Casino Surveillance Training

For ten years I have either been training casino surveillance personnel on my own or I have been helping others to do it. For most of those years I was also either Casino Surveillance investigator or a supervisor.

In all of this time, the basic concept has been that casino surveillance trainers jealously guarded their materials–their “stock in trade”–including presentations, written materials and especially video materials of cheats and thieves and other crooked activity. I subscribed heartily to this, because it seemed that, in a limited business niche like this, if one gave away one’s materials, soon one would no longer have a market.

Recent events, including a collapsing economy and the resultant collapse of businesses associated with casinos, has demanded a fresh look.

Why, in fact, should consultants demand that casinos bring them back? With the amount of personnel turnover in the casino business, the people I trained are very seldom in the same casino three or four years later. Some of them have been promoted, some have moved to higher positions in other casinos, and some have even gotten out of the employee relationship, just as I did. This would seem to require that trainers return, again and again, to casinos where they had been, ensuring return visits.

This is the business model for today: Sell something, but make sure your product requires continued support. Just ask Bill Gates. Sell a product, but ensure that the customer must come back, again and again, each time paying more money, usually for the same product.

Well, I do not agree with this business model, just as I do not agree that I should have to pay for a guarantee on my home appliances.

My customers deserve a PERMANENT SOLUTION, handled RIGHT NOW, to the problem of keeping their Surveillance and Security personnel trained to an acceptable, consistent and effective standard.

Outside training is a temporary solution to an ongoing problem. Even when competently done, the problem returns with promotions and personnel turnover.

Yet very seldom did a casino actually engage the same trainer. The next time the casino needed external training, they either did it themselves, incompletely from the written materials from the last trainer,  or they brought in a different trainer, with no benefit whatever to the original one. Training was not consistent, with personnel hired at one time learning one thing, and others hired at a different time learning something else  from a different trainer. Some trainers sell fear of different things (cardsharp activities, sleight of hand, card counters–the list goes on and on). Some trainers didn’t teach anything at all that applied to the real world of casinos: they put on a dog and pony show that is very impressive–but how often do you need to know twenty-plus methods of marking cards, most of which do not apply to a casino environment, or methods of switching dice, when you can PREVENT that problem by proper training and correction of table games personnel?

Do these people teach the actual methods of internal theft in Slots, so that Surveillance, Security and Gaming Regulation personnel actually know what to look for and how to detect it? Do they teach how to enforce the procedures that  effectively prevent these forms of internal theft? I don’t think so. I have attended seminars by some of these people, and they don’t. And a few of them are terribly questionable as to their actual motivation. Have you had a casino “trainer” or “consultant” ask for access to your computer system?

Can the “consultant” be licensed in your state, or is he a crook, who isn’t allowed to work as a casino employee any more?

Outside training is expensive, and can seldom be justified when budgets are tight. Currently, training budgets for casinos, especially in Security and Surveillance, have never been tighter. In many places they have been cut out altogether.

So why guard those materials so jealously? It simply ensures that no one ever gets the benefit of the years of experience, the video libraries, the articles and presentations painstaking written.

There are a few other things that have entered into this new concept: Both the best of the places that I worked and the best of the places I trained in had formal training programs for their Surveillance staff, with specific requirements which had to be met to qualify for promotions or pay raises. I contributed in the design of some of these programs. They are in fact the only way for a Surveillance department to maintain its quality and reliability of performance without regularly scheduled outside training.

Yet each casino had to basically re-invent the wheel for its training programs. There was no available outline, and materials had been so jealously guarded over the years that there was very little training material available for such a program. There was very little that could be universally applied, if a person went to a new casino as an operator/investigator, or accepted a promotion in another property, or even if he took on a new position working for the same company or tribe in a new casino.

Therefore my fresh look demanded a new idea, a new way for casinos to maintain the standards of training and knowledge in their Surveillance departments, despite personnel turnovers and despite nose-diving training budgets. Please take a look at the article here.