MARKETING: "Captain Casino": A career is born
by Dennis Conrad
August 1, 2010
The time was the mid-1980s and the place was the Holiday Casino in Las Vegas, owned and operated by Harrah's.
The
Holiday was built to look and feel like a Mississippi riverboat. In fact, its
marketing moniker was “The Ship on The Strip”. It was a pretty cool little
place, known for its cheap but quality buffet, loose dollar slots and friendly
employees. Still a pretty nifty marketing strategy, now that I think about
it
I
had gone to work at the Holiday after six years of being a craps dealer at the
Stardust, loosely the setting for the movie “Casino” and since imploded to make
room for progress that has not yet progressed.
After several months as a dealer at the
Holiday I did what is affectionately known in the business as “putting on a
coat”. That is, I entered management. I became a floor person, assigned to
supervise a number of games and dealers. I quickly found the job to be a lot
less exciting than being a dealer, with less of a paycheck as well (one of the
things that is backward in our industry — dealers making than their
supervisors, after you factor in tips).
It was at this point, after spending 10 years
in gaming, that I seriously considered leaving it. I thought about becoming a
stockbroker (another form of gambling). Or selling insurance. Or (Heaven
forbid!) pursuing law school once again. But no industry, then or now, seemed
as interesting to me as the delightfully screwy casino biz.
As fate would have it, before I made a rash career move a position
opened up at the Holiday called “Captain Casino” (I am not making this up), one
of the first live games instructor positions in the industry. The job was to
present an eight-hour schedule of table games lessons to interested beginners,
including lessons in roulette, baccarat, craps and blackjack, and soon
thereafter, poker, pai gow poker and other specialty games.
I applied for the Captain Casino job and got
it. I should also mention that no one else applied for it, which should tell
you how that job, which had been in place for about a year, was perceived among
the Holiday’s table games professionals.
Captain Casino was seen as a “carny” job. You
had to wear an outlandish uniform, the ostensible purpose of which was to make
you look like a ship’s captain but in reality conveyed more the impression of
being a refugee from the “Love Boat” — tuxedo pants, bow tie, a reclaimed room
service jacket with gold bars Velcroed on the shoulders and an uncomfortably
hot “Captain’s” hat made of vinyl.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to create the
Captain Casino program, it had already been running for a year. But I did have
to market it better, for it had a low profile, little customer participation
and not much support from the table games traditionalists in the
department.
So here’s what I did, and what I learned (and if it sounds like a
comprehensive strategy, it wasn’t).
First of all, the actual lessons weren’t much fun. So I adopted a
“Captain Casino” persona that was witty, and I incorporated some old gambling
jokes into my patter. During the craps lessons I’d force one of the students to
play the role of the stickman — it was hilarious to watch a novice try to rake
the dice back to the middle of the table after they had been
thrown.
Basically, I made the lessons a show rather than a
class.
They were not very easy to understand either. So I reached into my
teaching background, reduced the games to their simplest form and structured
the lessons to proceed from the most basic knowledge building blocks and go
from there. If there was confusion in the audience I didn’t move on until basic
concepts were understood.
One Captain Casino feature that I employed got me into hot water,
but I didn’t care. That involved being mathematically honest with my students.
Most gaming lesson programs (even now) may impart some basic ways to play
various table games, but they rarely touch on the best way. I thought that was
dishonest so I included basic strategy for blackjack, optimal craps bets
information and other mathematical inside tips in my lessons. The players loved
the straight talk even if they didn’t always grasp it or implement
it.
And from management’s perspective I knew it was important to show
value in the lessons. So I handed out business cards to students who were
tourists not staying at our hotel and asked them to call me for future
reservations. I opened up the table games for live play right after each
lesson, inviting the students to play on real games with real money (for low
stakes), keeping track of their initial buy-ins and sharing that information
with the table games director. I shared letters from grateful students who said
they were now Holiday customers because of their “classroom”
experience.
Was Captain Casino the perfect job? No, the hat was too hot, my
fellow managers thought I was a clown, and the shtick got old after a year. But
it was my first marketing experience and the start of my career.
And I can now say that I’ve had a parrot on my shoulder at work.
But that’s another story.
Dennis Conrad
Dennis Conrad is the president and chief Relationship Officer of Raving Consulting Company, a full service marketing company specializing in assisting gaming organizations. He can be reached at (775) 329-7864. Visit Raving’s Web site at www.ravingconsulting.com.
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