Casino lab at Drexel preparing workers for modern Atlantic City jobs

Six floors above a quiet street on Drexel University’s main campus sits the Philadelphia casino you’ve never heard of.

True, there aren’t real-money wagers being placed at the Dennis Gomes Memorial Casino Training Lab, a mock gambling hall that recently opened at Drexel’s hospitality school.
But from a security standpoint, state regulators treat the lab and its three slot machines as wholly authentic.
“It’s under surveillance 24-7. Everything is locked down,” said Robert Ambrose, a casino industry veteran who runs the school’s expanding casino-studies program.
And for a few handfuls of students enrolled in the program, the stakes are far higher than any bets being made at SugarHouse, the casino across town.
They’re betting their careers on casino gaming. Ambrose, who spent decades working at the Tropicana, including as an executive director of slots and marketing operations, is absolutely convinced those bets will pay off.
He said all the talk of an Atlantic City casino market in crisis obscures a truth about the global gambling industry: It’s growing.
And the industry needs well-trained people — people such as Dennis Gomes, the Atlantic City icon who, Ambrose said, was chosen as the lab’s namesake because of his strengths as a casino executive.
That’s where the lab comes in.
It’s part of a larger effort at Drexel to emphasize “experiential learning” in hospitality training, Ambrose said. “It’s all about live education.”
To that end, the sixth floor at Drexel’s Center for Hospitality & Sport Management is virtually a resort in and of itself, a microcosm of what students will experience in the field.
Adjacent to the lab is a bistro that sells meals cooked by students in commercial kitchens down the hall. Soon, there will be a mock hotel front-desk as well, Ambrose said.
The value of that verisimilitude isn’t lost on Vincent Santosusso, an upperclassman from Philadelphia who’s enrolled in the gaming program.
“I was in class the day the slot machines were actually delivered,” he said. Watching the process gave him insight into slot installation and maintenance that he couldn’t have gleaned from a textbook, he said. “It’s a big difference.”
The machines are used as tools in role-playing to refine students’ customer-service skills and to help them understand the probabilities behind the games.
Santosusso, who is the program’s first recipient of a $10,000 scholarship from the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers, said his passion for casinos stems from family trips to Atlantic City, where the energy of the gambling floor had a profound impact on him.
“That atmosphere always excited me,” he said. He saw “people gambling, slot machines going, cards being shuffled, cocktail waitresses” and thought: “Wow, this is great. I want to be a part of it.”
And now, he’s going to be.
Ambrose is in the process of securing him a co-op at Dover Downs, in Delaware.
The instructor is drawing on a seemingly endless list of contacts in the casino world to place his students in internships that will put them in the thick of the action.
Last week, about an hour before he arrived in downtown Philadelphia to hear regulators reveal who would receive a coveted license to build another casino in Philadelphia, Ambrose told his students, “Whoever gets picked, this is your future.
“You’re at ground zero,” he said.
State regulators awarded the license to Live! Hotel & Casino, a joint venture of the Cordish Cos. and Greenwood Gaming LLC.
That had to be great news for Ambrose, who said he has a tentative agreement to make Drexel’s lab the primary training venue for the new casino.
After the decision was announced at the Pennsylvania Convention Center last week, Joe Weinberg, a Cordish executive, said the lab “is going to be tremendously helpful to us.”
“To have that kind of feeder system, to us, is a godsend,” he said.