Independent on Sunday, The: Croupier school: Chips with everything

`If you took a thousand pound off an old lady, would you feel bad? Would you?" Dennis stares at his trainees, his head at an interrogative oblique. An uncomfortable silence, until a group member volunteers "Yeah, course you would". Dennis triumphantly brings his fist down on the table. "Wrong answer! Now, get back to chip cutting."

We are trainee dealers, and this one of Dennis' first attempts to toughen us up into croupiers. We started out as a group of 30 recruits - a motley group of bartenders, builders and out-of-work models - but our numbers are dwindling daily. After Dennis's bout of ethical questioning little Kelley never turns up for another training session, although this might be because he had threatened to cut off her long silver-spangled nail extensions. "Even glamour has to go if it's getting in the way of your black jack."

Another recruit found that colour-blindness meant red chips were invisible on green baize; some gave up the struggle to learn their 35 times table. A week on and only half of us are still taking the turning down the dingy Rotherhithe back-alley to croupier school.

From the outside our classroom is industrial breeze block, but if you peer through the blinds you can see rows of roulette wheels gleaming. You can also make out three clocks, with the labels "London", "Las Vegas" and "Luxor". Inside, we deal practice games to each other, throwing fantasy bets of hundreds of thousands of pounds, stopping for trips to the caff (its slogan "You know when you've had a sandwich") and returning to count out small fortunes in pretty parti-coloured tokens.

Dennis, a giant of the gaming industry and a bulky Glaswegian, roves around the room lecturing us on gambling arcana. He lost a leg as a child and with his prosthetic one makes an unwieldy passage between tables. "A good dealer is so skilled, so smooth that punters are mesmerised. Now you, Scott, you can really count. You've got a mathematical head on you" Dennis lunges towards Scott, who blushes through to his ginger roots. "But your chip-handling is a disgrace. You might as well have gloves on!"

Dennis laughs loudly, but Scott smiles nervously, pinned down as he is by Dennis's stray false foot. Blithely unaware, Dennis lumbers off Scott's foot and begins to demonstrate how to place Tiers du Cylindre bets, manipulating the chips with deft speed, as graceful as a concert pianist.

We are still haemorrhaging trainees. One man says he can't afford the tube fare in the mornings and disappears off the radar; a girl who giggles a lot and talks too fast to follow loses her temper at the table one afternoon (over a question of cash conversion for the Voisins du Zero) and slaps and spits at another dealer. "She can go" says Dennis glumly.

And one day we run inside from a rainy lunch break to find that Scott has been dismissed. "But it's his birthday, we've bought him a battered sausage" we protest. Dennis sighs. "When we were checking through your police files it came out. Scott had a history of fraud. The casino is no place for him."

After weeks of watching Dennis, we are beginning to feel like professional dealers. He has played us CCTV clips of famous casino cheats, pointing out sneaky hands placing late bets on winning numbers, shouting "Bastards!" at the television, and re-winding the grainy footage to shout at them again.

We know the industry does not tolerate chewing gum, since enterprising croupiers have used it to affix high-value chips to the roofs of their mouths. We have been taught how to spot forged tender (its texture a degree too thick, too papery) and we know the tricks of card counters (watch for their incessant chip-fiddling - it's a mnemonic).

Dennis now wears the air of a proud parent, and has even recommended that we insure our hands. Our ragtail group suddenly has a sense of skilled identity; training wages mean people have bought new outfits, and cocky Jason now seems confident. Our training for the vice industry has not been without its virtues.