Good Deal Puts Them in the Chips : Learning the Fast Shuffle Can Mean a Card Club Job for Poker School Alumni

Michael Kalke may have only a ninth-grade education, but at Gardena’s Ace Poker Dealing School, where he is owner, head instructor and dean of card dealing, nobody knows more about poker.

And Kalke and his students are having so much fun, it’s not like school--or work--at all.

“Poker’s like a way of life,” Kalke said. “If you’re a serious poker player you don’t have to have a job. You can make a living playing poker. My ears hurt when you say the word work . Work is work only when you want to be somewhere else.”

A lean, balding, quick-speaking, chain-smoking man of 45, Kalke said he had no formal training as a teacher, but knew enough to dismiss many of the techniques he remembered from his abbreviated school years in Milwaukee. Instead, he patterned his teaching methods after the intense concentration and dedicated effort of his Asian students, who usually make up at least half his class, he said.

Self-Taught Methods

The one-story white building where Kalke practices his self-taught methods, on Vermont Avenue near Redondo Beach Boulevard, is reminiscent of a small, old-fashioned, one-room schoolhouse.

But the differences are big, including two additional practice areas where Kalke’s 25 to 30 students can learn poker-dealing basics, including the three R’s: the rules of the game, reading hands and the quick mental ‘rithmetic needed to keep tally of sums won or lost.

During the three-month course, students attend classes at least six hours a day, four days a week, and are graded on skills that include card shuffling, card pitching, concentration, cutting stacks of poker chips, game control, courtesy to players and overall speed.

After graduation, students traditionally have been hired by one of Gardena’s three card clubs and those in Commerce, Bell and Bell Gardens, Kalke said. The school has about 400 graduates, he said. The best students often go to the self-described biggest card club in the world, “the Bike,” as the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens is known.

Kalke has competition, but his school appears to be the only one-man operation in the South Bay.

There are other schools throughout Southern California that teach card dealing exclusively. One of the biggest is the International Dealers School Inc., which has schools in several cities, including Redondo Beach, Westminster in Orange County and seven locations in Las Vegas, said Ron Barry, the school’s California divisional manager.

Blaine Nicholson, a spokesman for the Normandie Casino in Gardena, said: “Many clubs train their own dealers; they don’t always get dealers from the schools.”

Minimum Wage Plus Tips

Students pay $1,250 for three months of training that prepares them to make what Nicholson said are typical card dealers’ earnings: minimum wage plus tips that range from $10 to $40 a day.

According to Kalke, tips depend on the dealer’s sure-handedness and ability to keep the game flowing smoothly, skills he said he gives his pupils at the Ace School.

The success of the Ace Poker Dealing School is no bluff, Kalke said. The school opened in 1983, when Kalke came to California from Las Vegas, “flat busted” but with a dream of starting his own school, Kalke said.

He knew that card clubs throughout Los Angeles were hiring professional dealers, abandoning the practice of having players at a table take turns dealing.

He rented the building in Gardena and, during the months it took to remodel, polished his card dealing skills.

“I’d been a card player all my life,” Kalke said, but added that he had never worked as a professional card dealer. “I had to get the mechanics down. If I was going to be the teacher, I had to be good.”

“I’d watched my grandfather play when I was a little boy, but he was a lousy player,” Kalke said. “But I learned a lot from another guy who played with my grandfather, who was a lot better.”

Kalke grew addicted to the game as a young adult in Milwaukee, where gambling is illegal and where his indulgence in illicit poker games at friends’ homes forced him to stay “one step ahead of the police,” he said.

So he moved to Las Vegas, where he made a living playing poker with other people’s money and splitting the proceeds with them, Kalke said.

“I win 90% of the hands I play,” he said, then added after a moment’s thought, “75% for sure.”

The stream of students has been steady from the beginning. “The day I opened, another dealer school closed up,” Kalke said. “Ten students from that school were standing outside my door.”

Sometimes the classes include informal English lessons for the students, some of whom are immigrants from Thailand, Cuba, Cambodia, Colombia, Iran, China and Mexico.

Often, the terms they learn sound like a language of their own.

Visits of Former Students

“Wing ‘em out,” Kalke said to one student dealer as she dealt cards to the players. “Don’t rock in the box, just move your arms.”

“Burn and turn,” he instructed her as she laid the cards out on the green-felt table top.

Kalke also greeted former students like Enriquez Villamil, 26, who often stops by the school on his way to his job as a card dealer at the nearby Normandie Club.

“I learned a lot from Mike,” Villamil said. The course was “great, first because of the chances he gave me to play, and because he gave me a lot of his time. He does that with everybody.”

The school came “highly recommended by friends in Las Vegas,” said current student Sharon Usab, 40, a one-time Las Vegas blackjack dealer. “If you learn it here, you’re going to learn it right.”

Kalke, who compares the strategy and psychology of poker to chess, said it takes at least a year to learn the game properly, and five years to become skilled at it.