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A good bet: New Yorkers are lining up to become casino dealers
By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Nov 12, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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Hannah Frishberg / Gothamist
By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Nov 12, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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The odds seem to be in their favor.
On the sixth floor of a NoMad office building, an hour’s drive from New York City’s first full-scale casino in Jamaica, the Big Deal Casino Academy has been scaling up to keep pace with demand.
During a recent Thursday morning class at Big Deal, a diverse array of students practiced the card game Baccarat. Cocooned from Manhattan’s busy streets within a narrow office building, the windowless space was quiet but for the clicking of cards and chips.
Big Deal founder Wendy Rubin is a poker player who said she “saw the writing on the wall” for the city’s impending need for dealers. She poured her life savings into starting the first incarnation of the Academy, the boroughs’ only Department of Education-licensed dealer school, back in 2014, soon after the New York legislature passed resolutions permitting casino gaming in the city. She didn’t anticipate that it’d take over a decade for the casinos to actually arrive.
Then at last, this April, Resorts World Casino launched live table games. A second casino, adjacent to Citi Field, and a third in the Bronx are both slated to open in 2030.
“I've kinda hung in there like a dog with a bone, waiting, waiting, waiting — and here we are,” Rubin said. Now, “We get people calling all the time looking to take classes. After so many years of waiting, it’s really rewarding.”
“It’s become a hotter job,” said Brooklyn native and Bed-Stuy resident Tony Hall, 28, a dealer manager at Resorts World who teaches at Big Deal. “Growing up, I never heard anyone say, ‘hey, I wanna be a table games dealer. I wanna work in a casino.’”
Now, though, friends and family often contact him about what it takes to get the gig after seeing him making good money without having to do grueling physical labor.
“It's never too hard to take someone’s bet, or to pay someone out, or to flip a card,” Hall said. It’s a far cry from the work that was expected of him during his days driving trucks for FedEx, loading boxes for UPS and cleaning up schools as a custodian for the Board of Education. It's better money too, not to mention a more reliable schedule. After switching to be a dealer, “I didn’t have no back pains. I’m not going home with no headaches, no nothing, no stress. It’s a real easy labor job.”
Dealing is also appealing for its relatively low bar for entry: It takes approximately nine weeks and $2,780 to get certified. No high school diploma is necessary. Those who’ve been convicted of certain felonies — fraud, perjury, embezzlement — or have been found to demonstrate financial instability through failure to pay child support or unpaid taxes are ineligible.
Since the house always wins, employment is relatively secure, and for now jobs are plentiful and unionized. Those who are promoted to be pit bosses and floor managers lose their union cards but often make six figures annually.
To become certified and hirable, aspiring croupiers must formally learn blackjack and one other table game of their choice. Right now, Rubin said, Resorts World is looking for craps dealers. Craps is a notably challenging game to play and deal, so she and her team have been keeping an eye out for students who seem well-suited for it, no matter their know-how entering the Academy.
The school, meanwhile, is being challenged by the casinos themselves, which teach dealers in-house, creating something of a competition for both students and teachers. (Unlike the DOE-licensed Big Deal, casinos’ internal education programs are overseen by the Gaming Commission.)
“In fact, the casino hired all of our teachers,” she said, a fact she acknowledged was “certainly a little challenging.”
But she’s rehired and is confident that “in a year or so I imagine everything will shake itself out — there’ll be enough teachers, there’ll be enough dealers, everybody will be happy.”
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Hannah Frishberg
Hannah Frishberg covers New York City arts and culture. Got a tip? Email Hannah at [email protected].
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