jack-knifed and was in collision with a second British coach carrying 36 pupils plus staff from Norwich School.. Pupils paid tribute yesterday to a teenager killed when two coaches taking British children on half-term holiday ski trips were involved in a crash with a lorry on a German motorway.