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RINGS, immaculate nail polish. The cards flip smartly into place as she first shuffles, then halves the pack. She lifts them lightly at the corners and c-r-a-c-k, the deck miraculously merges again. The Riffle Shuffle. It looks possible, even easy when Marion Shennan does it, but when I try myself the cards feel stiff, over-large, my hands the digital equivalent of slugs – thick, slow-moving and graceless. Odds on my ever achieving the manual dexterity to become a croupier? About a million to one.
God, it’s disappointing. This is my chance to learn the arcane tricks of the croupier, to penetrate the mysterious world of casinos. Shennan has set up Casino Training UK, Scotland’s first such school, in Glasgow, offering a 10-week croupier skills course for those who want to enter the expanding world of casino gambling. Many casinos are importing croupiers because there are so few trained staff available here. “People have to understand this is not going to be one of those fluffy courses,” says Shennan. “This is a 10-week training course in which we actually give you a career.”
Initially when 10 weeks was mentioned I figured 10 weeks of evening classes. But training to be a croupier is not just digitally demanding, it is also completely arithmetically exhausting. It’s going to make my head hurt just explaining this to you, but here goes. If you put one chip on one square on the roulette board your odds of winning are 35 to one, which is called a straight up. But if you want to lay a split bet and cover two numbers that’s 17 to one. Two splits plus a straight up are 69 to one. If you’re still with me and fancy your chances of mastering the 17-times table, you might have a hope of becoming a croupier. I got lost myself a few sentences back.
There has been an enormous boom in all kinds of gambling worldwide over the past decade. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the gap between rich and poor has been increasing in that time. Australia has a huge problem with fixed-odds poker machines, “pokies” as the Aussies call them, while the global internet gambling market is worth £12 billion and rising. In Scotland, a young man tried to kill himself after running up online debts of £158,000 on his parents’ credit cards – in just 50 minutes.
The British government had plans for enormous expansion of the casino business, not only to increase the number of establishments, but to introduce huge super- casinos and attract big international gaming companies into the UK. “They decided that people should be allowed to gamble, that it’s just part of leisure,” says Professor Jim Orford of Birmingham University’s school of psychology. “So suddenly everybody started to make a fuss and said, ‘Haven’t you heard about problem gambling?’ The House of Commons got very excited and made them cut down their plans. They wanted 40 casinos at first, then it was eight. Then they said, ‘We’ll just have one in the first instance.’ I don’t think they knew what hit them.”
Eight cities, including Glasgow, are still in the running to bag the one super-casino, though the odds are that it will go to one more “centrally” based – in other words, London (US tycoon Philip Anschutz – whose company wants to site a mega-casino in the Millennium Dome – was at the centre of controversy last week, when it emerged that John Prescott had stayed at his ranch). Licences are also being granted for 16 regional casinos, which are expected to bring a huge amount of money to the areas chosen. The one Scottish council on the shortlist is Dumfries and Galloway, not the obvious location for a casino, though in the US many, particularly those run by Native Americans, are situated in rural areas.
Since 1968, the casino business has been one of the most tightly regulated industries in Britain. Previously, gambling restrictions had been loosened, with the effect that criminals immediately moved into the industry, creating the world you see so often in films – the heavies on the door, the trip to the manager’s inner sanctum when a gambler wins too much against the house. “The initial legislation allowed casinos to flourish but when the criminal element moved in, the law was changed very quickly,” says Orford. “The government is very conscious of that.”
Despite the tight control, there has always been a romance about casinos, a sensuality that no other form of gambling can compete with. I’m thinking of Clive Owen smouldering in Croupier, or the young Sean Connery gazing across the roulette tables in Monte Carlo at endless beautiful women. To be a croupier in that kind of company … you’d definitely be ahead.
I pursue this dream at Marion Shennan’s Glasgow west end home. The living room is full of books, dodgy-looking plaster work, and a roulette wheel. For a moment I harbour the brief fantasy that the wheel is an item of domestic negotiation for Shennan and husband Frank, a director of her company. Lamb chops for tea tonight or pasta provençale? Are you doing the dishes or am I?
Alas, it turns out that neither Marion nor Frank gambles. They went on a working trip to Las Vegas and gambled two dollars between them. This might seem like a pathological aversion to risk-taking, but then the central truth of the gambling business is that the owners’ profit depends on other people taking risks. They don’t take them themselves. Given that the odds are on the casino’s side, it has always puzzled me that people carry on gambling when they’re consistently losing, but this, it seems, is a misconception.
“They’re not,” says Mark Griffiths, a chartered psychologist and professor of gambling studies of Nottingham Trent University. “They’re consistently nearly winning. Slot machines in particular give lots of near-winning experiences. You can gamble 12 times in a minute, so as soon as you gamble once you’ve already forgotten about the guilt of losing and are on to the next one. What gamblers have a capacity to do is turn losing situations into winning ones.”
