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.
