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| He always kept his cool! |
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. 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.
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 to 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 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 is 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 a call from their casino department heads to come and train the casino in the first place. This usually gets most of the people who didn't come to the training with an open mind to open up their minds.
But not all.
However, I can deal with that and it's not frustrating. You cannot expect everyone to believe in new elements of training that contradict what they have already learned or experienced.
What does get my goat is when that disbelief is replaced by ignorance, over-aggressiveness and just plain resentment against me. Some people just don't accept learning game protection from an ex-cheat and have to vent that resentment by challenging me at every step and corner. Challenges are fine and I encourage them, but not when they get out of hand.
For example, at a European international event not long ago, I was doing a segment on daub card-marking, using 3-card poker as an example. So without asking the attendees which 3 cards would the card-markers be most interested in marking, I just got right into it telling them they would mark the Qs, Ks and As since they are the most important cards in the game. But as I started showing it, one attendee, actually a well-respected operations manager from a major European casino with 30 or 35 years experience, challenged me and said they might want to mark the 2s, 3s and 4s instead. At first I thought he was joking but he persisted to the point where he was disrupting the seminar. I kept asking him why would they mark the 2s, 3s and 4s instead of the three most important cards to the game. Then I thought maybe he didn't know the dealer qualifying rules. But he did know them and still persisted that the likelihood of marking the 2s, 3s and 4s was no different from that of marking the Qs, Ks and As, given only 3 ranks of cards would be marked.
Well, I lost my cool and let the ignorance of this person get to me. I argued with him until I was blue in the face and finally had to say lightheartedly, "OK, sir, you're right...."
After the seminar, another attendee who had witnessed my frustration approached me and said, "You know what? You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Everyone here paid a significant amount of money to attend your class. If someone wants to behave like that, just move on. Don't let it interfere with what you're trying to accomplish."
I explained to him how it bothered me so much because I really care about people learning and getting something out of my seminars. He just shook his head and said succinctly, "Sometimes you just can't give insight to those who wanna be blind."
And then he recounted a story about Steve Jobs, whom I think is one of the greatest human beings to ever step foot on earth. He told me that Jobs once said in an interview that when hecklers at his presentations would stand up and shout out something nasty about his products, like this or that iPhone sucks, he would just take pause for 10 seconds, look upward and take a deep breath, and then just go on about what he was saying about the product. He said that calmed him down and avoided confrontations.
I have since adopted the Steve Jobs method of dealing with onsite frustration and it has indeed helped me.
Thank you, Steve.
I would like to close with one incident that happened a few years back that is the epitome of not keeping an open mind. In one session, an elder attendee challenged me on a certain type of roulette cheat move. He said it could never be done on him or anyone else in his casino, and he took it to the wall and seemingly would have bet his life on it. Well, as fate would have it, not only could it be done on him and his casino, it WAS done on him IN his casino! Twice!
You see, while I was in the casino-cheating business for 25 years I kept records on every move I ever did, all thousands of them. I charted who the dealer was, who the floor supervisors were, if there was any heat, if surveillance was called or another pit notified, etc., etc. It just so happened I recognized this particular attendee as a dealer I had beaten with the same cheat move some years prior. He had very distinct physical characteristics. Of course his adamant refusal to accept reality pissed me off, but of course as well, I couldn't say that I had done the exact same move on him twice...for two reasons: 1) It would not be acceptable etiquette on my part; 2) He would have never believed me anyway!
That...is the frustration of game protection training.
So if luck has it that I ever visit your casino to do some training, please keep an open mind!
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