Last year the Christmas party committee at work decided to have a casino night. A vendor was hired to do the show and the show included a variety of casino style games. Blackjack, roulette, and craps were among the games present. The company had professional looking and knowledgeable dealers at each table. The party was a great success. Everyone received a certain amount of chips at the beginning of the night and the person with the most chips at the end of the night won a prize.
It was quite obvious that there were more blackjack tables than there were of roulette and craps tables combined. After speaking with a few of the dealers about this and watching the crowd, it was obvious that the blackjack tables were much more popular. People were at the blackjack tables all night long, while there were some slack times on the roulette and craps tables.
With the great success of this event and the predominant popularity of the blackjack tables, we decided to have a Blackjack only event this year. A few of us decided to do a test run at one of our homes to see if we could possibly run the event ourselves. One of the first tasks was to acquire all of the blackjack supplies needed for at least one table. The basic accessories like playing cards, dealer shoe, discard holder, and poker chips were not too expensive. However when we began to check into the nice tables similar to the tables that our show vendor used, we began to hit a price barrier. Fortunately we were able to buy an inexpensive felt layout for our test run. This does mean that it will be hard to justify buying several expensive blackjack tables for and event that we may have once every other year.
Many of us took turns filling the role of the dealer at the home game test run. Everyone agreed that it was quite exciting to be on either side of the table. Several co-workers also commented that it was fun to get more accustomed to the various blackjack accessories and to learn about proper dealer etiquette. It was stated by several that they had a new found respect for the job that real casino dealers perform and our previous show providers, for that matter. So, after much fun and careful consideration, we will continue to hire the same vendor for our blackjack themed events at work and we will keep the supplies purchased for our test run to use at home games.