Poker News

Terry Chiaradio - Poker Boss at Foxwoods

Terry Chiaradio is excited. She’s telling me about the Mega Stack Challenge that she and her team recently implemented at Foxwoods. We held our first event last month,” she said. “It’s a $3,000 buy-in tournament, but we have satellites and a qualifier to make it affordable and allow as many players as possible to enter. Players can buy into a satellite for as little as $100 and win entry into a $400 buy-in qualifier. They can also buy in to the qualifier directly, or buy into the main event for $3,000. We paid $207,000 for first place. That was for the maiden Mega Stack event,” she explains, “the first one ever. We had 241 entries and a prize pool of $655,000, and we expect it to grow bigger in the future.”

Terry has worked at Foxwoods since 1992, although she’s only been the Director of Poker Room Operations for a little more than a year. Nevertheless, she has a trick or two up her sleeve.

It’s simple, but it works. She listens.

“We talk to our players all the time,” she told me, “and we listen to them. We’re trying to learn what they would like to see, and there’s no better way to figure that out than to ask them. It’s important for us to keep communicating with our players and to develop an ongoing dialogue with them.”

Chiaradio’s job is a big one. She has 600 employees reporting to her through a series of subordinate managers, and the poker room is a 24/7 operation with 104 tables.

But it wasn’t always that way for her. “I started on the bottom rung of the ladder,” she said. “My family had a business right in this area, a small amusement park with go carts, miniature golf, and that sort of thing. But it was seasonal-no one plays miniature golf in Connecticut in the winter-so when Foxwoods opened up, I applied for a job, took a class there, and began dealing.” She moved up the ladder rapidly. “Two years later I was promoted to Assistant Floor Supervisor. It’s a ‘dualrate’ job where you deal some of the time and work as a floor supervisor other times. I became a full time Floor Supervisor in 1995 and was promoted to Assistant Shift Manager in 1996.”

She stayed in that job for seven years until being promoted to Shift Manager in 2003. In March 2006, when Kathy Raymond left to take over the poker room at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Terry was promoted to Acting Director of Poker Operations. Shortly thereafter, they removed “Acting” from her job title. Foxwoods has a branding relationship with the World Poker Tour, and a close working relationship with them. According to Terry, “We have two major tournaments annually and each has $10,000 buy-in events televised by the World Poker Tour. The World Poker Finals begins at the end of October and runs into November, and the Foxwoods Poker classic takes place the last part of March and extends into April. We’ve been very busy with our tournaments and I’m fortunate to have a Tournament Director with the abilities of Michael Ward.”

Foxwoods is the only World Poker Tour branded room, and according to Terry, “We’re working with the WPT to develop an ‘academy’ on site, to make it easy and convenient for players to become familiar with casino poker and to improve their skills.”

Unlike many poker rooms across the country, Foxwoods is located in an area where seven-card stud is still a popular game. “Hold’em hasn’t driven it out yet,” she told me. “We still deal $1-$3, $1-$5, $3- $6, $5-$10, $10-$20, $20- $40, and $75-$150, and the stud players are hanging in there.”

Terry’s goal is to continue to make the poker room player-friendly, and while running a department of this size and complexity is a challenge to her, it’s one that she looks forward to.

They say history repeats itself. Terry Chiaradio followed her parents into their business until lured away by poker at Foxwoods. Her own two children enjoy playing poker and look forward to turning 21 so they can move from the dining room table to the poker tables at Foxwoods.

Is working for mom in the cards for her kids? “It’s too early to tell,” she said smiling. “My oldest is 13 so he has eight years to go until he can play poker at Foxwoods.

For now they’re using real chips but playing for fun and bragging rights across the kitchen table.” She’s pensive for a moment and then says, “I followed my parents into their business, so why shouldn’t my kids follow me?”

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