That’s just in their heads, of course – their bank balances are still as depleted. The training course Shennan offers is the punters’ chance to see things from the winning side. Casinos always win, not just because the odds are stacked in their favour but because they create an ambience where people are urged towards making quick decisions. “It’s sounds, colours, lights,” says Griffiths. “People gamble more under red lights than blue because it’s a more arousing, fiery colour. When money is paid out, it’s paid out in full view, telling everybody in the environment that people are winning. You never hear the sound of losing, only the sound of winning. It’s like the lottery show – they don’t bring on the 29.9m losers.”
Marion Shennan got into the casino industry through her first husband, a croupier. She was working in offices during the day and he was in casinos at night and they saw each other so rarely, she began to consider going into his business. A newspaper advert featuring the QE2 seems to have clinched it: “How would you like to cross with the QE2? Become a croupier!” So she did, at a time when ships’ casinos were only open for a couple of hours in the afternoon and from 10pm until 3am. “The people were mostly of retiring age so we rarely had late nights,” she says tactfully.
Shennan has the impeccable grooming and smart dress of the pretty woman who has never taken her looks for granted. But then she has had to work hard for everything she has. Her company, Top Hat, was set up after her first marriage collapsed, as a way of providing for her two children.
Raised in Inverness , Shennan became a woman of the world, used to coping with whatever cards life dealt her. After her stint on cruise liners, she and her husband ended up in Iran when the last shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, was in power. As a woman, Shennan could not be a croupier, but she worked as a waitress in the casino. “The tips were phenomenal,” she says.
The casino staff lived in a large villa on the Caspian coast, the favoured holiday spot of wealthy Iranians. The villa had been built by Hitler and, in true Third Reich fashion, had massive steps leading up to it. It was commandeered by the shah for talks with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. “There were men with bulging jackets everywhere. Once you got in you weren’t allowed to leave the premises at all. The road surfaces were terrible and tarmac was laid overnight. It was fascinating to see up close. I’m sure it happens everywhere with [President] Bush now, but then we felt the amount of security was really over the top.”
At the time – the late 1970s – huge amounts of money were sloshing around Iran. The shah’s sister often came to the casino to play blackjack in their salon privé. She went missing one day, prompting panic among her entourage until she eventually turned up. “There was such a vast difference between the people who had and the people who didn’t,” says Shennan. “I enjoyed the country. I felt that the people were very hospitable and friendly. People would say, ‘Don’t talk to so and so. He’s with Savak, the secret police’. But the normal Iranian in the street would never have had a chance of finding out the true political situation.”
As the country became more troubled, threats and rumours began to circulate. One day in September 1978 , it was announced on BBC Radio 4 that the casinos in Iran were closing. When staff phoned the casino manager to tell him, he didn’t believe it . Luckily, he had a little nine-seater plane which helped them get out quickly. They flew to Tehran and then to Copenhagen. “We were freezing because we were in our summer clothes,” recalls Shennan.
After Iran, her first husband went out to Nairobi, but when she and the children joined him it was obvious he had another life and the marriage foundered. Rather than rely financially on someone in a different continent, Shennan returned to Inverness and set up Top Hat, which stages casino events for corporate clients. While she was out driving up and down the A9 with a vanful of casino tables and accoutrements, her parents looked after the children. “It was a good thing to be around, great fun to do, especially for a kid,” says her son Neil. “Not everyone can say, ‘My Mum runs a casino.’”
With only a cashed-in insurance policy, a £20 weekly start-up grant from the government and an office that was a shelf behind the kitchen door, things were difficult at first. But nobody else in Scotland was doing anything similar and Shennan gradually built the business up to the point where she had so many regular clients she had to move to the central belt. “It’s a fun night out ,” she says. “They’re not losing any real money, and they can come up and ask how to play or do procedures that a real casino wouldn’t allow. If they want to spin the ball or play the cards out of the shoe we let them.
“ Some of them can be quite competitive. We did an event for a well-known firm of solicitors and noticed that while the fun money was green, some of it was a different colour. They’d been running upstairs to the photocopier and printing off more.”
That kind of raffishness, though, has always been part of the glamour of casinos. Now, through Shennan’s course, ordinary people like you and perhaps me have a chance to be part of it. Casinos are heaving with beautiful, reckless, adventurous people. I picture myself in a little black dress, dealing cards with careless sexuality across the blackjack table or spinning the roulette wheel with a nonchalant flick. Just 10 weeks to go. If only I could get the knack ... Odds on my ever achieving the manual dexterity to become a croupier? Now about a half-a-million to one.
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